A working name for the ELT-side reading-comprehension question taxonomy associated with Christine Nuttall's Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (Heinemann 1982; revised edition 1996; reissued by Macmillan 2005). Nuttall did not publish a single canonical numbered list under that label; the taxonomy is identified through her chapter on questioning and through the work of researchers who built explicitly on her framework. Two formulations now circulate.
The most-cited modern descendant. Day and Park (2005), in Reading in a Foreign Language, consolidate six types of comprehension that they attribute explicitly to the influence of Pearson & Johnson (1972) and Nuttall (1996):
This is the taxonomy used in modern materials-development work and in textbook analysis across the EFL literature.
Empirical analyses of high-stakes reading tests often collapse Nuttall's distinctions into three levels — literal comprehension, reinterpretation, and inference — where reinterpretation absorbs reorganisation and the more text-bound forms of evaluation. A study of Barron's IELTS preparation tests using this frame found 43.8% literal, 43.3% reinterpretation, and only 12.9% inference. The thinness of the inference layer is typical of commercial materials and gives a sharp diagnostic for the cognitive demand profile of an item bank.
The six-type version is the right tool for materials development, item-bank tagging, and curriculum balance checks; it carries enough resolution to drive decisions about what to author next. The three-level version is the right tool for whole-test analysis where the question is does this exam discriminate at the inferential layer? For an item bank intended to discriminate at upper proficiency, the inference proportion is the cleanest single quality signal under either formulation.