Selon la dernière enquête internationale PISA 2012, près de 20 % des adolescents en France présentent des difficultés de lecture relativement importantes (OCDE, 2014). Quels sont les outils en langue française dont dispose le praticien ou le pédagogue (enseignant, médecin scolaire, psychologue et orthophoniste) pour évaluer les troubles spécifiques de la lecture chez le collégien ? Les outils évaluant les capacités de compréhension écrite, d’identification de mots écrits et les capacités langagières orales et cognitives associées à la lecture sont présentés en distinguant les outils de dépistage de ceux de diagnostic. Cette synthèse permet de dégager leurs intérêts et leurs limites, et d’envisager de nouveaux outils prenant en compte cinq critères primordiaux notamment la mesure de la rapidité.

As reported by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA, 2012), almost 20% of French teenagers show difficulties in reading (OCDE, 2014). What are the French language tools the practitioner or educationalist (teacher, school doctor, psychologist, and speech-language pathologist) use to assess specific reading disorders for middle school students? The tools assessing reading comprehension skills, word-level reading skills and reading-related skills are presented by distinguishing the tools developed for screening of reading difficulties (the purpose of which is to detect early disease or risk factors for disease in large numbers of apparently healthy individuals) than them developed for diagnosing of reading difficulties (the purpose of which is to establish the presence [or absence] of disease as a basis for treatment decisions in symptomatic or screen positive individuals). This synthesis allows to identify their interests and limits, and to consider new tools respecting five essential criteria: (1) the tool structure must be based on recent theoretical models specific at the middle school, (2) the tool must assess reading comprehension skills (with control of listening comprehension skills) and the mastery of two word-level reading procedures (lexical and sublexical), (3) the tool must measure a set of reading-related skills such as phonological awareness, phonological short-term memory, rapid serial naming and morphological awareness, (4) the experimental material (vocabulary control) and the standardization must be recent or updated and (5) the speed must be measured accurately.