Friday, April 13, 2012

Processing Letters

Birch, B. (2011). (2nd Ed.) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom. New York, NY: Routledge, ch. 5

Salient Points:

Carrel (1993) interpreted Goodman's 1973 idea "sampling the text" to think of reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game. The reader does not need to use textual clues. He or she can use graphophonic, syntactic, and semantic glues to guess or predict meaning form the text. They predict meaning by using language cues in the text.

This is important, because it means the teachers in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s focused on top-down reading strategies. They felt that teaching background information and reading comprehension skills were more important than teaching bottom-up reading strategies.

However, sampling a text is not really guessing and it also does not pertain to the reading process of beginner, intermediate, or ELL readers. If teachers focus too much on the top-down reading strategies, they will forget to teach the foundations (bottom-up strategies) of reading.

One of the basic components of reading a text is focusing on graphs and graphemes, which are mental symbols of writing. There are two kinds of graphemes:

  • simple graphemes:
  1. single graphemes: one grapheme to represent the phoneme, i.e. /t/, /d/, /f/, /s/, etc.
  2. double graphemes: digraphs, or two graphemes together to represent one phoneme, i.e. "ch", "sh", "ph," "th", et
  • compound graphemes: simple graphemes double, i.e. "tt", "gg", "nn", "ck", etc.
  • complex graphemes: one grapheme to represent a sequence of two phonemes, i.e. "x".
Readers need to develop graphemic knowledge and processing strategies such as identifying and writing the alphabet (alphabetic principle), and eye movements (saccades) and eye fixation. They also need to practice selective fixating and projecting their focus more on consonants than vowels, and content words. Finally, they need to learn high frequency words.

Implications:
  • We as teachers need to teach both top-down and bottom-up reading strategies, or the foundations of reading.
  • Speaking of the foundations, we can teach the different types of graphemes that go with the alphabet and the alphabetic principle.
  • Readers must not only learn about graphemes, but also about the correct eye movements and fixations.
  • In the beginning, children look at pictures. They do not have a pattern of eye movement or eye fixation. When they start to read, we as teachers have to teach them how to move their eyes across a page and follow text. We also have to teach our students selective fixation on the important parts of words and the important parts of the text, such as content words.
  • It also is a imperative that students learn high frequency words and sight words.

No comments:

Post a Comment