CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
2.5 MODELS OF READING
2.5.4 The text model of reading
Grabe (2009, p.40) states that for comprehension to take place, the reader must be conversant with the text structure and the situation of the text. This is in view that reading is discipline-specific where the text of a specific discipline differs from that of other disciplines. The above statement means that students should be conversant with text structures of their different modules for them to be able to comprehend various texts in their different disciplines. The focus below is on what a text is and how important it is towards academic reading.
2.5.4.1 A text
A text is defined by Halliday and Hasan (1989, p.10) as:
A spoken or written language that expresses meaning. It must be something which is a semantic unit. A text should also be seen as a product and a process.
It is a product in the sense that it is an output, something that can be recorded and studied, having a process that can be recorded in systematic terms.
A text is also described as a process. It is a process in the sense that:
it is a continuous process of semantic choice, a movement through the networks of meaning potential, with each set of choices constituting the environment for a further set (Halliday & Hasan, 1989).
The above quotation means that students should be able to express their thinking through writing systematic, meaningful sentences or paragraphs. This is based on the nature of the relationship between reading and writing. If a text is defined as a product and a process, then students should have skills or strategies to comprehend various texts especially in their field which is in this case is science reading.
FIGURE 2.7 Schematic View of Reading Processes. Adapted from Birch (2007, p.
3, Figure 1.1) and Carrel et al. (1990, p. 8).
The following discussion is focused on what academic texts are and how crucial they are towards academic reading.
2.5.4.2 Academic texts
Academic texts are generally known to be more complex than general text in high schools and unfamiliarity with academic texts may create some challenges to students.
Pretorius (2006, p.433) explains the nature of academic texts as conceptually dense and often present conflicting viewpoints. Rose et al., (2003) comment on the complexity of the academic texts by stating that “language patterns are specialized and involve abstract concepts and discipline-specific technical terms”.
Text comprehension involves the combination of information from the currently formed proposition with the active meaning elements that have been integrated into a network of ideas already activated from textual input (Grabe, 2009, p.40). In addition to the view
above, Ozuru, Dempsey and McNamara (2008, p.1) relate academic text to topic relevant to student’s prior knowledge. They argue that topic-prior knowledge refers to
“the readers’ pre-existing knowledge related to the text content”. This statement reaffirms the importance of the knowledge of the structure of the text in science.
Students need to be familiar with the structure of these texts for them to meaningfully read through them. They therefore need some inferencing skills to do so. A text model of reading comprehension also requires the use of “bridging” inferences to connect new propositions to the network of already active propositional ideas and relationships (Grabe, 2009, p.40).The newly-formed textual propositions are maintained by existing reference to some element or idea in the existing network. It overlaps with already active information providing a direct connection into the network and strengthening the activity of that specific element in the network. The new element may represent extensions of existing information to become linked as part of a supporting network (Grabe, 2009, p.40).
The application of the above views on text implies that a scientific text has its own language different from an ordinary text in English. Hutchinson and Waters, in Parkinson (2000, p.369) view the scientific language as being different from ordinary everyday language in terms of:
Vocabulary,
The higher frequency of some grammatical forms and
Topics
The scientific discourse is therefore a unique text. For a text to be classified as scientific, it should have a cluster of features throughout the text.
Hart (2014, p. 91) designed a reading model trying to address the issue of the knowledge of the text. In his design, he stated that reading and writing are hugely complex task that involve recognizing and using patterns of language at three levels, which are:
At the level of text, readers must recognize what a text is about and how it is organized as sequence of events in stories, or as chunks of information in factual texts.
At the level of the sentence, readers must recognise how words are arranged in phrases, and what phrases means, such as who or what the sentence is about, what they are doing, where, when, why and how.
At the level of the word, readers must recognize what each word means, and how letters are arranged into patterns that spell the word.
2.5.4.3 The textual comprehension
Grabe (2009, p.40) states that for comprehension to take place, the reader must be conversant with the text structure and the situation of the text. The above means that students should be conversant with text structures of their different modules for them to be able to comprehend various texts. As it is said that reading is discipline specific, texts from different disciplines differ. Halliday and Hasan (1976) refer to a texts as:
having texture, and this is what distinguishes it from something that is not text…If a passage of English containing more than one sentence is perceived as a text, there will be certain linguistic features present in that passage which can be identified as contributing to its total unity and giving it texture.
The gist of what Halliday and Hassan are saying is that a text has its own features which separates it from other types of texts. Therefore, if students are conversant with the genre of science texts, it makes it easier for them to comprehend these texts. Grabe (2009, p.40) adds to the information of text comprehension by stating that
“comprehension requires the use of “bridging” inferences to connect new propositions to the network of already active propositional ideas and relationships.” These inferences are based on students’ background knowledge on the content in texts. This fact makes the textual model of reading linked to the schema theory (Carrel et al., 1988) or the activation of the background knowledge in reading. The combination of the new information with the information which already exists is an aspect of the schema theory.
Grabe (2009) asserts that students ‘prior knowledge is a valuable source for their
reading. This aspect is also linked to reading as an interactive process. There is an interaction between the new information “meaning elements” in the comprehension of texts. The above supposition reiterates the fact that students need to be conversant with the text structure to activate their schema relating to the content of the text for them to be able to construct meaning.
The model relies on the usage of the high order skill and downplay other textual cues which may be important in the reading process. The model then becomes more suitable for advanced readers than for beginners.The construction of meaning also depends on the situation of their reading. The following section will focus on the situational model of reading.