CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING AND TEACHING
2.2 T HEORETICAL P ERSPECTIVES ON R EADING
2.2.3 Meaning-driven theories of reading
teacher to use basal readers and skills-based worksheets to assess the component skills of phonics, comprehension, vocabulary and study skills.
Fifth, the ―look-and-say‖ method (which relies on memorizing words on the basis of their overall shape and involving analytic phonics) is included in the bottom-up paradigm (Vacca et al. 2003, p.37-38). Although popular wisdom has it pitted against ―the phonics method‖
(treated somewhat without discrimination in the 20th Century, and generally referring to learning to pronounce the sounds ―made‖ by printed letters in a synthetic manner), both are essentially behaviourist and perceptual in nature, arguing for the teaching of isolated skills to automatically recognise words or letters before comprehension can occur.
Current debates about the teaching of phonics have progressed beyond whether phonics should be taught to how it should be taught. These issues are explored further in Section 2.4.6.
that, ―Normal use of language is not an exercise of any habit or skill‖ (Chomsky, 1987).
Contrary to the previously dominant behavioural view of language acquisition, Chomsky and others argue that language acquisition is innate and that children are ―wired‖ to acquire the language of the community into which they are born. From this perspective, language acquisition is rule governed, and children actively infer and test out these rules. In other words, reading is a constructive process. This approach helps to explain how, for example, readers are able to interpret the influence of stress on meaning in spoken language, or the meaning of homonyms in written language.
Kenneth Goodman and Frank Smith are the key psycholinguistic theorists concerned with reading. Goodman (1965/2003) has studied what he calls children‘s ―miscues‖ (as opposed to their errors) while reading orally, and uses these miscues to show how readers actively construct meaning. This work has had huge impact on the way the reader‘s efforts are valued – errors became seen as generative rather than negative. Goodman (1967/2003) uses the phrase ―psycholinguistic guessing game‖ to explain how readers construct the meaning of text using syntactic, semantic and graphophonic cues. In this view, reading is not about precise perception and identification of letters and words but about efficiently using cues to make appropriate guesses. It involves interaction between thought and language. Readers use graphophonic, syntactic and semantic cues to predict and infer, or guess, where a text is going. The reader selects graphic cues from the text, holds them in short-term memory, then makes tentative decisions about the word, and transfers this to medium term memory.
Readers check this against what they know (their schema). If it fits, the meaning is transferred to long term memory; if it does not match the process begins again, using new cues. Goodman claims that this model can be generalised over various populations: ―diverse readers respond very similarly to common texts and produce some identical miscues at key points‖ (1994, p. 1099).
Frank Smith‘s main contribution (1971/1994) has been to argue that one learns to read from reading, and the teacher‘s role is to help learners to read, not to teach them to read. Reading, according to Smith, is more than seeing. When we read we use four sources of information – orthographic, syntactic, semantic and visual – and the more skilled we are at reading, the less we use visual cues. Rather, skilled readers construct meaning by making informed predictions based on what they already know. Smith uses the phrase ―the Literacy Club‖ to explain how we come to do literacy in the same way as other literate people. Children in the Literacy
Club have opportunities to see what written language can do, they are encouraged and helped to do those things themselves and they are not at risk of exclusion if they make mistakes.
They ―learn to be like the other members of the club‖ (Smith, 1971/1994, pp. 217-218).
In the 1970s cognitive psychologists such as Rumelhart (1982) applied schema theory to an understanding of reading comprehension and learning. Schema theory is concerned with how our knowledge is structured and ordered in our memories. We understand new things/
experiences in terms of what we already know or have experienced. In reading, prior knowledge is central. The reader brings to the text his or her past memories, thoughts and experiences and present personality, and together these crystallise into a new experience. This theory focuses teacher‘s attention on what learners already know, rather than on what they are not yet able to do or do not yet know.
The cognitive psychology perspective raises the question of whether meaning resides in the text, the writer, the reader, or in interactions between any of these. The transactional view of the reading process, as set out by Rosenblatt (1994), posits that meaning does not reside ready-made in the text, and neither does it reside in the head of the reader. It comes into being through the transaction between the reader and the text, in which process both the reader and the text are transformed in some way (Rosenblatt, 1994, p. 1063). Rosenblatt famously coined the metaphorical idea of ―The Poem‖ to describe this transacted meaning.
In contrast to the maturational view of how literacy develops, the reading-as-meaning paradigm conceptualises literacy learning as a process which continues throughout life, beginning in early childhood. Experiences with and learning about literacy in the home, community or early childhood education contexts were recognised as important – an approach called Emergent Literacy. This is discussed further in Section 2.4.2.
Sociolinguists such as Halliday (1975), Heath (1983), and Wells (1986) focus on understanding reading and language in a social and cultural context. They use the concept of
―context‖, which had previously been seen in terms of the words surrounding a word in a text, to refer to the home, community and instructional context of a learner. The social functions of language and reading are highlighted, as are the influence of class, race and gender. The role of preschool, community and family-based experiences is highlighted.
Sociolinguists also argue that reading itself is a social process and has particular functions in
particular contexts. One of the few South Americans to make a significant impact on the reading field, Paulo Freire, emphasises that reading involves ―reading the world‖ (Freire &
Macedo, 1987, p. 29ff) as well as reading the word, and proposes a methodology of learning to read which is at once a theory of social transformation in the sense of challenging power relationships and the structure of society, and a conception of education as a tool to bring about such change.
Implications for teaching reading
In essence the ―top-down‖ approaches to reading pedagogy advocate that, since reading is essentially a meaning-making activity, teaching should proceed from whole to part and that the child should first be introduced to whole sentences and paragraphs (in the context of natural and meaningful text), and learn from this about the smaller units of language such as words, letters and sounds. From this perspective it is not necessary for the reader to process every letter or every word. This is also called an ―inside-out‖ process because it begins in the mind of the reader who hypothesises, on the basis of past experience and knowledge of language, about the meaning of the text, and later confirms/denies these hypotheses.
Practically, the linguistic, psycholinguistic and cognitive psychology views of reading place comprehension at centre stage of reading instruction. Learners are taught that reading should always make sense, and accurate reading aloud is de-emphasised. Learners are required to talk about books in book clubs or literature circles rather than to answer traditional factual recall type comprehension questions. Explicit links are made between reading and writing.
Writing for genuine purposes is emphasised and children are encouraged to ―invent‖
spellings. Reading instruction is not confined simply to the very early years at school and is integrated increasingly in other curriculum areas.
The 1970s saw the development and increasing dominance of ―whole language‖ (not to be confused with ―whole word‖ or ―look-and-say‖ methodology), which, as Vacca et al. (2003, p.37-38) point out, is a bottom-up approach, and the intensification of conflicts between proponents of this method of teaching and the decoding method. Whole language methodology is child-centred, constructivist, authentic and integrated. The teacher is seen as a facilitator of learning and a skilled adaptor of materials and methods to support individual
learners at a specific time. The learner is seen as an active constructor of meaning who already has knowledge which can be built on.
From this perspective, value is placed on texts using natural language patterns which enable learners to predict words and meanings. Genuine literature, language experience texts, patterned and highly predictable texts are commonly used. Altered or simplified texts are typically avoided for teaching and learning purposes, as these would prevent learners from making use of innate language knowledge and strategies. Classroom libraries of trade books (books which are not designed specifically for instructional purposes) and Big Books (large format books which can be seen and read together by a whole class) are commonly used, as are the materials of real life such as newspapers, menus, instructions and other genres. In response to schema theory, the reader‘s knowledge and cultural background are taken into account in choosing reading materials.