On Hierarchies of Reading Skills and Text Types.

to describe the target language performance abilities of foreign language learners.' The proficiency movement is spearheaded by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) which over the last several years has promoted the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, proficiency-based curricula, syllabi, and, in general, are behind proficiency-based teaching. In the proficiency context, foreign language professionals are probably most familiar with the Oral Proficiency Interview, especially with the large scale training undertaken and the widespread implementation of oral proficiency requirements. Now gaining increasing attention is reading proficiency, which is the concern of the present paper. The ACTFL definition of reading proficiency is given in terms of a trisection between content, function, and accuracy which translate more specifically to reading as: text type, reading skill, and task-based performance (Galloway). The proficiency construct, as shown in Figure I, is characterized by two parallel hierarchies, one of text types and the other of reading skills, which are cross-sectioned to define developmental levels. In other words, a specific developmental level is associated with a particular text type and particular reading skills. By the definition of hierarchy, high level skills and text types subsume low ones so that readers demonstrating high levels of reading proficiency should be able to interact with texts and be able to demonstrate the reading skills characteristic of low levels of reading proficiency. Conversely, readers at low levels of the proficiency scale should neither be able to demonstrate high level skills nor interact with high level texts.