Reading A Discourse Perspective

READING A DISCOURSE PERSPECTIVE
4.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter takes up some of the central themes which have been developing in the two preceding chapters and applies them to the development of reading in a second or foreign language the key theoretical and empirical perspectives on the nature of reading are examined in the first section of the chapter.
4.2 BOTTOM-UP AND TOP-DOWN VIEWS ONREADING.
The bottom-up view suggest that successful listening is a matter of decoding the individual sounds we hear to derive the meaning of words and thence utterances; and the top-down view which suggests that we use discoursal and real world knowledge to construct and interpret aural messages. The central notion behind the bottom-up approach is that reading is basically a matter of decoding seriesof written symbols into their aural equivalents. Cambourne, who uses the term "outside-in" rather than bottom-up, provides the following illustration of how the process is supposed to work.
Print= every letter discriminated= phonemes and graphemes matched=blending =pronunciation=meaning.
According to this model, the reader process each letter as it is encountered. These letters, or graphemes,are matched with the phonemes of the language, which it is assumed the reader already knows. These phonemes, the minimal units of meaning in the sound system of the language, are blended together to form words.( Phonemes are the individual units of sound in a language) the derivation of meaning is thus the end process in which the language is translated from one form of symbolic representation toanother.
This is a logical explanation of what happens when we read. Letters do represent sounds, and despite the fact that in English twenty-six written symbols have to represent over forty aural symbols , on the surface then ,it seems more logical to teach initial readers to utilize the systematic correspondences between written and spoken symbols than to teach them to recognize every letter andword they encounter by memorizing its unique configuration and shape, one of the assumptions underlying thus phonics approach is that once a reader has blended the sounds together to form a word and that word will then be recognized, common English words have irregular spellings and were therefore excluded, the stories in primers tended to be unnatural and tedious. Kolers and katzmann (1966), forexample, demonstrates that it takes from a quarter to a third of a second to recognize and assign the appropriate phonemic sound to a given grapheme, at this rate given the average length of English words readers would only be able to process around 60 words per minute. In fact, it has been demonstrated that the average reader can read and comprehend around 250-350 word per minute.
Insights fromsources such as the reading miscue inventory led to the postulation of an alternative to the bottom-up, phonics approach. This has become known as the top-down or psycholinguistic approach reading. As with the bottom-up models, there are a number of variations in this approach, but basically all agree that the reader rather than the text is at the heart of the reading process. Cambourne (1979)provides the following schematization of the approach.
Past experienc , language, intuitions and expectations= selective aspects of print= meaning= sound, pronunciation ,if necessary.
From the diagram, it can be seen that this approach emphasizes the reconstruction of meaning rather than the decoding of form. The interaction of the reader and the text is central to the process, and reader bringto this interaction their knowledge of the subject at hand , knowledge of and expectations about how language works ,motivation, interest and attitudes towards the content of the text, rather than decoding each symbol, or even every word, the reader forms hypotheses about text elements and then "samples" the text to determine whether or not the hypotheses are correct.

4.3 SCHEMA THEORY AND...