here - TIMSS and PIRLS Home - Boston College

172 chapter 5: school curriculum and organization for teaching reading
on reading to acquire information included Kuwait, Lithuania, Macedonia,
the Russian Federation, and the Slovak Republic. Countries with a major
emphasis on reading to acquire information but less emphasis on reading
for literary experience included Belgium (French), the Netherlands, Poland,
and Spain. Not surprisingly, many of the participants emphasized reading in
order to improve reading. Twenty-six participants reported a major emphasis
on reading for enjoyment in the reading curriculum, while only 11 reported
a major emphasis on reading for social awareness or civic duty.
The corresponding information about the reading processes assessed
by PIRLS is found in Exhibit 5.8. Participants were asked to provide relatively
detailed information about the extent to which their curriculum emphasized
various aspects of the four broad reading processes assessed by PIRLS 2006:
1) focus on and retrieve explicitly stated information, 2) make straightforward
inferences, 3) interpret and integrate ideas and information, and 4) examine
and evaluate content, language, and textual elements.
More than two thirds of participants reported placing major emphasis in
the reading curriculum on the processes related to focusing on and retrieving
information, including identifying specific ideas, searching for definitions
of words or phrases, and finding the topic sentence or main idea in a text.
Of the straightforward inferencing processes, summarizing the main point
was most widely reported as a major emphasis (27 participants), followed by
evaluating cause and effect (18 participants), determining the referent of a
pronoun (12 participants), and identifying generalizations (11 participants).
The most highly emphasized process within the category of interpreting
and integrating ideas and information was discerning the overall message
or theme, which received a major emphasis in more than two thirds of
curricula. Interpreting a real-world application of information from the text
and describing the relationship between two characters received a major
emphasis in 17 and 16 of the reading curricula, respectively. Inferring mood
or tone in a story, or comparing and contrasting information from a text
received major emphasis in less than one third of the curricula.