ASSESSING COMPETENCIES IN LITERACY OF FORM FOUR 16-YEAR-OLD STUDENTS ACROSS MALAYSIA 
Imran Khan  and Ambigapathy Pandian 

ABSTRACT
This paper investigated Malaysian secondary school Form Four students’ reading literacy competencies. The study aims to investigate the literacy index of Form Four 16-year-old students who have completed their first half of lower secondary education in Malaysian context. In this study a standardized model is developed for literacy assessment and literacy index, referred to as Malaysian Literacy Assessment (MLA) which reflects the issues and literacy practices of Malaysian secondary school students. The concepts that were embedded to develop MLA were mainly adapted from Bloom (1956) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). For the survey, a strategy was devised to obtain sample that could best represent and reflect the target audience and therefore the country was divided into six zones based on geographical proximity. The intended sample size is based on the average of thirty Form Four students per class, but limited to two classes per school that was visited. The test which was designed for 16-year-old Form Four students consisted of multiple choices and open-ended questions that require listing of required specific information and full sentence short answers. The overall analysis of reading literacy confirmed and revealed that students did not perform well in the test. The results of the literacy assessment indicated that young adults have very limited literacy skills in English reading.
KEYWORDS: Literacy, reading literacy, secondary Form Four school students, Malaysian Literacy Assessment