GROUP MEMBERS :

1. NURUL HAFIZAH BINTI SHAHAR

2. MARINA BINTI UDIN

3. NOOR AINI BINTI MAMAT

PART 1 READING SKILLS

3.0 This unit aims to enhance learner’s knowledge of reading skills with special
emphasis on the Barett’s taxonomy. The exercises that follow the explanation
should provide some immediate practice in ehancing your comprehension skills.

3.1 Learning Outcomes:

 To read critically for meaning and understanding, and give personal response.
 To recognize and identify different levels of Barrett’s Taxonomy.
 To skim and scan a given text
 To locate author’s message and intention.
 To identify and justify the choice of word(s),
 To recognize and identify expressions and figure of speech which reflect the
message and intention

3.2 Content

BARRETT’S TAXONOMY

Using Contextual,,
Syntactic and
The Barrett’s Taxonomy of
Reading Comprehension Semantic Clues to
Derive Meaning

Critical Reading Skills and Tasks & Exercises

Barrett’s Taxonomy

Suggested Answers

THE BARRETT’S TAXONOMY OF READING COMPREHENSION

The Barrett’s Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension was designed to help teachers
formulate comprehension questions or to develop test questions for reading. It classifies
skills and orders them according to the degree of complexity. It consists of five categories.
The first two categories which are literal comprehension and reorganization deal with facts
presented in texts and therefore result in closed questions that have a single correct
response. The other three categories that include Inference, Evaluation and Appreciation
will always involve the student’s own background of experience. As a result, it is possible to
have as many different but correct responses as there are students present since each
brings to school a different background of home, family, friends and learning. These
remaining three categories thus lead to the development of open-ended questions.

3.3 CRITICAL READING SKILLS AND BARRETT’S TAXONOMY

Critical reading means reading with the goal of finding deep understanding of a
material, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. It is the act of analyzing and evaluating what you
are reading as you progress, or as you reflect back. Critical reading skills involve your ability
to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize what you read. It is the ability to see relationships of
ideas and use them as an aid in reading.

Barrett Taxonomy is a good guide to the levels at which we are trying to measure
comprehension for a written text. The taxonomy was introduced at a conference in 1968. It
is designed originally to assist classroom teachers in developing comprehension questions
and / or test questions for reading. Here, you will be introduced to Barret’s Taxonomy. It is
especially useful for classroom questioning in other content areas as well.

As a form of revision we will now read and look closely at Barrett’s Taxonomy

Barrett’s Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension

1.0 Literal Comprehension

1.1 Recognition

1.1.1 Recognition of Details

1.1.2 Recognition of Main Ideas

1.1.3 Recognition of a Sequence

1.1.4 Recognition of Comparison

1.1.5 Recognition of Cause and Effect Relationships

1.1.6 Recognition of Character Trait

 1.2 Recall

1.2.1 Recall of Details

1.2.2 Recall of Main Ideas

1.2.3 Recall of a Sequence
1.2.4 Recall of Comparison
1.2.5 Recall of Cause and Effect Relationships
1.2.6 Recall of Character Traits

2.0 Reorganization

2.1 Classifying
2.2 Outlining
2.3 Summarizing
2.4 Synthesizing
3.0 Inferential Comprehension
3.1 Inferring Supporting Details
3.2 Inferring Main Ideas
3.3 Inferring Sequence
3.4 Inferring Comparisons
3.5 Inferring Cause and Effect Relationships
3.6 Inferring Character Traits
3.7 Predicting Outcomes
3.8 Interpreting Figurative Language
4.0 Evaluation
4.1 Judgments of Reality or Fantasy
4.2 Judgments of Fact or Opinion
4.3 Judgments of Adequacy and Validity
4.4 Judgments of Appropriateness
4.5 Judgments of Worth, Desirability and Acceptability
5.0 Appreciation
5.1 Emotional Response to the Content
5.2 Identification with Characters or Incidents
5.3 Reactions to the Author’s Use of Language
5.4 Imagery
 Task 1

Read the text below and formulate at least two comprehension questions for each of
the categories of the Barrett’s Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension.
In the Car
Bernadette M. Smyth
I steered through fantastic streets of boisterous traffic, past glittering buildings, and
footpaths that moved with shoppers. I beeped the horn when I saw Mrs Sweeney.
“Hop in!” I shouted.
“The town’s mad today,” she said, getting into the car.
“Packed! There’s hundreds in town.”
“Thousands more like.”
“Millions even – I’d say there’s easily a million people doing their shopping today.”
Mrs Sweeney tightened her headscarf.
“Plenty of groceries there,” I said.
“Sure haven’t I ten mouths to feed, Petulia?”
“Ten kids? That’s nothing – I’ve fifteen.”
“Humph! If I only had fifteen children I’d be laughing- I’ve twenty you know.”
“You said ten!”
“No, no, Petulia, ten at the moment; John-Joe, Jimmy, Jamesy, Jemmy, Mary- Concepta,
Concepta-Mary, Penelope, Agnes, Ignatius, and Alphonsus, are away on their holidays.”
I went back to the steering.
“How’s Paddy’s leg?” I enquired.
“Gone.”
“Gone?”
“Chopped off!”
“And how does he manage?”
“Sure he has to hop.”
“That’s desperate!”
“It is Petulia, especially with twenty children knocking him over.”
“Still,” I said, “isn’t it better to be missing a leg than have an extra one. There’s my
Johnny and he’s awful bother with the three legs.
“Three? That’s nothing – I’ve a brother with four.”
“Four legs Mrs Sweeney?”
“Four – he has to crawl so he does.”
“And has he a tail?”
“No …”
Mrs Sweeney’s voice collapsed as she looked towards the house. Mammy was standing
at the kitchen window.
I ran after her, over the path, and into the house where our tea was waiting. “I’ve told you
two already!” she shouted, “No playing in the car! GET INSIDE NOW!”
Michelle scrambled out of the car, leaving behind Mrs Sweeney and her phantom
groceries,
TASK 1: Formulate at least two comprehension questions for each of the categories
of the Barrett’s Taxonomy of Reading Comprehension. :

1. Literal Comprehension:
i) Who gets into narrator/Petulia’s car?
ii)How many is Mrs. Sweeney children

2. Reorganization :
i) Who is Mrs Sweeney and Petulia really are?
ii) What is relationship between narrator and the three leged man?

3. Inferental Comprehension :
i. What does “phantom” in the text means?
ii. interpret the word “boisterous”

4. Evalution :
i) Is the conversation between them reality or fantasy?
ii) Why does Michelle scrambled out of the car

5. Appreciation:
i) What word describes the feeling of shocked?
ii) Why is scrambled a good term?

READ FOR MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING A VARIETY OF TEXTS

Reading for meaning focuses on five main areas namely:

3.4.1Main idea
The main idea is the summary of essential points of the paragraph. The main idea of a
paragraph can often be substituted with a topic sentence with controlling ideas.

3.4.2. Inference

Inferencing is a reading skill in which you use observations, prior knowledge and
experiences, and details from the text to make connections and come up with
ideas.

3.4.3 Sequence

Sequencing in reading is to be considered when there is an order of incidents and

actions in the selection. A sequence will be constituted only when order of occurrence is
specifically required.

3.4.4 Compare and contrast

Comparing and contrasting is a reading skill where you can find the similarities and
differences between items, characters, times and places that is stated in the selection

3.4.5 Cause and effect The skill of looking at happenings or actions in the selection
where you can identify the causes of a problem or issue and the effects in an orderly
way.
3.5 Now let us look at what text is and its variety.

Text is any piece of writing. This could be a letter, an email, a novel, a poem, a

recipe, a note, instructions for D.I.Y, an article in a newspaper or magazine,

writing on a webpage or an advert. All of these examples can be called texts.

When you are reading or writing any text, think about the purpose of the text or why it
has been written.

3.2.1 What might the purpose of a text be?

An advert might be trying to persuade you to buy something.
A letter from school might be to inform you about something.
A novel might describe somewhere or someone to you.
A car manual might instruct you how to do something to your car.

Depending on the purpose of the text, different methods will be used to get the
message across to the reader.

Exercise 1

Read each of the following paragraphs carefully. Look up any unfamiliar words
if necessary. Then choose the title that best describes the main idea of each.

1. Universities are a microcosm of society. But they are more than a reflection or mirror;
they are a leading indicator. In universities, an environment where students live, eat, and
study together, racial and cultural differences come together in the closest possible way.
Of all American institutions, perhaps only the military brings people of such different
backgrounds into more intimate contact. With coeducation now a reality in colleges, and
with the confident emergence of homosexual groups, the American campus is now
sexually democratized as well. University leaders see it as a useful laboratory
experiment in training young people for a multicultural habitat. Michael Sovern, president
 of Columbia, observes, "I like to think that we are leading society by grappling earnestly
and creatively with the challenges posed by diversity."

--Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education

1. The best title for this paragraph is

A. "The University Environment"

B. "Sexual Democratization on American College Campuses"

C. "The University vs.the Military"

D. "The University as a Microcosm of Society"

2. Marriage was not designed as a mechanism for providing friendship, erotic experience,
romantic love, personal fulfillment, continuous psychotherapy, or procreation. The
Western European family was not designed to carry a lifelong load of highly emotional
romantic freight. Given its present structure, it simply has to fail when asked to do so.
The very idea of an irrevocable contract obligating the parties concerned to a lifetime of
romantic effort is utterly absurd.

--Mervyn Cadwallader, "Marriage as a Wretched Institution," Atlantic Monthly

3. The best title for this paragraph is

A. "Unrealistic Expectations in Western Marriages"

B. "The Failure of Romance"

C. "Why Marriages Are Doomed to Failure"

D. "Marriage and Romance"

3. The baby mastering the skills that lead to establishment of the upright posture behaves
in the same way as the novice skier. He feels compelled to repeat the activity hundreds
of times until he has mastered the skill and mastered his anxiety. He often reveals that
he is having difficulty in "unwinding" when we put him to bed for his nap or for the night,
 and if you peek into his room while he is settling down for sleep (or unsettling down for
sleep), you may see him, groggy and cross-eyed with fatigue, still climbing and pulling
himself upright, collapsing momentarily with weariness, then exerting himself for another
climb. He repeats this over and over until finally he cannot lift himself even once more
and succumbs to sleep. One set of parents discovered their eight-month-old daughter
climbing in her sleep on several occasions during this mastery period. At eleven or
twelve at night they could hear soft sounds in the baby's room and upon entering would
find the baby standing in her crib, dazed and dimly conscious, too sleepy to protest when
she was put down in her bed again. When the art of standing was perfected, the baby
gave up practicing in her sleep.

--Selma H. Fraiberg, The Magic Years

The best title for this paragraph is

A. "Practice Makes Perfect"

B. "Babies' Nighttime Activities"

C. "The Sleep Habits of Babies"

D. "How a Baby Masters the Skill of Standing"