Unit 1 Introduction to Reading

UNIT 1

INTRODUCTION TO READING

Dubin, Eskey and Grabe (1986:5) state that reading is a complex cognitive skill (no one fully understands it) which we cannot break down into a series of steps that a teacher can take into a classroom and teach. Perhaps that is why, to date, there is no definitive definition of reading. Among those given are as follows: Reading is a receptive language process. It is a psycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaning which the reader constructs. There is thus an essential interaction between language and thought in reading. The writer encodes thought as language and the reader decodes language to thought. (Carell, Devine and Eskey 1992:12) reading and learning to read are essentially meaningful activities; that they are not passive and mechanical but purposeful and rational, dependent on the prior knowledge and expectations of the reader (or learner). Reading is a matter of making sense of written language rather than of decoding print to sound (Smith 1982:166) A simple (and provisional) definition of reading is that it is a process whereby one looks at and understands what has been written. The key word here is understands merely reading aloud without understanding does not count as reading. (Williams 1984:2)

The Characteristics of Reading

(i) Reading is purposeful we do not always read everything in the reading text. Reading is a selective process where readers will attend
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Unit 1 Introduction to Reading

to information that is relevant to them. The readers purpose for reading will determine the type of information that readers will attend to when reading. (ii) Reading is an active process readers need to work on constructing the meaning of a text. There is no guarantee that readers will get the meaning of a text just because it is meaningful. A text may prove to be easier to comprehend to one person than to another. The active nature of reading involves producing and evaluating a continuous cycle of hypotheses until the most satisfactory interpretation of the message is achieved. (iii) Reading is concerned with meaning meaning or comprehension is the main goal of reading. Reading without comprehension is not reading. For example, reading aloud is not reading. It is speaking, as it involves orally identifying letters or words. It is referred to by some reading theorists as barking at print. (iv) Reading is a flexible and interactive process depending on the text and the purpose of reading, readers may read using different types of strategies, different rates and different levels of understanding. Readers may want to skim and scan through a magazine to decide if they want to purchase it, or read a text closely with higher level comprehension to prepare for a test the next day. A competent reader is also a flexible reader.

The Purpose of Reading

Wallace (1992) and Beard (1990) propose four possible purposes for reading:

Unit 1 Introduction to Reading

(i)

Reading for survival also known as functional reading; e.g. reading street signs, labels, and advertisements.

(ii)

Reading for learning reading to enrich knowledge; e.g. school related reading, reading the newspaper; etc.

(iii) (iv)

Occupational reading reading at the workplace. Reading for pleasure also known as aesthetic reading (Rosenblatt 1978) or recreational reading (Beard 1990); e.g. reading novels or magazines, or rereading a certain part of a text a number of times so that the experience/pleasure of reading can be enjoyed over and over again.

The Reader and the Text

What type of knowledge do readers have? Readers prior knowledge can be divided into two types: (a) (b) knowledge of the language readers knowledge of the phonology, morphology, syntax and pragmatics of a language. knowledge of the world readers knowledge such as of the subject matter and cultural attitude. For example, some parents may be eager to teach their children to read even at the young age of three or four, while others may wait until their child enter kindergarten. In both cases, the child will need to look at the print and guess its meaning. One of the first lessons a child needs to learn is that the crooked marks on the piece of paper, label or book shown are not just any marks the marks are meaningful. The print says something; it has meaning. For example, Apple means apple, and the picture of an apple is shown

Unit 1 Introduction to Reading

together with the word. The process of learning the print takes place using the background knowledge that the child already has. The younger the child, the more background knowledge needs to be centered on the home. It is important that materials for beginning readers be related to a world they know (which is referred to as knowledge of the world). This enables the readers to use what they know about the world to make guesses and to make sense of the new concepts they are about to learn.

The Role of the Eyes

There are a few eye movements that are involved when we read: 1. Tremor with or without our awareness, our eyeballs are in a constant state of movement. The movements are extremely fast and so slight that they are unnoticeable. Tremor helps to keep the eyeballs in place. 2. Saccade when reading in English, the eyes move from left to right. Once it reaches the end of the line, it will make a big jump to the right and move slightly over to the next line. This movement is called a saccade. 3. Fixation at the end of a saccade, the eyes will pause. This is called a fixation. It is during fixation that reading takes place. The fixation usually occurs on content words. 4. Regression this is when the eye movement goes in the opposite direction of a saccade. This happens when readers reread. The word regression may sound negative because it is poor readers who tend to reread the text over and over again. If readers, especially children, make a lot of regressions when reading a certain text, this may indicate that they are having difficulty reading the text. There are occasions, however, when regression can be positive. Fluent

Unit 1 Introduction to Reading

readers also regress when they realize that a confusion or misinterpretation has taken place. It is important to back track so that necessary corrections can be made for comprehension to be achieved.

The Role of Memory

There are three aspects of memory that are involved in reading: 1. Sensory store the information received from the eyes is placed briefly at a place called sensory store before the brain is able to make any perceptual decisions. According to Smith (1986), not much information can be held in the sensory store at a time. In a meaningful phrase, it may accommodate approximately 25 letters. Input into the sensory store is very fast and retrieval of information depends upon the speed of information to be processed. The more meaningful the information and the more prior knowledge readers have, the faster the retrieval and vice versa. 2. Short-term memory information will then go to short-term memory (STM). STM comprises information on what readers are attending to at a specific moment in time. This is also the time when the previous information that was stored is being processed. The capacity of information that can be placed in the STM is limited to 7 unrelated digits. Input to STM is very fast and although the persistence of information is very brief, it is possible to hold the same information for some time over a number of fixations. This is called rehearsal. Retaining information in STM or rehearsal will prohibit more information from being processed, as there is a limit to how much information the STM can handle at any one time. Recalling information form STM is immediate.

Unit 1 Introduction to Reading

3.

Long-term memory long-term memory (LTM) represents all our previous experiences. The capacity is infinite. What is placed in the LTM is not a series of items or letters. Information is kept in the form of meanings. That is why when we are asked to recall something from our LTM, we may not be able to recall it using the identical language or wards as it was written/said, but we may still get the meaning right. We do not keep meaning in specific languages; meaning refer to concepts. Input into the LTM is slow, at approximately 5 seconds per item. Although there is no time limit to how long information can be stored in the LTM, retrieval is not as immediate as for the STM. It depends on how information is stored and organized in the LTM Information in the LTM is organized into a system, which comprises networks of inter relationships where information is inter-related to each other. If the new input can be related to the existing network of knowledge, the new information can be either accommodated or assimilated. In both cases, it is easier for the information to be recalled in contrast to storing information as an isolated unit, with no relation to any of the existing networks of knowledge.