READING

Catherine Wallace
From
The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages,
CUP (2011)
Summary by Sajit M Mathews, IIT Kanpur

INTRODUCTION
Anthropologists and social psychologists study reading as practice.
Focus is on the use of language in everyday life
Reading is seen as a product, and focus is on the form and
meaning of written texts and its parts.
Reading is seen as a process also. Readers role is given
importance. Reading strategies are important too.

BACKGROUND: PRACTICE- FOCUS ON

USES OF READING
Reading is located in wider framework of literacy framework
specific to particular sociocultural environments.
Relevant when learners are from varying (reading) literacy
backgrounds (in first or other language)
Reading and writing are to be seen as part of language behaviour
beyond the learning of specific skills and strategies.
Street (1984): instruction of reading and writing is seen 1) as
learning of skills universally part of literacy instruction and 2) as
ideological where reading and writing has a value and prestige in
the historical, social and cultural settings

BACKGROUND: PRODUCT- FOCUS ON

TEXT
Priority is given to text with attention on form or form and
meaning.
Reader skills are linked to textual features
Phonemic awareness is grown using phonics. Look-and-say, wholeword methods, etc are used to promote building vocabulary from
the text- memory based.
Stubbs (1980) uses semantico-grammatical connections in the text
to deduce grammatical class and meaning from the text.
Word and sentence level text feature based methods are called
bottom-up methods.

BACKGROUND: PROCESS- FOCUS ON

READER
Here, reader is the point of departure-not the text.
Top-down approach: greater value is assigned to b/g knowledge
reader brings to reading.
This schema/mental model allows reader to relate new text-based
knowledge to existing world knowledge.
Earlier, reader was seen as passive. Reading was seen as a
passive skill. Today, reading is an interactive process. Reader
negotiates meaning. Writers intention may not prevail over
readers interpretation.

BACKGROUND: PROCESS- FOCUS ON

READER
Some say it is a pure cognitive exercise, other take affective
engagement of the reader.
Widdowson: readers take either submissive or assertive position as
readers
Wells: readers use their epistemic literacy to go beyond the limits
of the text and make critical and cognitive links with the readers
life experiences.

BACKGROUND: FIRST AND SECOND

LANGUAGE READING
Alderson: Is reading a reading problem or a language problem?
Both
L2 learners need a certain competence in L2 before taking their L1
reading abilities into L2.
General consensus is that reading abilities can be generalised
across languages (even when scripts are different), are not
language specific.
Reading is judged with:
Reading words
Reading and making sense of continuous texts
Reading is judged with the quality of ones engagement with the text.

RESEARCH: READING AS PRACTICERESEARCH ON LITERACY PRACTICES

Literacy as social practice: investigate literacy practices in their
own right, and pedagogic implications.
Heath: schools need to make use of diverse literacy experiences
children bring to school.
Gregory: studied how minority language childrens socialisation
into dominant group is affected by the dominant language training
in English medium schools of London.
Todays research looks at multi-literacy where literacy should go
beyond just reading and writing.

RESEARCH: READING AS PRODUCT TEXT-FOCUSED RESEARCH

In cognitive psychology, much research is about ability to decode
words, and skills needed for fluent, independent reading.
Phonemic awareness, ability to process words automatically and
rapidly, and reading achievement are closely linked in this
research.
A hierarchy of skills/stages is not yet found/established in reading.
The mismatch between phonic irregularity of English and
regularity of ones L1 (if it has) creates problems for the learner.
Research thus need to extend to textual features beyond word and
sentence level structure.

RESEARCH: READING AS PROCESS

READER FOCUSSED RESEARCH
Concerns strategies or resources readers use in reading and
learning to read.
Goodman and smith: reading is not linear matching up of symbols
and sound realisations, but a context based process mediated by
ones ability to make informed predictions online.
This view is challenged. Lab studies showed that readers read
every word on a page, and processing is not selective.
Goodman and smith: reader use 3 cues- graphophonic, syntactic,
and semantic. They studied the systematic replacement of certain
words by beginning level readers- miscues.

RESEARCH: READING AS PROCESS

READER FOCUSSED RESEARCH
Strategies of successful L2 readers [Hosenfeld, 1992]: skip
inessential words, guess from context, readin in broad phrases,
continue reading when new word is seen.
Metacognitive strategies are used by readers to monitor their own
reading process.

RESEARCH: READING AS A SOCIAL

PROCESS CRITICAL READING
Reading as a social, critical process: new interest.
Social and ideological factors that affect readers access to text.
L2 readers bring different cultural and ideological assumptions to
L2 reading, thus offering fruitful challenges to
mainstream/conventional readings.

PRACTICE: READING AS PRACTICEFOCUS ON USE

There isnt much methodology studying literacy as practice
What L2 learners from various settings read; inviting reader to
consider their needs and roles as readers in L1 and L2: to study
literacy as practice

PRACTICE: READING AS PRODUCTFOCUS ON TEXT

Early Reading
Bottom-up approach is preferred by Eskey and Paran on grounds
that top-down approach leads to neglect of language data that the
reader is necessarily drawing on.
Eskay advises activities that promote automaticity- discrimination
of graphophonically similar words (see, sea, sew, saw)
Another approach is syntactic awareness of word and sentence
structure (learners generate words from given list or on their own).
They will see the systematic nature of English word order and
morphology. This enables them to develop metalanguage to talk
around texts.

PRACTICE: READING AS PRODUCTFOCUS ON TEXT

Intermediate to Advanced Reading
Practical work with more complex sentence structure, whole text
structure, cross-text features, etc.
Understanding co-references, genre-specific texts, stylistic and
structural features of different text types.

PRACTICE: READING AS PROCESS

Early Reading
Miscue analysis can be done to understand quantity and quality of
learner errors in the processing of a text
Especially useful for L2 learners:
because of the systematic syntactic and phonological departures from
standard English, they may miscue from their current use of English,
rather than their misunderstanding.

Language experience approaches: learners write something with

the help of teacher, and use it as predictable material for reading
back.
Graded materials with consistent tenses, predicable word order
and familiar content gives reader an opportunity to increase
fluency in processing L2 text (especially in out-of-class reading).

PRACTICE: READING AS PROCESS

Intermediate to Advanced Reading
Reading instruction that focusses on readers schematic knowledge
of the world and language, and on their ability to use productive
strategies while reading is essentially reader centred.
Reading comprehension is a more traditional method.
Process approaches attend to:
1. prime the reader with new knowledge or prompt him/her to recover
existing knowledge
2. make maximum use of linguistic and cognitive resources during text
processing.

This involves pre-reading, while-reading tasks.

PRACTICE: READING AS PROCESS

Intermediate to Advanced Reading
Such tasks are designed for flexible and reflective reading.
Flexibility: by promoting reading a range of texts in a variety of
ways
Reflectiveness: by posing questions or prompts to interrogate the
text while reading it
Current reader strategies include meta-strategies where readers
reflect and judge the effectiveness of their own reading.

PRACTICE: READING AS SOCIAL

CRITICAL PROCESS
Critical process reading encourages critical framing: readers are
encouraged to consider the underlying cultural contexts and
purposes of the text.
Critique the way in which text has been written, and what has
motivated the writers choice of lexis, syntax and overall style and
presentation.
Such materials are produced majorly for L1 readers.

FUTURE TRENDS AND DIRECTIONS

The text-focussed and reader-focussed approaches are reaching
reconciliation
Automatized processing fails without the active and selective engagement
readers make use of in real life.
Some readers understand words, but dont understand texts, integrate text
with their world knowledge. This needs inference across texts and
monitoring ones ongoing processing of the text.
Both L1 and L2 learners need specific help with effective processing of the
text, aided by the socio-cultural understanding of texts origins and literary
practices.
Process-oriented group has neglected analytical text-focussed study that
would have led to better understanding of English writing system.
Attention to form can be handled in the new critical reading methods.

CONCLUSION
Understanding of different backgrounds of learners form
background of pedagogy.
Formal aspects of written English helps process-favoured teaching
approach
This can be broadened to include critical reading aspects like
ideological and cognitive aspects of literacy.