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thoughts, values and beliefs.
Scientific argumentation
relates concepts of events, objects and
ideas to systems of thought and knowledge so that the resulting propositions can be verified as
valid or non-valid. Examples of text objects in the text type category
argumentation
are a letter
to the editor, a poster advertisement, the posts in an online forum and a web-based review of a
book or film.
Instruction
(sometimes called injunction) is the type of text that provides directions on what to
do.
Instructions
present directions for certain behaviours in order to complete a task.
Rules,
regulations
and
statutes
specify requirements for certain behaviours based on impersonal
authority, such as practical validity or public authority. Examples of text objects in the text type
category
instruction
are a recipe, a series of diagrams showing a procedure for giving first aid
and guidelines for operating digital software.
Transaction
represents the kind of text that aims to achieve a specific purpose outlined in the
text, such as requesting that something is done, organising a meeting or making a social
engagement with a friend. Before the spread of electronic communication, this kind of text was
a significant component of some kinds of letters and, as an oral exchange, the principal
purpose of man
y phone calls. This text type was not included in Werlich’s (1976)
categorisation, used until now for the PISA framework.
The term transactional is used in PISA not to describe the general process of extracting
meaning from texts (as in reader-response theory), but the type of text written for the kinds of
purposes described here. Transactional texts are often personal in nature, rather than public,
and this may help to explain why they do not appear to be represented in some of the corpora
used to develop many text typologies. For example, this kind of text is not commonly found on
websites, which are frequently the subject of corpus linguistics studies (for example, Santini,
2006). With the extreme ease of personal communication using e-mail, text messages, blogs
and social networking websites, this kind of text has become much more significant as a
reading text type in recent years. Transactional texts often build on common and possibly
private understandings between communicators
– though clearly, this feature is difficult to
explore in a large-scale assessment. Examples of text objects in the text type transaction are
everyday e-mail and text message exchanges between colleagues or friends that request and
confirm arrangements.
Narration
occupies a prominent position in many national and international assessments.
Some texts are presented as being accounts of the world as it is (or was) and therefore claim
to be factual or non-fictional. Fictional accounts bear a more metaphorical relation to the world
as it is, appearing either as accounts of how it might be or of how it seems to be. In other large-
scale reading studies, particularly those for school students: the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP); the IEA Reading Literacy Study (IEARLS); and the IEA
Programme in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), the major classification of texts is
between fictional or literary texts and non-fictional texts (
reading for literary experience
and
reading for information or to perform a task
in NAEP;
literary experience
and
acquire and use
information
in PIRLS). This distinction is increasingly blurred as authors use formats and
structures typical of factual texts in creating their fictions. The PISA reading literacy
assessment includes both factual and fictional texts, and texts that may not be clearly one or
the other. PISA, however, does not attempt to measure differences in reading proficiency
between one type and the other. In PISA, fictional texts are classified as narration.
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