Theoretical Framework

Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

Modified from Bloom’s Taxonomy, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwol added their

contributions in revising the Benjamin Bloom’s original framework. The revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

reflects on the active thought process for each category.

The Levels of Comprehension Skills

Heilman et.al (1981:246) identifies the following:

Lexical Level, this level is the simplest level where the reader relies on their stored mental

representations of known words to comprehend the text.

Literal Level, the reader draws information that are stated directly in the text. It is at this level

that questions are factual and detailed, based purely on the written material. The skills needed for this

level are noting factual data, sequence, chronology, and enumeration.

Interpretive Level, the reader goes beyond the facts laid out by the writer. The reader needs to see

the significance of the data; to note various relationships such as cause and effect and its relevance as a

part of a whole, to make comparison, to draw conclusions, inferences and generalizations.

Applied Level, the readers will evaluate and judge facts from the text to draw interpretations from

and extend the concepts or ideas beyond the text and into real-world situations.

Affective Level, the reader needs to reflect on the presented facts and use it to formulate and

rethink ideas of his own. Questions that may be asked at this level are open-ended queries, requiring the

reader to present his own knowledge, views, and values in relation to the text.
Schema Theory – Linguistic Schema

“Schema” was firstly put forward by philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1804, and it is defined as the

human mind’s ability to connect new information to previously acquired concepts and experiences.

Schema is a memory structure that allows readers to bridge reading materials to existing schema in the

brain so that they can understand better. The classification of schema can be divided into three types:

linguistic schema, content schema, and formal schema. Linguistic Schema is the most prominent type as

it is the basis of not only the English reading comprehension, but also content and formal schema. It

refers to the reader’s former knowledge regarding phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary. Linguistic

schema is what allows students to comprehend the content of the text and be able to draw conclusions and

own ideas based from their acquired past knowledge.

The Reading Systems Framework

The Reading Systems Framework (RSF) (Perfetti & Stafura 2014), states that comprehension

requires two main sub-processes namely: word identification and word-to-word integration. Word

identification is the process of converting letters into their respective sounds, combining these sound into

words, and assigning meaning to the words being read. In word-to-word integration on the other hand,

students create sentences by integrating the activated single word meanings. The activated word meanings

are stored in the mental lexicons, serving as the output of word identification and input for word-to-word

integration to construct eaning from the text.