An Interactive Approach to Teaching L2 Reading

An Interactive Approach to Teaching L2 Reading From the Bottom-Up Adapted from Heidi Hyte’s Brigham Young University  Objectives • Provide examples of bottom-up, top-down, and intera

An Interactive Approach to Teaching L2 Reading

From the Bottom-Up

Adapted from Heidi Hyte’s Brigham Young University



Objectives

• Provide examples of bottom-up, top-down, and interactive strategies for teaching L2

reading

• Provide practical methodology and approaches to teaching bottom-up strategies in L2

reading

• Offer rationale for the role of students’ phonemic awareness

• Offer rationale for the use of explicit, systematic bottom-up strategies instruction

What is reading ?

The ability to successfully generate meaning from text.

What is fluent reading ?

“The ability to read at an appropriate rate with adequate comprehension”

What is strategic reading?

“The ability of the reader to use a wide variety of reading strategies to accomplish a purpose for reading”

What is the goal of reading?

Comprehension

Factors that influence reading comprehension.

• The reader

• The text

• Interaction between the reader and the text:

– Strategies

– Schema

– Purpose for reading

– Manner of reading

• Fluency

Models of Reading

• Bottom-up processing (decoding)

• Top-down processing

• Interactive approach

Bottom-up Processing

Reader builds meaning from the smallest units of meaning to achieve comprehension

Example

letters à letter clusters à words à phrases à sentences à longer text à meaning =

comprehension

Top-down Processing

Reader generates meaning by employing background knowledge, expectations,

assumptions, and questions, and reads to confirm these expectations

Example

Pre-reading activities (i.e activating schema, previewing, and predicting) + background

knowledge (cultural, linguistic, syntactic, and historical) = comprehension

Interactive Approach

Reader uses both bottom-up and top-down strategies simultaneously or alternately to comprehend the text

Example

Reader uses top-down strategies until he/she encounters an unfamiliar word, then employs

decoding skills to achieve comprehension.

Knowledge base + bottom-up strategies + top-down strategies = comprehension

Which model should be adopted?

The reader must be competent in both bottom-up and top-down processing

Interaction (“balance”) of bottom-up and top-down strategies:

Why bottom-up ?

“Despite the emergence of interactive models, I am concerned that much of the second language reading literature continues to exhibit a strongly top-down bias… This research has resulted in many useful insights, but the lack of attention to decoding problems has, I think, produced a somewhat distorted picture of the true range of problems second language readers face”

“In practical terms, my concern is thus to keep the language in the teaching of second language reading That may not sound very controversial, but I think that in promoting higher-level strategies like predicting from context or the use of schemata and other kinds of background knowledge some researchers have been sending a message to teachers that the teaching of reading

to second language readers is mostly just a mater of providing them with the right background knowledge for any texts they must read, and encouraging them to make full use of that knowledge

in decoding those texts Though that is certainly important, it is also, I think, potentially misleading as a total approach…We must not, I believe, lose sight of the fact that language is a major problem in second language reading, and that even educated guessing at meaning is not a substitute for accurate decoding”

What’s your opinion?

“The introduction of top-down processing has had such a profound impact on second language reading that there has been a tendency to view the introduction of a strong top-down

Top-down Bottom-up

processing perspective as a substitute for the bottom-up, decoding view of reading, rather than its

complement”

Self Reflection

1) What strategies do YOU use to teach reading?

2) When you learned how to read, did you learn both bottom-up and top-down skills?

3) When you teach reading, do you rely more on teaching top-down strategies? If so, why?

4) Are you an interactive reading teacher ?

SOURCES

Aebersold, J & Field, M L., (1997) From reader to reading teacher: Issues and strategies for second language classrooms New York: Cambridge University Press.

Anderson, N J (2003) Exploring Skills: Reading In D Nunan (Ed.), Practical English Language Teaching (pp 67-86) New York: McGraw-Hill.

Birch, B M, (2002) English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom Mahwah, New Jersey:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Carrell, P (1993) Introduction: Interactive approaches to second language reading In P

Carrell, J Devine, & D Eskey (Eds.), Interactive approaches to second language reading (pp

1-7) Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press

Eskey, D (1993) Holding in the bottom: An interactive approach to the language problems

of second language readers In P Carrell, J Devine, & D Eskey (Eds.), Interactive approaches to second language reading (pp 93-100) Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Nunes, T (1999) Learning to read: An integrated view from research and practice.

Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer