Governments and other stakeholders have become increasingly interested in assessing the skills
of their adult populations in order to examine how well prepared they are to meet the challenges of the
modern knowledge-based society. The current paper provides a conceptual framework for the assessment
of reading component skills in the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult
Competencies (PIAAC). The assessment of component skills is intended to provide a greater level of
information about the skills of individuals with low levels of literacy proficiency than has been available
from previous international assessments. The ‘component skills ’identified for the assessment are
vocabulary knowledge, sentence processing and passage comprehension.
