Abstract
Despite the growth of Welsh-medium education (WME), there is a shortage of standardised tests in Welsh for assessing literacy development and tracking progress over time. This article reports on the development and standardisation of a new test to assess reading accuracy among learners in WME: the Central South Consortium Standardised Welsh Reading Test. The test comprises two forms that each consist of 17 sentences of increasing complexity and which were designed following an analysis of authentic reading materials for children aged 5-16. The standardisation exercise involved 761 pupils from school years 1 to 11 in schools in south-east Wales who completed both forms. We present an analysis of the raw data, the results of which showed no significant difference in scores between boys and girls, but a strong positive correlation between school year and test score. Learners from Welsh-speaking homes scored significantly higher than those from mixed-language or English-speaking homes in Years 1-4, but this difference was based on a small sample of learners from Welsh-speaking homes and was not statistically significant from Year 5 onwards. The article discusses the implications of these findings for practitioners and calls for broader samples for the development of Welsh-language standardised tests that account for sociolinguistic differences in communities across Wales.
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