A Review of the Research on the Application of SOLO Taxonomy in English Reading Teaching in Middle Schools

Reading is one of the main ways through which middle school students learn English, and the quality of their reading depends largely on the level of thinking involved in the learning process. In actual teaching, however, many reading tasks remain at a low cognitive level, and students encounter difficulty when questions require inference, evaluation, or creation. SOLO taxonomy, which describes the structural complexity of observable learning outcomes, provides a basis for planning and assessing reading tasks across cognitive levels. Drawing on representative studies from China and abroad, this paper reviews research on the application of SOLO taxonomy in English reading teaching in middle schools. It traces the origin and development of the taxonomy, analyzes its compatibility with reading teaching, and examines two lines of applied research, namely SOLO-based reading teaching design and SOLO-based reading teaching assessment. The review indicates that design research has consolidated a working model of tiered objectives, ascending tasks, and question chains, while assessment research has produced level descriptions, evaluation scales, and process-oriented frameworks. And the two lines converge on aligning objectives, activities, and assessment within one level system. The field nevertheless remains constrained by predominantly case-based methods, scarce controlled or longitudinal evidence, and uneven attention between junior and senior high schools. The review concludes that SOLO taxonomy provides an operational definition of thinking depth in reading and supports the integration of teaching, learning, and assessment, but that future work requires more rigorous empirical designs, validated instruments, and broader coverage of learners and reading contexts.