Analysis Of The Barrett's Taxonomy Of Reading Comprehension

Tejero (2010) classified the reading skills into three levels. These are the literal comprehension, interpretation, critical evaluation and integration. The Barrett’s taxonomy of reading comprehension classifies skills and orders them to their degree of complexity. The taxonomy consists of four categories with subset of skills. Literary recognition or recall is the first, which has subset of skills like recalling of details, main ideas, sequences, and comparisons of cause-and-effect relationships and of character traits. Next is making inferences. Its subset of skills are inferring supporting details, main ideas, sequences, comparisons, predicting outcomes and inferring about figurative language. Then the evaluation with subset of skills like

The five reading areas are grouped together as if they are equal. But they are not equal. The first four reading areas all serve one purpose that is to increase comprehension. Comprehension is the goal of all reading instruction. Phonemics and phonics instruction enables many children to decode unknown words, which can help them to read and better understand a story. Adequate fluency is important because slow, halting readers expend so much energy figuring out words that little energy is left for understanding what they are reading. Finally, a good vocabulary helps students to understand the meanings of words within a passage, giving them a better chance to fully understand the

Teachers exerted all efforts in their desire to help their pupils read and comprehend. However, many just cope and could hardly decode the printed words. Thus, this inability to read becomes one of the major causes of failure among them which leads to other problems that are either behavioural or personal in nature. In addition, when a pupil does not learn to read at the time it is expected of him, he suffers not only from the failure itself, but from the difficulty with all others subjects and activities in school that depend on reading competence. For this matter, Haentah and Laughton (2002) suggested that diagnosing pupils properly especially those with reading disabilities is very important. According to them, evaluation and assessment will provide the teachers significant information that will assist them in the development of strength and remediation of weaknesses of their