Types of Reading

H. Douglas Brown (2001:189) said in the previous chapters we saw that both listening and speaking could be subdivided into at least five different types of listening and speaking performance. In the case of reading, variety of performance is derived more from the multiplicity of types of texts (the genres listed above) than from the variety of overt types of performance. Never­theless, for considering assessment procedures, several types of reading performance are typically identified, and these will serve as organizers of various assessment tasks.

• Perceptive. In keeping with the set of categories specified for listening com­prehension, similar specifications are offered here, except with some differing ter­minology to capture the uniqueness of reading. Perceptive reading tasks involve attending to the components of larger stretches of discourse: letters, words, punctu­ation, and other graphemic symbols. Bottom-up processing is implied.
• Selective. This category is largely an artifact of assessment formats. In order to ascertain one's reading recognition of lexical, grammatical, or discourse features of language within a very short stretch of language, certain typical tasks are used: picture-cued tasks, matching, true/false, multiple-choice, etc. Stimuli include sen­tences, brief paragraphs, and simple charts and graphs. Brief responses are intended as well. A combination of bottom-up and top-down processing may be used.
• Interactive. Included among interactive reading types are stretches of lan­guage of several paragraphs to one page or more in which the reader must, in a psy­cholinguistic sense, interact with the text. That is; reading is a process of negotiating meaning; the reader brings to the text a set of schemata for understanding it, and in­take is the product of that interaction. Typical genres that lend themselves to inter­active reading are anecdotes, short narratives and descriptions, excerpts from longer texts, questionnaires, memos, announcements, directions, recipes, and the like.The focus of an interactive task is to identify relevant features (lexical, symbolic, gram­matical, and discourse) within texts of moderately short length with the objective of retaining the information that is processed. Top-down processing is typical of such tasks, although some instances of bottom-up performance may be necessary.
• Extensive. Extensive reading, as discussed in this book,, applies to texts of more than a page, up to andd including professional articles, essays, technical re­ports, short stories, and books. (It should be noted that reading research commonly refers to "extensive reading" as longer stretches of discourse, such as long articles and books that are usually read outside a classroom hour-Here that definition massaged a little in order to encompass any text longer than a page.) the purposes of assessment usually are to tap into a learner’s global understanding of a text, as opposed to asking test – takers to “zoom in” on small details. Top – down processing is assumed for most extensive tasks

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Title : Types of Reading
Description : H. Douglas Brown (2001:189) said in the previous chapters we saw that both listening and speaking could be subdivided into at least five di...

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