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