In second-language education (e.g. English for children in India), Munby’s taxonomy of microskills can be applied and he distinguishes the following reading ‘microskills’:
- Recognising the script of a language
- Deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items
- Understanding explicitly stated information
- Understanding information when not explicitly stated
- Understanding conceptual meaning
- Understanding the communicative value of sentences
- Understanding relations within the sentence and understanding relations between parts of text through lexical cohesion devices
- Understanding cohesion between parts of a text through grammatical cohesion devices
- Interpreting text by going outside it
- Recognising indicators in discourse
- Identifying the main point or important information in discourse distinguishing the main idea from supporting details
- Extracting salient details to summarise (the text, an idea)
- Extracting relevant points from a text selectively
- Using basic reference skills
- Skimming
- Scanning to locate specifically required information
- Trans coding information to diagrammatic display
Of course, the list is formidable and not really meant to be used by parents in its entirety. Yet, it is very illustrative to go through the aforementioned list to fathom the challenge of reading as a skill and take heart in the fact that there is no uncommon reading skill in the list. The Munby’s framework is drawn from ‘Assessing Reading’ by J. Charles Alder son, published as Cambridge Language Assessment Series.
