This study builds on and contributes to work in the field of reading comprehension in a second langauge and reading assessment. Although studies have examined students' reading skills in primary and lower secondary school, there has not been a lot of research among students in upper secondary school. As such, this study provides additional insight into upper secondary students' reading skills in Norwegian as their first language (L1) and in English as their second language (L2). The analytic focus on crosslinguistic reading enables another contribution. This is a population study that analyses how 10.331 upper secondary students read across languages, which component reading skills correlate within and across languages, and whether reading skills in L1 can be explained by reading skills in L2 and vice versa. Although numerous studies (OECD 2000, 2003, 2006, 2009; Ibsen, 2003) have identified how students read in either L1 or L2, little analytic attention has been paid to reading skills across languages. I address this issue by demonstrating how the same students read in L1 and L2 during nationally distributed mapping tests in upper secondary school in Norway. The L1 investigation of reading skills was undertaken on paper, while the L2 test measured online reading comprehension. Both tests were taken during the same week in 2012. Reliability, regression, factor and frequency analyses in SPSS is conducted.

Two research questions guided the study:

1. To what extent can reading comprehension in English (L2) among first year upper secondary students be explained by reading literacy in Norwegian (L1), and language knowledge in English (L2)?
2. What insights about L2 reading literacy can be derived from the 20% lowest performers within and across Norwegian (L1) and English (L2)?

This study is placed within the framework of compensatory theory of second-language reading (Bernhardt, 2011) and formative assessment (e.g. Black & Wiliam, 1998, 2004, 2009; Wiliam, 2011). Assessing second-language reading can further be conceptualized within the theoretical frameworks of both cognitive and socio-cultural theories. This is signalled in the PISA definition of reading: “Reading literacy is understanding, using, reflecting on and engaging with written texts, in order to achieve one’s goals, to develop one’s knowledge and potential, and to participate in society” (OECD, 2007:23), and also in the commonly used definition of reading from the RAND-project: “…the process of simultaneously extracting and constructing meaning through interaction and involvement with written language” (Snow, 2002:11). This signals an interactive model of reading where the reader actively engages with the text by involving perception and thought as a parallel interaction between the reader’s prior knowledge, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and experience with text and reading comprehension strategies (Alderson, 2000; Bernhardt, 2011; Grabe, 2009). This study further builds on Bernhardt (2011) and her compensatory model of second language reading (L2), where she claims that we cannot know anything about students’ reading comprehension in L2 unless we also have information about the same students’ reading skills in L1. She argues that 20% of the students’ reading skills in L2 can be explained by L1 literacy skills, that 30% of their reading skills in L2 can be explained by L2 linguistic skills, and that the final 50% is so-called unexplained variance. When assessing reading through individual mapping tests, cognitive aspects might be considered more prominent than socio-cultural aspects.

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