A Report in EN 202 (The Teaching of Reading and World Literature)

RENE A. VILLAREALMAEd EnglishPartido State University

READING FOR COMMUNICATION

Terms used in this section:

• Schema – psycholinguistic-cognitive group employed this as a term referring to prior knowledge (plural schemata)

• Continuum - a link between two things, or a continuous series of things, that blend into each other so gradually and seamlessly that it is impossible to say where one becomes the next (Microsoft® Encarta® 2007)

•Metacognition – knowledge about own thinking: knowledge of your own thoughts and the factors that influence thinking.

The Interactive Nature of the Reading ProcessIn reading, the reader performs a number of simultaneous tasks: Decode the message by recognizing the written signs Interpret the message by assigning meaning to the string of

words Understand what the author’s intention was

In this process, there are at least three participants: The writer The text The reader

Reading is therefore inherently interactive since it involves the three participants.

The Psycholinguistic-Cognitive Approach

• Barnett (1989)

• Learner-centered and places cognitive development and text processing at the core of its view in reading.

• Prior knowledge is central in this approach

• Theorists belonging to this approach have been instrumental in changing teaching methodologies from the traditional focus on isolated features of texts to the interactive and collaborative view of the composing process (Silva, 1990), which develops as part of reader-text interaction.

Developed Approaches to Reading• Bottom-Up Approach – view reading as “a series of stages that proceed in a fixed order from sensory input to comprehension” (Hudson, 1998:46). Gough (1972) is one of the proponents of this approach.

• Top-Down Approach – view the interpretation process as a continuum of changing hypotheses about the incoming information. Smith (1971, 1988, 1994) and Goodman (1968, 1976) are the major proponents of the approach.

• More recently, approaches that take an interactive view of reading require an integration and combination of both top-down and bottom-up approaches to describe the reading process.

The Written Text Reception Framework

Legend:• The knowledge components are in ovals and the purpose of reading is in a triangle as part of the pragmatic considerations.

• The interactive nature of the reading process has been described and studied for the past two decades by many researchers on this field (Rumelhart 1977, 1980, 1984; Rumelhart and McClelland, 1982; Stanovich 1980, 1981, 1986).

• Some of the studies have focused on the writer, rather than on the features of the text; others have focused on the strategies of interpretation employed by the reader.

• Since top-down and bottom-up processing take place simultaneously – the reader needs to recruit his/her prior knowledge and prior reading experience, apply knowledge of writing conventions, and consider the purpose of reading in order to engage in top-down processing.

Suppose…• A person comes across a scrap of paper on which the following section of a text is printed without a title, without graphics or any other indication as to where the text might have appeared originally, by whom it may have been written, and for what purpose:

On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein told the president of the United States that his scientific colleagues had evidence to show that an atomic bomb might be made.

• Any reader might recruit his/her knowledge about atomic bomb, the tragic history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fight against nuclear weapons, or any other potentially related topic that seems relevant. With the reader’s schemata, the reader might construct some initial hypotheses about the text.

The next text would be…

Six years later, in February 1945, Klaus Fuchs met a Russian agent whom he knew by the code name “Raymond” and passed on to him what he knew about making the bomb.

• Our imaginary reader can now narrow down and focus attention more specifically on the initial development of the atomic bomb in the United States and the transmission of this secret information to Russia.• Yet, the reader still has too little information about the text in order to anticipate the aim or message of the text.

The next bit of text…

Was one of these men right to disclose his terrible knowledge, and was the other wrong? Or were they both wrong? Do scientists have a sense of right and wrong?

• At this stage, most readers would realize that the text is concerned with questions of ethics and the reponsible conduct of scientists. Had the reader seen the title, “A Moral for an Age of Plenty” (Bronowski, 1977:196) or s/he known the name of the author, s/he might have narrowed down the expectations and hypotheses based on the content of the title and/or the knowledge the personmight have about Bronowski as an author of articles related to philosophic, scientific and moral issues.

Therefore…• The top-down processing of text recruits the reader’s background knowledge of both content and text genre, and his/her expectations and experiences and applies them to the interpretation of the text, as the reader moves along from one section to the next, within the text. • This type of processing is easier and more effective when readers are familiar with the subject matter of the text and it becomes more difficult when such preparatory information is not available.• Simultaneous with the top-down processing, readers utilize a bottom-up approach also known as data-driven processing, which is text bound and which relies heavily on linguistic information (both semantic and syntactic in nature) available in the text.• It is the complementary utilization of the two types of processing that make text interpretation possible.

Good and effective reading therefore…

• Must be viewed as combining both rapid and accurate recognition and decoding of letters, words, collocations, and other structural cues with sensible, global predictions related to the text as a whole.

• Good readers constantly integrate top-down and bottom-up processing techniques.

• Readers bring their prior knowledge and experience to the reading process and at the same time interact effectively with the text by using their linguistic knowledge and individual reading strategies.

• This is the interactive nature of the interpretation process.