Written exam skills for the “Esame di Stato”

This article focuses on reading comprehension skills and assessment with a view to creating a custom-made written test for the “Esame di Stato”. It presents a reading text and some tasks for the final exam, whose format is designed to foster a successful exam experience to both stronger and weaker, less confident learners. The article also gives advice on how to create your own written tests and on using multiple assessment tasks that allow the teacher to separate the assessment of language production from that of reading comprehension and have a fuller picture of the learners’ proficiency across the two skills and is simultaneously more complete and fairer to all the students in mixed ability classrooms.