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.