1. The traditional bottom-up view
The traditional bottom-up approach to reading was influenced by behaviorist psychology of the 1950s, which claimed learning was based upon “habit formation, brought about by the repeated association of a stimulus with a response” and language learning was characterized as a “response system that humans acquire through automatic conditioning processes,” where “some patterns of language are reinforced (rewarded) and others are not,” and “only those patterns reinforced by the community of language users will persist” (Omaggio 1993, 45-46). Behaviorism became the basis of the audio-lingual method, which sought to form second language “habits” through drilling, repetition, and error correction.
Today, the main method associated with the bottom-up approach to reading is known as phonics, which requires the learner to match letters with sounds in a defined sequence. According to this view, reading is a linear process by which readers decode a text word by word, linking the words into phrases and then sentences (Gray and Rogers, cited in Kucer 1987). According to Samuels and Kamil (1988: 25), the emphasis on behaviorism treated reading as a word-recognition response to the stimuli of the printed words, where “little attempt was made to explain what went on within the recesses of the mind that allowed the human to make sense of the printed page”. In other words, textual comprehension involves adding the meanings of words to get the meanings of clauses (Anderson 1994). These lower level skills are connected to the visual stimulus, or print, and are consequently concerned with recognizing and recalling.
Like the audio-lingual teaching method, phonics emphasizes on repetition and on drills using the sounds that make up words. Information is received and processed beginning with the smallest sound units, and proceeded to letter blends, words, phrases, and sentences. Thus, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills that sequentially build toward comprehension ability. Having mastered these skills, readers are viewed as experts who comprehend what they read.
The bottom-up model describes information flow as a series of stages that transforms the input and passes it to the next stage without any feedback or possibility of later stages of the process influencing earlier stages (Stanovich, 1980). In other words, language is viewed as a code and the reader’s main task is to identify graphemes and convert them into phonemes. Consequently, readers are regarded as passive recipients of information in the text. Meaning resides in the text and the reader has to reproduce it.
The ESL and EFL textbooks influenced by this perspective include exercises that focus on literal comprehension and give little or no importance to the reader’s knowledge or experience with the subject matter, and the only interaction is with the basic building blocks of sounds and words. Most activities are based on recognition and recall of lexical and grammatical forms with an emphasis on the perceptual and decoding dimension.
This model of reading has almost always been under attack as being insufficient and defective for the main reason that it relies on the formal features of the language, mainly words and structure. Although it is possible to accept this rejection for the fact that there is over-reliance on structure in this view, it must be confessed that knowledge of linguistic features is also necessary for comprehension to take place. To counteract over-reliance on form in the traditional view of reading, the cognitive view was introduced.
1. The traditional bottom-up view
The traditional bottom-up approach to reading was influenced by behaviorist psychology of the 1950s, which claimed learning was based upon “habit formation, brought about by the repeated association of a stimulus with a response” and language learning was characterized as a “response system that humans acquire through automatic conditioning processes,” where “some patterns of language are reinforced (rewarded) and others are not,” and “only those patterns reinforced by the community of language users will persist” (Omaggio 1993, 45-46). Behaviorism became the basis of the audio-lingual method, which sought to form second language “habits” through drilling, repetition, and error correction.
Today, the main method associated with the bottom-up approach to reading is known as phonics, which requires the learner to match letters with sounds in a defined sequence. According to this view, reading is a linear process by which readers decode a text word by word, linking the words into phrases and then sentences (Gray and Rogers, cited in Kucer 1987). According to Samuels and Kamil (1988: 25), the emphasis on behaviorism treated reading as a word-recognition response to the stimuli of the printed words, where “little attempt was made to explain what went on within the recesses of the mind that allowed the human to make sense of the printed page”. In other words, textual comprehension involves adding the meanings of words to get the meanings of clauses (Anderson 1994). These lower level skills are connected to the visual stimulus, or print, and are consequently concerned with recognizing and recalling.
Like the audio-lingual teaching method, phonics emphasizes on repetition and on drills using the sounds that make up words. Information is received and processed beginning with the smallest sound units, and proceeded to letter blends, words, phrases, and sentences. Thus, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills that sequentially build toward comprehension ability. Having mastered these skills, readers are viewed as experts who comprehend what they read.
The bottom-up model describes information flow as a series of stages that transforms the input and passes it to the next stage without any feedback or possibility of later stages of the process influencing earlier stages (Stanovich, 1980). In other words, language is viewed as a code and the reader’s main task is to identify graphemes and convert them into phonemes. Consequently, readers are regarded as passive recipients of information in the text. Meaning resides in the text and the reader has to reproduce it.
The ESL and EFL textbooks influenced by this perspective include exercises that focus on literal comprehension and give little or no importance to the reader’s knowledge or experience with the subject matter, and the only interaction is with the basic building blocks of sounds and words. Most activities are based on recognition and recall of lexical and grammatical forms with an emphasis on the perceptual and decoding dimension.
This model of reading has almost always been under attack as being insufficient and defective for the main reason that it relies on the formal features of the language, mainly words and structure. Although it is possible to accept this rejection for the fact that there is over-reliance on structure in this view, it must be confessed that knowledge of linguistic features is also necessary for comprehension to take place. To counteract over-reliance on form in the traditional view of reading, the cognitive view was introduced.
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