Approaches to teaching reading

Approaches to teaching reading

1. Button-Up Processing

   • Called because it focuseses on developing the basic skill of matching sounds with the letters, syllables, and words written
   • Bottom-up approach to reading is known as phonics, which requires the learner to match letters with sounds in a defined sequence
   • Is a linear process by which readers decode a text word by word, linking the words into phrases and then sentences
   • In other words, textual comprehension involves adding the meanings of words to get the meanings of clauses (Anderson 1994)
   • As with the audiolingual teaching method, phonics requires a strong emphasis on repetition and on drills using the sounds that makeup words
   • . Most activities are based on recognition and recall of lexical and grammatical forms with an emphasis on the perceptual and decoding dimension.

2. Top-down Processing

   • Focuses on the background knowledge a reader uses to comprehend a written text.
   • Schematheory is based on the notion that past experiences lead to the creation of mental frameworks that help us make sense of new experiences.” Smith (1994)
     • This means that past experiences will be related to new experiences, which may include the knowledge of “objects, situations, and events as well as knowledge of procedures for retrieving, organizing and interpreting information”
   • Top-down approach is associated with schema theory.
   • Comprehension is “activating or constructing a schema that provides a coherent explanation of objects and events mentioned in a discourse” (Anderson 1994, 473).
     • For Anderson and Pearson (1988), comprehension is the interaction between old and new information
   • A reader comprehends a message when he is able to bring to mind a schema that gives account of the objects and events described in the message
   • Activities are used to activate and build students’ schemata
     • Pre-reading: this important stage the the teacher should make sure that students have the relevant schema for understanding the text (prediction, semantic mapping, and reconciled reading)
     • During-reading: teachers can impart at this stage is note-taking, which allows students to compile new vocabulary and important information and details, and to summarize information and record their reactions and opinions
     • The post-reading stage offers the chance to evaluate students’ adequacy of interpretation, while bearing in mind that accuracy is relative and that “readership”

3. Interactive Model

   • The interactive model acknowledges that lower level processing skills are essential for fluent and accurate reading; it also emphasizes that as bottom-up processing becomes more automatic, higher-level skills will become more engaged. For Eskey (1988)
   • In this model refers not to the interaction between the reader and the text (as in schema theory) but to the interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing skills.
   • The interactive model takes into account the continuous interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing in the construction of the meaning of a text

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