IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve Price2.4 Frameworks used in reading assessment studiesMuch of the research into the nature of reading in different domains has relied on taxonomies thatseek to divide reading practices into a variety of skills and sub-skills. Particularly influential amongthese has been Munby’s (1978) list of general language skills, used both for the purposes of syllabusand material design, as well as for the design of tests. In a list that he described at the time as “notexhaustive”, Munby distinguished a total of 266 skills – sub-categorised into 54 groups, includingsuch reading specifics as:■■■■■■understanding the communicative value (function) of sentences and utterances withexplicit indicatorsunderstanding relations between parts of texts through grammatical cohesion devices ofreference, comparison etcscanning to locate specifically required information: a single point/more than one pointinvolving a simple search.Amid the complexity of Munby’s scheme, it is possible to detect a basic division between readingskills that are involved in the simple comprehension of texts (eg understanding explicitly statedinformation p 126), and those involving interpretation of some kind (eg interpreting text by goingoutside it p 128).In recent years there have been efforts to pare such taxonomies down to a more manageable catalogueof skills (eg Carver 1997; Grabe & Stoller, 2002). Carver (1997), for example, recognises five basicelements: ‘scanning’, ‘skimming’, ‘rauding’, ‘learning’ and ‘memorising’. Rauding is defined as a‘normal’ or ‘natural’ reading, which occurs when adults are reading something that is relatively easyfor them to comprehend (Carver, 1997, pp 5-6). For Grabe and Stoller (2002), the activity is bestcaptured under seven headings:1 Reading to search for simple information2 Reading to skim quickly3 Reading to learn from texts4 Reading to integrate information5 Reading to write (or search for information needed for writing)6 Reading to critique texts7 Reading for general comprehensionOne notes that this latter list takes on a slightly simplified form in a recent study conducted for theTOEFL reading test (Enright et al, 2000):1 Reading to find information (or search reading)2 Reading for basic comprehension3 Reading to learn4 Reading to integrate information across multiple textsOf the various taxonomies developed, the most useful for the present project was thought to be thatproposed by Weir and Urquhart (1998), and used in another recent study into the IELTS academicreading test conducted by Weir et al. (2009). Rather than compile a list of discrete skills, Weir andUrquhart construct their taxonomy around two dimensions of difference: reading level and reading192 www.ielts.org