The ideas and insights stated so far, envisage an active role for the students to react to
and reflect on their reading. Such a role can help both the learner and the teacher to
take an associative/ facilitative/negotiative view of reading assessment. ‘Consequently, we should think of language as an experience rather than as a repository of extractable meanings’ (Fish, 1980, p. 67). In this regard, the students find it an educating experience to voice and share their perceptions of what has been read. The active utilization of reading response questionnaires, response journals and reading portfolios by students fosters in them a belief that they are as empowered as their teachers to propose meanings/ideas and translate them into perspectival/speculative knowledge by which they live by (Sivasubramaniam, 2004).
As a result, reading assessment becomes a student-centered undertaking. This is not to
suggest that the teacher will assess the students as they wish to be assessed. But it is
to suggest that the participatory role of the students can make them take responsibility
for reading and for taking control of how the tasks and strategies proposed by the
teacher should be handled (Clark, 1987; Nunan, 1988). The accruing autonomy and
involvement of the students can support constructivist practices in reading and its assessment in addition to offering benefits to and motivating the students.