IELTS Research Reports

Tim Moore, Janne Morton and Steve PriceLevel of engagementLocalGlobalAs Weir et al. (2009) note, different types of reading activities are, of their nature, either more local or moreglobal in their orientation. Thus, for example, the act of ‘scanning’ (i.e. locating specific information withina text) has a more local focus; on the other hand, the act of ‘skimming’ (i.e. obtaining an overview of a text )is necessarily a more ‘global’ form of reading.Dimension 2: Type of engagementOur second dimension – ‘type of engagement’ – involved an adaptation of the Weir and Urquhart(1998) schema. Whereas their categories of ‘careful’ and ‘expeditious’ readings refer arguably to thereading ‘strategies’ (or ‘processes’) that students may adopt, our focus on academic tasks meant thatthe interest was more on what was needed to be done with texts, that is to say the prescribed outcomesof the reading. In our preliminary observations of tasks in the two domains (IELTS and academicstudy), it was clear that different tasks called for different types of readings. Sometimes, for example,the requirement was simply one of understanding the basic contents of a text; in other instances,readers needed to bring a more personal response to material.In developing this dimension, the study drew initially on the distinction traditionally made inlinguistics between semantic and pragmatic meaning. The semantic meaning of a text is typicallycharacterised as the sum of the individual propositions contained within it; pragmatic meanings, on theother hand, refer to those meanings that emerge from the relationship between the text and the contextof its production (Yule, 1996). As Yule (1996, p 4) explains it, whereas semantics is concerned withthe literal meanings of sentences, pragmatics is concerned with probing less tangible qualities, such as“people’s intended meanings, their assumptions, their purposes or goals, and the kind of actions theyare performing when they speak [or write].”Related to acts of reading, a broad distinction can be made in this way between a focus on what atext says (semantic meaning), and what a text does, in saying what it says (pragmatic meaning). Toillustrate this distinction, Taylor (2009, p 66) cites the following short text sample from a FrenchHistory textbook:The winter of 1788-9 was a very harsh one in France, inflicting untold misery on the peasants. Therevolution broke out in July 1798.These two sentences, as Taylor explains, can be read ‘literally’ i.e. as a sequence of propositions aboutevents in late 18th century France (a semantic reading); or they can be read more ‘interpretatively’;in this case, as an attempt by the author to explain events i.e. to see the first event as a cause for thesecond (a pragmatic reading). Taylor (2009) suggests that while both types of reading are importantin the context of academic study, it is the latter mode – the more interpretative readings – that is oftenmissing in accounts of the types of reading students typically need to do in their studies.This basic distinction in the way one might engage with a text (or be required to engage) providedthe second category of our framework as follows (a similar basic distinction is often drawn in thebroader area of learning theory, where engagement with materials is seen to divide between suchbinaries as surface vs deep learning (Marton & Saljo, 1976), higher and lower order skills (Bloom,1956), reproductive vs. analytical (Ballard & Clanchy, 1991), critical and non-critical approaches toknowledge (Ennis, 1987)):194 www.ielts.org