Nuttall's Taxonomy

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 six-type formulation (Day & Park 2005)

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):

• Literal comprehension. Understanding of the straightforward meaning of the text: facts, vocabulary, dates, times, locations. Answerable directly and explicitly from the text.
• Reorganisation. Combining information from different parts of the text into a fresh synthesis. Built on literal understanding; forces the reader from sentence-level to global view.
• Inference. Drawing conclusions from material that is in the text but not explicitly stated. Combines literal understanding with the reader's own knowledge and intuitions.
• Prediction. Using both the passage and prior topic knowledge to determine what might happen next or after a story ends. Distinguishes while-reading from post-reading prediction.
• Evaluation. A global or comprehensive judgement about some aspect of the text: its argument, evidence, or relevance to the reader.
• Personal response. The reader's feelings about the text and the subject. Not in the text, but must reflect a literal understanding and be tied to the content.

This is the taxonomy used in modern materials-development work and in textbook analysis across the EFL literature.

The three-level formulation (in IELTS-type research)

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.

When to use which

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.

Key References

• Nuttall, C. (1982). Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language. Heinemann Educational Books.
• Nuttall, C. (1996). Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (rev. ed.). Heinemann.
• Nuttall, C. (2005). Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language. Macmillan Education.
• Pearson, P. D. & Johnson, D. D. (1972). Teaching Reading Comprehension. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• Day, R. R. & Park, J. (2005). Developing reading comprehension questions. Reading in a Foreign Language, 17(1), 60–73.

See Also

• Barrett's Taxonomy: the older reading-comprehension taxonomy Nuttall's work parallels and extends
• Bloom's Taxonomy: the general-cognition framework often imported into ELT in place of reading-specific schemes
• Reading Subskills: the inventory of sub-skills the question types operationalise
• Reading Comprehension Test Design: how question-type balance feeds discrimination at the test level