Assessing Literary Comprehension through Barrett's Taxonomy: A Study of Philology Students' Critical Reading Skills
Аннотация
Students need to be able to read critically, interpret deeply, and interact with literature at higher cognitive levels in today's technologically sophisticated and information-rich world. Barrett's Taxonomy serves as the analytical framework for this study, which examines the critical reading skills of philology students at the Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanisation Engineers (TIIAME). Due to its philosophical and thematic depth, Ray Bradbury's short story The Last Night of the World was selected as the stimulus text. Written responses to evaluative and appreciative prompts, as well as multiple-choice questions designed to assess literal and inferential comprehension, were used to gather data. Each level's performance was evaluated using a scoring rubric. According to the findings, students' ability to identify explicit details at the literal level was moderately successful, but their inferential, evaluative, and appreciative skills declined significantly. Pupils found it challenging to engage with the text's literary and emotional aspects, decipher implied meanings, and examine deeper themes. These findings were supported by qualitative interviews, in which participants expressed confidence in simple tasks but struggled with higher-order comprehension because they had limited experience with critical reading. The combined findings of the quantitative and qualitative data point to a lack of development of advanced comprehension skills in the current curriculum. These results demonstrate the urgent need for curriculum reforms that prioritize critical reading and methodical practice in higher-order thinking to better prepare philology students for the demands of academic scholarship and modern literacy.