Class Cancellation

Dear Students

Our class on Wednesday, 30th of July, 2008, from 10-30 - 11.20 am has to be cancelled since I have been asked to represent the Dean to attend a lecture at Dewan Sri Budiman, main campus.

Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Salam

MODELS OF READING: INTERACTIVE-CONSTRUCTIVE & NEW LITERACY APPROACHES

INTERACTION IN THE READING PROCESS

• Basically a combination of bottom-up and top-down models of reading


• So models of Interactive approach can either focus either on the reading process (cognitive processes) or the product of reader’s interaction with the info & prior knowledge
  

Important features

A) Automaticity (application of lower level skills). In other words application of lower level reading skills is done automatically
B) Interaction between text & background knowledge
▫Interaction of the writer’s intentions and the reader’s interpretations
▫For example : What are the two meanings of the following sentence:

Flying planes can be dangerous

This shows that the writer’s intention and the reader’s background knowledge sometimes do not match

C) The role of social, contextual & political variables affecting meaning making

Problems with BU and TD

Drawbacks of Bottom-Up

• The idea of linear processing
• Underestimated the contribution of the reader
• Failed to recognize that students utilize their expectations about the text based on their knowledge of language and how it works
• Failure to include previous experience and knowledge into processing

Drawback of Top-Down

• When reading topics which are completely new and foreign, it is inefficient, impractical and perhaps impossible to make predictions about the reading
• E.g. Imagine an ‘orang asli’ boy who has never left the village reading about MP
• Or a boy from Hmong tribe in Vietnam reading about Halloween

INTERACTIVE READING MODEL

• An interactive reading model attempts to combine the valid insights of bottom-up and top-down models.
• It attempts to take into account the strong points of the bottom-up and top-down models, and tries to avoid the criticisms levelled against each, making it one of the most promising approaches to the theory of reading today. (McCormick, T. 1988)
• To reiterate, an interactive reading model is a reading model that recognizes the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes simultaneously throughout the reading process.
• Emphasize the role of prior knowledge or pre-existing knowledge in providing the reader with non-visual or implicit information in the text.
• Also, add the fact that the role of certain kind of information-processing skills is also important.
• Interactive approaches see the advent of the incorporation of bottom-up and top-down approaches to reading (Eskey, 1988; Samuels and Kamil, 1988).
• Both modes of information processing, top-down and bottom-up alike, are seen as strategies that are flexibly used in the accomplishment of the reading tasks (Carrell and Eisterhold, 1983; Carrell, 1988; Clarke, 1979; Eskey, 1988; Grabe, 1988).
• Hence,the interactive approaches rely on both the graphic and contextual information

RUMELHART MODEL

• Successful reading is both a perceptual and a cognitive process
• Stresses the influence of various sources namely feature extraction, orthographic knowledge, lexical knowledge, syntactic knowledge and semantic knowledge on the text processing and the reader’s interpretation.
• Incorporates a mechanism labeled as the ‘message centre’, which holds the information and then redirects them as needed.
• This mechanism allows the sources of knowledge to interact with each other and thereby enable higher-level processing to influence lower-level processing.

In his model:

• Graphic information enters the process through a Visual Information Store (VIS)
• A cognitive Feature Extraction Device selects the important features of the graphic input
• A Pattern Synthesizer takes this information along with syntactic, semantic, orthographic, lexical and pragmatic knowledge (context) in order to produce the most probable interpretation for the graphic input.
• The reading process is the result of the parallel application of sensory and non-sensory sources of information

STANOVICH MODEL

• Stanovich introduced the interactive-compensatory reading model
• Neither BU or TD address all areas of reading comprehension
• But the interactive-compensatory taps into the strengths of both BU and TD
• Says that readers rely on both BU and TD processes simultaneously and alternatively depending on the reading purpose, motivation, schema and knowledge of the subject
• Incorporates the ‘compensatory mode’ to his model with the interaction between the top-down and bottom-up processing.
• The compensatory mode enables the reader to, “at any level compensate for his or her deficiencies at any other level” (Samuels and Kamil, 1988: 32).
• This model has enabled researchers to theorize how good and poor readers approach a text.
• If there is a deficiency at an early print-analysis stage (BU), higher order knowledge structures (TD) will attempt to compensate.
• For the poor reader, who may be both inaccurate and slow at word recognition but who has knowledge of the text-topic, TD processing may allow for this compensation
• E.g. A beginning reader who is weak at decoding reads this and do not know the word emerald.
• The jeweler put the green emerald in the ring
• He will still understand the meaning of the sentence because he may use context and knowledge of gems to decide what the word i
• States that if one of the processors (i.e, orthographic, lexical, syntactic and semantic) fails, other processors will facilitate comprehension
• For example in a cloze vocabulary exercises:
• Beagles, Retriever, Spaniels, as well as other ____ of dogs are favorite canines for hunting enthusiast.
• The lexical information is absent, but students would guess the word breeds or types, since syntactic and semantic cues compensate for the absent processors

ANDERSON & PEARSON SCHEMA-THEORETIC VIEW

• Focus on the role of schemata, knowledge stored in memory, in text comprehension
• Comprehension = interaction between old & new information
• Schema Theory: Already known general ideas subsume & anchor new information
• Include: a) info about the relationships among the components, b) role of inference & c) reliance on knowledge of the content, + abstract & general schemata.

Schemata:
Knowledge already stored in memory, function in the process of interpreting new information and allowing it to enter and become part of the knowledge store
Schema:
An abstract knowledge structure
A structure that represents the relationship among its component parts

Read this:

Queen Elizabeth participated in a long-delayed ceremony in Clydebank. Scotland yesterday. While there is still bitterness here following the protracted strike, on this occasion a crowd of shipyard workers numbering in the hundreds joined dignitaries in cheering as the HMS Pinafore slipped into the water.

What is the name of the ceremony?

PEARSON & TIERNEY R/W MODEL

• Negotiation of meaning between writer & reader who both create meaning through the text as the medium.
• Readers as composers:
  “ the thoughtful reader …is the reader who reads as if she were a writer composing a text yet for another reader who lives within her”.
• Reader reads with the expectation that the writer has provided sufficient clues about the meaning
• Writer writes with the intention the reader will create meaning
• Consider: pragmatic theories of language that every speech acts, utterance, or attempt at comprehending an utterance is an actionReading is an act of composing rather than recitation or regurgitation
• Context is important
• Knowing why something was said is as crucial to interpreting the message as knowing what was said
• Failing to recognize author’s goal can interfere with comprehension of the main idea or point of view
• Focus on the thoughtful reader with 4 interactive roles:
  Planner – creates goal, use existing knowledge, decides how to align with the text
  Composer – searches for coherence in gaps with inferences about the relationship within the text
  Editor – examines his interpretations
  Monitor – directs the other 3 roles

MATHEWSON’S MODEL OF ATTITUDE INFLUENCE

• A model that addresses the role that attitude and motivation play in reading
• Attitude intention to read reading
• Attitude = tri-componential construct: Cognitive component (evaluation), affective component (feeling) , & conative component (action readiness)
• * Conative = personality, volition, temperament
• All these influence the intention to read, & the intention to read affects reading behaviour.
• This model provides feedback on how motivation may change & how important it is to address affective issues in teaching reading.
• Attitude toward reading may be modified by a change in reader’s goal
• Examples:
  –Topic of no interest
  –Examination on comprehension
• Feedback during reading may affect attitude and motivation:
• Satisfaction with affect developed through reading
• Satisfaction with ideas developed through reading
• Feelings generated by ideas from the reading process
• Ideas constructed from in the information read
• How the reading affects values, goals and self-concept

Lecture 2 - Continued

BOTTOM-UP MODEL OF READING

Gough (1972):
◦Reading as a process that starts with the printed material itself
◦Reading is seen as a linear process
◦From left to right
◦The process is rapid

• Starts with basic skills such as decoding the letters,
• And the combination of the letters to form words.
• It then proceeds with a more complex processing which runs through a series of clauses to phrases to sentences to paragraphs and finally, to the text as a whole
• It starts with the letters being recognized first feature-by-feature by a visual system,
• And then transferred to a sound (phonemic) system for recognition and held until the next letter is processed in the same way.
• Consequently, when words are recognized, they are held in working memory until they are processed for underlying meaning and finally understood as sentences and text as a whole (Purcell-Gates, 1997: 2).

TOP-DOWN MODEL OF READING

• Starts with the reader making predictions about the text.
• His or her predictions are guided by his or her prior knowledge.
• Rather than decoding each symbol, or even every word, the reader forms hypotheses about the text and then ‘samples’ them to determine whether or not the hypotheses they made are correct.
• If the hypotheses are incorrect, the reader re-hypothesize and so the same process continues.

How did Goodman arrive at this model?

He used reader miscue analysis:
◦A method that looks at types of errors readers make while reading aloud
◦Research shows that reading errors related to syntactic and semantic contexts of a lexical item
◦E.g. a reader might read hoped for opened, a for the, he for I.
◦This is taken to mean that guessing and sampling are taking place as text is transformed into meaning.


Smith (1971,1994): it would simply take too much time for a reader to process all visual clues
Knowledge of the linguistic form and knowledge of the world is close and that it has direct implications on the reading process

Notes prepared by Dr. Faizah Majid

Exercise:

Read the title of an article from Reader's Digest

Are Your Normal or Nuts?

Think of the hypotheses that you may have formed, your conceptions and perceptions about the content of the article. Now read the article here and check whether your hypotheses, conceptions or expectations are confirmed.

Lecture 2 - Models of Reading

RESEARCH ON READING

• Cognitive psychologists: late 1870s - James Cattell & Wilhelm Wundt
  Reading as a means to study perceptual processes (eye movement, word recognition, etc)
  (1880s – 1910s)


• 1908 : research moved from cognitive processing to behaviorist explanatory theories
  But, did not contribute much to body of knowledge


• Then taking after Skinnerian psychology, research focused on the reading process

READING PROCESS – PSYCHOLINGUISTIC’S POINT OF VIEW

• Smith (1971) described reading as the “reduction of uncertainty”


• That is, as we progress through a text, our choices of what to select are constrained, often heavily both by features within the text itself and those external to it.

Smith (1971) has categorized this act of ‘reduction of uncertainty’ under 4 headings:

1. graphic information

2. phonetic information

3. syntactic information

4. semantic information

Frank Smith’s famous example:

“The captain ordered the mate to drop the an___”

◦Graphic information – knowledge of English spelling tells us limited possibilities
◦Phonetic information – tells us the limited possibilities of sound, thus, reducing the uncertainty
◦Syntactic information – only adjective and NP phrase can follow ‘the’
◦Semantic information – our knowledge and the context limits us on the things that can be dropped. e.g. antelope

Thus, the uncertainty is reduced to the word ‘anchor’

Goodman (1967) – looked at reading as “a psycholinguistic guessing game”

Readers make use of 3 cue system represented by 3 levels of language within the text:

1. graphophonic (visual & phonetic features)

2. syntactic (possible kind of word order)

3. semantic (meaning of words)

Goodman, K. (1967) Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game.

When reading:

• 1st readers make use of their knowledge in visual and phonetic features of English


• 2nd they draw knowledge of syntactic constraints (possible word order)


• 3rd they are aware of the semantic constraints related to the meaning of the words and their collocation

READING PROCESS – SOCIOLINGUISTIC’S POINT OF VIEW

‘Sociolinguistic factors’ – the way written language use is affected by factors both in the immediate communicative situation between reader and writer and in the wider institutional and sociocultural context.

Kress (1985:44) - “ Although from the individual’s point of view, his or her reading is ‘just a personal opinion, that personal opinion is socially constructed”Thus, in taking a process view of reading, it is important to see it as involving not just psychological processes, but also social factor related to our membership of interpretative communities.

In others, our interpretation of a text is shared with those of similar social class, or ethnic group, religious belief or political belief.

READING PROCESS – INTERTEXTUALITY’S POINT OF VIEW

The production and reception of a given text depends on the writer’s and reader’s knowledge of other texts.It may also be helpful to know how a particular text relates to other texts by the same author and other contemporary genres.

It may also be helpful to know how a particular text relates to other texts by the same author and other contemporary genres.

All texts contain traces of other texts frequently cannot be readily interpreted – or at least fully appreciated – without reference to other texts. e.g. Academic reading materials

IN SHORT, READING PROCESS IS

Interactive in several ways:

1. Interaction between the levels of language within the text

2. Interaction between reader and writer

3. Intertextuality

Notes prepared y Dr. Faizah Majid

Announcement

Dear Students,

Please take note that during the month of Ramadhan (Sept 1 - 30, 2008) our class on Mondays (6.10 - 7.50 pm) will instead be held on Mondays 1 - 2 pm and Tuesdays 1 -2 pm at TEC 4. We will revert back to the old time after the Eid.

Thank You.

Lecture 1 - Reading and the Reader

WHAT READING MEANS

Reading is very much related to language. How ?
a) We use it for a purpose (for both language and
reading)
b) It makes sense in a context (for both language and
reading)

Language is the most important resource for any readers.
We read for different purposes:

—A man at the airport looking the departure time screen
—A student in a library gazes intently at a textbook, occasionally making notes

Purposes are linked to physical setting
(i.e. we cannot identify the purpose for the activity without some knowledge of the setting)


DEFINITION OF READING
In defining reading, apart from looking at the purpose and the physical setting of reading, we have to take into consideration who is speaking and to whom and in what set of circumstances.

Consider what the question ‘Can you read this?’ would mean in each situation:
a) An adult is having a sight test at an optician’s and is asked to read a list of words.
— ‘Are you able to identify the words on the cards?’
b)A child is shown a flash card with the word ‘apple’ on it by the teacher.
—Can you decode the text? – Read aloud without meaning
c)An Islamic religious leader asks a congregation of boys to read aloud the Koran.
—Can you recite the verses correctly?
d)The owner of a new computer asks an experienced friend about instructions in the manual.

Can you interpret the manual?

Reading in general is defined as interpreting, meaning - reacting to a written text as piece of communication; in other words, we assume some communicative intent on the writer’s part which the reader has some purpose in attempting to understand.

WHAT BEING A READER MEANS

Experienced readers make judgments during activity about the degree of care and attention which the material warrants.

Effective reading means a flexible and appropriate response to the material in hand, and this is always guided by the reader’s purpose. (Readers have options e.g. option to give up reading)

Which of the following you carefully scrutinize, cursory read, discard?

—Agreement / contract
—Ingredients of a food product
—Road signs
—SMS
—Exam instructions
—Letter asking for donation
—Sport news
—Political news

News on celebrities

How we response to a reading material and the results of our reading activity will depend on:

—Time
—Attention
—Energy
—Purpose

READING PURPOSE

There are some reasons for reading :

1) Reading for survival
2) Reading for learning
3) Reading for pleasure
—

Survival
—Life and Death : e.g. A STOP sign
—Ladies or Gents
—Exit , Emergency Exit

Serves immediate needs and wishes

Learning

Extending our knowledge
Goal oriented

Does not necessarily take place in academic institutions only

Pleasure
—

Done for its own sake
We do not need to do it if we do not want to
Literature – meant to be for pleasure reading. Nevertheless, it is required reading for examination
Educational practices neglect the pleasure principal

Important product of reading for pleasure is FLUENCY (speed and ease of reading)
If readers do not read for pleasure in L1, very unlikely to do so in L2 or FL

A Vicious Cycle

If we do not have fluency in reading we will not be motivated to read. Not being motivated does NOT help to build fluency.

Source: Wallace, C. (2003)

Notes prepared by Leele & Hanim, adapted by Izaham

Weekly Schedule

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: Types of Reading (Wallace, Chap1)
Week 3: Models of Reading: Bottom-up & Top Down (Hudson, Chap 2)
Week 4: Models of Reading: Interactive-constructive & New Literacy Approaches (Hudson, Chap. 2)
Week 5: Reading skills (Hudson, Chap. 4)

Week 6 (Aug 11 – 15)Reading Strategies (Hudson, Chap 5); QUIZ 1 (Hudson, Chaps. 2 – 5)
Week 7 (Aug 18 – 22): Mid-Semester Break
Week 8 Second Language reading issues (Hudson, Chap. 3)
Week 9 (Sep 1 -3) Reading syllabus in Malaysian Secondary schools (Secondary English Curriculum); ASSIGNMENT 1 – Issues on second language reading classes

Week 10 Reading Materials (Chitravelu)
Week 11 Reading Activities (Chitravelu); QUIZ 2 (Chaps. 6 – 10)
Week 12 Reading assessments: Barret’s Taxanomy & samples of assessments
Week 13 (Sep 29 – Oct 3) - Special Break (Eid)
Week 14 (Oct 6 – 10)Microteaching; ASSIGNMENT 2 – Reading Test Evaluation

Week 15 (Oct 13 – 17) Microteaching
Week 16 (Oct 20 – 24) Microteaching
Week 17 Study Leave