unit 1 introduction toasdf reading

8/13/2019 Unit 1 Introduction toasdf Reading

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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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unit 1 introduction toasdf reading

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