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Unit 1 Introduction to Reading
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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 apsycholinguistic process in that it starts with a linguistic surface
representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaningwhich the reader constructs. There is thus an essentialinteraction between language and thought in reading. Thewriter encodes thought as language and the reader decodeslanguage to thought.
(Carell, Devine and Eskey 1992:12)
reading and learning to read are essentially m eaningfulactivities; that they are not passive and mechanical butpurposeful and rational, dependent on the prior knowledgeand expectations of the reader (or learner). Reading is amatter of making sense of written language rather than ofdecoding print to sound
(Smith 1982:166)
A simple (and provisional) definition of reading is that it is aprocess whereby one looks at and understands what hasbeen written. The key word here is understands merelyreading aloud without understanding does not count asreading.
(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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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:
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(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) Occupational reading reading at the workplace.
(iv) 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) knowledge of the language readers knowledge of the phonology,morphology, syntax and pragmatics of a language.
(b) 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 itsmeaning. One of the first lessons a child needs to learn is that the crooked
marks on the piece of pa per, 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
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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 asaccade.
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 whotend 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
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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.
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