Reading is always situated, the reading situation consisting of a reader with specifi c goals or tasks to fulfi l and a text document written by an author with specifi c expertise, knowledge and intentions for a specifi c audience. The situatedness of reading is an important aspect for the mo-tivational aspects of reading and learning, when the individual searches for information about interesting topics in school or outside of school settings (including sports competitions, rules of games, etc.). It should also be consider ed for the assessment of reading literacy.
Reading is per se a unidirectional communication. Although there are many communication situations which are interactive and bi-directional, for example, when letters are answered after reading, when readers can write to authors, when websites expect users to respond to questions, or when Wikis invite users to edit or re-write articles, these bi-directional kinds of communication are a blend of reading and writing and will therefore be kept out of focus of this framework.
A reading situation is always embedded into a broader context. The Council of Europe (1996) suggests a distinction of four categories of read-ing contexts: readread-ing for private use, readread-ing for public use, educational
use and occupational use.2 The categories are not distinct, but overlap.
We will describe them in the following in more detail.
Reading for private use. This category of reading context refers to any kind of reading documents for satisfying the reader’s personal interests, including practical and intellectual ones, and social interests of being connected to other people. Reading for private use includes also reading of any kinds of documents (including belles letters) for the purpose of leisure and recreation.
Reading for public use. This category refers to reading offi cial (public) documents with information about public affairs or events such as news-papers, information about new law regulations (i.e. juridical texts), an-nouncements of public events such as concerts, games etc. Besides the print world, in the electronic world this can also refer to news-websites, homepages of public institutions, and so forth.
Reading for educational use. This category of reading context refers to reading of texts written for the purpose of instruction. It can include printed textbooks as well as interactive learning software. This kind of reading to learn is the ‘natural continuation’ of the predecessor learning activity of learning to read (Sticht & James, 1984; Stiggins, 1982).
Reading for occupational use. This category includes reading of job offers in print newspapers, and also online. It further includes reading for satisfying job requirements by, for example, reading how to operate a system, or reading of workplace directions and related issues (Stiggins, 1982). Even though at grade 6, reading for occupational use is still far ahead, some precedent-related reading requirements may also be included at this level, with some reference to the occupational life and also for motivational reasons. Also, as part of developing social and civic com-petence, students should learn about the economy, and the world of la-bour. Thus the inclusion of such texts in diagnostic assessment is both possible and necessary.
Assessment of reading literacy should cover a suffi ciently large vari-ety of reading contexts with a correspondingly large diversity of content.
As mentioned above, all contexts could and should be introduced both in reading instruction and in assessment, in order to prepare students for future tasks and roles and as a means for this preparation.
2 The distinction of reading contexts suggested by the Council of Europe has been modifi ed by PISA 2009 into personal, public, educational, and occupational domains.
Some of the personal and social motives are discussed at length in the available Hungarian literature, but research questions are phrased more in terms of the texts read than in terms of reading as a purposeful activity.
The sociology of reading discusses some elements from the reading pur-poses identifi ed in other fi elds of reading research (for an overview of these see Szenczi, 2010). Reading literature and different narrative genres (e.g., Gereben, 2000, Péterfi , 2009) have privileged status in studies, as the way to improve aesthetic sophistication, and for shaping national identity, or as plain entertainment. Library use features heavily in these reports, even though they also admit that access to books and literature, hence accessing them from the library, is a function of family sociocul-tural background (cf. Kelemen-Molitorisz, 2009a). Since reading litera-ture has long been a distinguished curricular objective, the result of such instructional efforts is tangible in the responses of Hungarian students in the PISA assessments (for an overview, see D. Molnár, Molnár & Józsa, 2012).
In research on the sociology of reading, data about e-reading (e.g., Péterfi & Nagy, 2009) are also organized by medium and general activ-ity rather than reading motivation and processes. For example, it is not unusual to fi nd the general term ‘computer use’ and ‘internet use’ among items inventorying reading habits and leisure activities, and the diversity of reading necessary or probable for these ICT-related activities seems to be ignored. Research interests in this fi eld include the frequency of read-ing activities, readread-ing habits, text types/genres or content categories read, favourite authors, books read (favourite books), sources of reading mate-rial, library use; and reading among leisure activities (including, earlier:
using a computer; now: use of the internet).
Only a few studies address the reading tasks and content areas in which reading occurs not for pleasure but for information to be used in problem solving or for knowledge building for future use. When A. Nagy (2003) asked his subjects to list why they read, they mentioned interest in the subject matter, as laypeople would. Researchers typically duplicate this view when they ask about reading activities related to medium, gen-re and subject matter – integen-rests to be satisfi ed by a close reading and appropriation of the text, for intellectual and educational gains or for pleasure. Again, researchers seem to take a narrow defi nition and do not look at the activity itself, or at everyday situations where information
must be accessed and processed in a written form. When investigating reading in the private sphere, even Terestyéni (1996) and Gereben (2000) focused only on the occupational context and use a limited range of read-ings. What is surprising, though, is that reading for learning also seems to be outside the scope of investigations, even though problems in this regard have been articulated quite early (Kádárné, 1985; Lénárd, 1978;
Kelemen-Moltorisz, 2009b). (What is known about contexts of reading beyond the private sphere and literary experience mostly comes from large-scale international assessments of reading literacy.) Discussions on civic education sometimes include references to reading requirements, while this area includes some of the most diffi cult document types (Mátrai, 1982; Kinyó & Barassevich, 2010).
It is even more diffi cult to fi nd estimates of reading needs in the econ-omy as yet. Terestyéni calculated in his studies on adult literacy (1987 and 1996) that about a quarter of the Hungarian population may have been functionally illiterate at the time, with no reading and writing ac-tivities in their private sphere. In the workplace, more than half of his subjects indicated a total lack of reading and writing tasks. Vári et al.
(2001) summarized and contextualized the results of the 1998 Interna-tional Adult Literacy Survey: about two thirds of Hungarian adults fell in the two poorest categories in reading documents, while their perform-ance was somewhat worse in reading prose and somewhat better on quantitative texts (later numeracy tasks). Based on data and results from the same assessment, Köllő (2009) proposed the hypothesis that prob-lems in reading and writing may be both the cause and consequence of unemployment or of working in jobs requiring no literacy skills. More importantly, Köllő showed that workplaces in socialist economies were not literacy intensive, and in fact demanded a third of the effort from workers in this respect than the Western labour market. However, those workplaces created in East-Central Europe after the regime change differ only a little in this regard from Western requirements, that is, workers now face a greater number of reading, writing and calculation tasks here in their daily work compared to before and the number of these tasks correlates with income levels. That is, it is essential that the development of reading literacy encompasses all its elements for all students – a lack of doing so would lead to dire consequences on both the personal and the societal level.
De Glopper and Horváth (1996) conducted a mother tongue validity survey, in which they collected data on the frequency, importance and perceived personal mastery of communicative tasks related to work, study and citizenship, in varied language functions, from people with a GCSE, from teachers in secondary education and from employers. The ways in which these three sub-samples evaluated literacy tasks by the above mentioned criteria show rather high agreements (r>0.78). Although little has been published of the reading-related fi ndings, it is known (Horváth, 1996) that self-reported reading problems include forms to be fi lled in, instructions and argumentative texts; that Hungarians tend to underestimate these problems when they compare them to their knowl-edge gaps in literature; and that employers attribute a higher importance to orality. (There are no data regarding whether the latter may be a cul-tural phenomenon or a consequence of the literacy problems mentioned.) The communication problems manifested from the responses were re-lated to the public sphere. Horváth observed that subjects attributed these to their own mastery problems.
Giving an overview of adult literacy studies, Vári et al. (2001) call for a variety of texts, including the introduction of non-traditional, non-lit-erary genres in the development of reading literacy at school. All these would lend support for the inclusion of reading purposes and topics to be included in diagnostic assessment, too, of course through texts that are appropriate for the given populations in both content and language.
Assessment standards typically focus on knowledge and skills, and not on aspects of motivation. Yet in the light of the above, it may be worth considering the inclusion of a reading motivation component in the standards, even if its assessment would be, at present, not feasible.