Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA)
This braille version of the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (Revised British Edition) has been prepared to enable teachers to assess the reading skills of school-age braillists. One of the Neale test's advantages is that it allows reading speed, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension to be measured simultaneously. It consists of short passages of continuous prose, cast into the form of stories of increasing length and complexity, and in that respect it is different from simple word-recognition tests. It is a test that requires something more than the decoding of words in isolation since the child is being asked to make use of the whole syntactic and semantic context. Another strength of the Neale is that there are parallel Forms - two sets of prose passages of comparable length and difficulty -so that progress in reading can be assessed after further teaching and practice have been carried out. It has, too, diagnostic value, both in its print format and its brailled version, that enables teachers to pinpoint specific problem areas for a given child.
It is for these reasons that the decision was made to transcribe the NARA into fully-contracted Standard English Braille (SEB), released in 1998. In 2017, we've updated the pack to reflect the move to Unified English Braille (UEB) and the contraction changes.
User manual and record forms
Subscribe to the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability (NARA) reading list to download these files in PDF format:
- User Manual
- Braille Optional Diagnostic Test for Stories 1 and 2
- Individual Record Sheet - Form 1
- Individual Record Sheet - Form 2
Braille stories
The two braille files for the stories can't get be added to the main collection, but they can be downloaded from this page as a Zip file. Download the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability braille stories zip file.