CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LEARNING AND TEACHING
2.2 T HEORETICAL P ERSPECTIVES ON R EADING
2.2.2 Theories arguing that meaning comes after letter and word recognition
Nature of the reading process
From this perspective, reading is generally seen to consist of the exact, detailed, sequential, perception and identification of letters, words, spelling patterns and larger language units (Weaver, 1994, p. 9). Reading is understood as essentially a perceptual process in which readers translate written letters into sounds, which are thought to be interpreted by the brain
as oral language. Once words are pronounced, meaning is presumed to take care of itself.
This paradigm is usually associated with the view that reading is a maturational process, commonly known as ―reading readiness‖. This is discussed in detail in Section 2.4.1 of this chapter. The term ―bottom-up‖ is also used to refer to these models of reading, since they work from the smallest units of print (letters) and build up to words, sentences, paragraphs and whole text. Bottom-up models emphasise decoding, while top-down models emphasise meaning. Selected theories within this paradigm are now briefly described.
Possibly the best known proponent of this paradigm is the best-selling American polemicist, Rudolph Flesch (1955), who unleashed an attack on ―progressive education‖ and in particular on whole word methods of teaching reading, firing up the Cold War American public into thinking that the USA was falling behind Europe because it did not teach phonics in schools.
Flesch‘s position was ―[Teach the child] letter-by-letter and sound-by-sound until he knows it – when he knows it, he knows how to read. ― (Flesch, 1955, p. 121).
Also within this paradigm, research from a structural linguistic perspective explores the link between reading and speaking. Reading is thus seen as a language function. One line of thinking proposes that reading is about turning the visual stimulus of written language back into speech. The graphic shapes of print represent speech and the meaning is in the speech which is represented by the print (Bloomfield, 1942). An alternative structural linguistic view is that reading is about turning written representations of sounds into the spoken word (Fries, 1963). In either event, the printed word is not directly meaningful. In order to get the meaning of printed words, the reader must literally or figuratively hear the spoken word that print represents. The phrase ―barking at print‖, originally coined by Smith (1971/1994), is used by critics of this perspective to refer to the way that this view can have readers saying the words/sounds represented by the text, but not understanding the message at all.
Gough (1972) takes an information-processing approach to reading, describing a linear, additive process whereby letters are visually recognised by their features. This information is transferred to a sound system, where it is held in a working memory until all the letters in the word are processed. All words are held in this memory until they can be processed for meaning and the sentence can be understood.
LaBerge and Samuels‘ (1974) influential model of reading argues that reading is a two-step process beginning with word recognition and followed by comprehension. However, their model suggests that recognition of words occurs using not only visual cues, but also phonological, semantic and contextual information, and that there are various ways to move from print to meaning, involving visual, phonological and semantic memory, as well as an interaction of visual information and knowledge (note that this implies both "top-down" and
"bottom-up" processing, see Samuels, 1994, p. 1136). LaBerge and Samuels introduce two key concepts, ―attention‖ and ―automaticity‖, in an attempt to explain the difficulties that beginning readers experience in understanding what they read. They argue that beginning readers focus their attention on the decoding function, and later switch their attention to a comprehension function. Beginning readers cannot carry out both functions at once. For them, reading is a slow, laborious process. Fluent readers, according to the theory, have achieved ―automaticity‖ in word decoding, which enables the reader‘s attention to comprehension to be freed up by not having to expend conscious energy on recognising letters and words. Automaticity is achieved through repetition and practice. Research using Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the brain while reading (Shaywitz, 2003) appears to support this distinction between fluent and beginning reading, as is discussed in Section 2.4.2 below.
Following Purcell-Gates (1997), I discuss phonemic awareness (see for example Adams, 1990) in relation to the bottom-up paradigm, because although it is seen in current literature as one of the components of an interactive literacy programme (see Section 2.2.5 below), phonemic awareness theory proceeds from the argument that skilled readers recognise and process every letter visually and translate them into sound units for pronouncing and understanding. Phonemic awareness is a subset of the umbrella category of phonological awareness (sensitivity to any aspect of phonological structure in language). These terms are sometimes imprecisely used in the literature. Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in SPOKEN words (see Erhi &
Nunes, 2002; National Reading Panel, 2000; Wagner & Torgesen, 1987; Wren, 2001).
More than 40 longitudinal studies and 30 experimental studies of the relationship between reading ability and phonemic awareness have been conducted since 1970, but no single study conclusively establishes that explicit, isolated phonemic awareness training enhances reading or spelling acquisition (Castles & Coltheart, 2004). Castles and Coltheart distinguish between proximal and distal causes of reading ability. Phonological awareness is a distal cause
because it is part of oral language not part of the reading system. They also distinguish between phonemic awareness as a process and as a task arguing that the acquisition of reading skills changes the way a reader performs the reading task, but does not change the level of phonological awareness itself. Thirdly, they argue that the relationship between phonological and phonemic awareness and reading ability is affected by the complexity of the orthography of the language concerned. There does not appear to be published research relating this theory to the Zulu language, the first language of the students in this study, but the regular nature of sounds in isiZulu and the agglutinative nature of its orthography may well influence the ease with which learners can develop phonological and phonemic awareness.
Unlike meaning-oriented theories which are discussed in the next Section, ―word-bound‖
theories focus on word recognition and sounding-out and do not consider a whole range of other factors as important. Examples of these factors are grammar; the influence of context;
the role of background knowledge; readers‘ and writer‘s prior experiences; affective dimensions of reading; the role of text features such as the content, cohesion and organization; or some of the expected outcomes of literacy learning e.g. the functions that literacy encounters serve.
Implications for teaching reading
In general, this paradigm focuses on isolated skills to achieve accurate and automatic letter and word recognition. This is seen as crucial before comprehension can occur. Early knowledge about the names of letters of the alphabet is seen as the key to later reading success (Adams, 1990, p. 61, found that it was ―one of the best predictors of first-grade reading ability‖). Pedagogical practice for beginning readers therefore focuses on learning letter names, then sounds, then syllable blending to ensure that students master the code (Pearson, 2000, p. 2). This is essentially synthetic phonics instruction (synthetic meaning building up). Pronunciation, fluency and eloquence are the goals of instruction for more advanced learners. As automaticity is achieved, increasing focus is placed on comprehension. Typically, reading aloud to the teacher is required to demonstrate skill in reading accuracy.
The above goals are to be achieved through presenting, drilling, practicing and testing of discrete items such as letter-sound correspondence, phonemic awareness and elocution (in the South African context, teachers typically refer to this as ―pronunciation‖), in a sequenced skills-based curriculum. The practice of repeated reading is common. The teacher‘s role is seen as providing drill and practice, while the learner is seen as a receiver of knowledge and a doer of drills.
Various code-oriented teaching approaches can be identified. Firstly, ―Basal reading programmes‖ were common in the mid 20th century. These consisted of a series of readers purporting to take into account the interests and developmental capabilities of children by limiting sentence length and difficulty and controlling vocabulary by letter-sound correlation and frequency of use. One of the major impacts of Jeanne Chall‘s work, First Grade Studies (Chall, 1967), was on the nature of basal readers. Chall heavily criticised the dominant basal readers, as a result of which they began to have more interesting content and characters, to introduce more challenging vocabulary and to include more phonics. The two key messages of Chall‘s work were that ―just about any alternative‖ was better than using the basal readers common at that time and that early attention should be paid to letters and sounds (Pearson, 2000, pp. 8-9).
A second group of bottom-up approaches was influenced by linguistic issues. Bloomfield‘s approach was to focus on teaching regularly-spelled words and word groups (Bloomfield, 1942), whereas Fries stressed the habitual learning of common word patterns and contrasting spellings (e.g. can-cane; rat-rate; fat-fate) (Fries, 1963). In classrooms in South Africa today the teaching of ―word families‖ (words with common rimes) has its roots in these linguistic approaches.
A third (and not very successful) series of bottom-up instructional innovations saw the development of various new orthographies called Initial Teaching Alphabets in English.
Fourth, the ―Mastery Learning Movement‖ which emphasised breaking complex processes into their subcomponents and teaching each of these separately (Pearson, 2000, p. 10), led to the development of a range of single-component and criterion referenced skills tests. These were used to produce curriculum embedded ―skills management systems‖ which enabled the
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.