Reading

Why is reading important?

Reading is a fluent process of readers combining information from a text and their background knowledge to build meaning. According to Anderson (2003) the goal of reading is comprehension. Reading is one important way to improve your general language skills in English. How does reading help you? 1. Reading helps you learn to think in English. 2. Reading can enlarge your English vocabulary. 3. Reading can help you improve your writing 4. Reading may be a good way to practice your English if you live in a non-Englishspeaking country. 5. Reading can help you prepare for study in an English-speaking country 6. Reading is a good way to find out about new ideas, facts, and experiences.

In reading comprehension, a reader needs to be able:

to select the main ideas of a passage, to select relevant details to support the main idea to follow a sequence of events, an argument or a line reasoning, to recognize the relationships of ideas in a passage, to draw conclusions from the facts or experiences presented to him. In short, he should be able to read actively and thoughtfully.

What students need to be able to do to read effectively?

1. They need to develop new schemata about what reading is and how it is done effectively. 2. They need to break the habit of reading every word. 3. They need to learn to tap their background knowledge in order to better employ top-down processing. 4. They need to acquire some of the skills which fluent readers of English employ unconsciously in order to strengthen their bottom-up processing abilities. 5. They need to acquire those reading skills which will enhance the interaction of top-down and bottom-up processing modes. 6. They need to learn to be able to read faster. 7. They need to learn to read in English for pleasure.

What are Schemata?

Schemata are the readers background knowledge. A readers background knowledge can influence reading comprehension (Carrell, 1983; Carrell and Connor, 1991). Background knowledge includes all of the experiences that a reader brings to a text: life experiences, educational experiences, knowledge of how texts

can be organized rhetorically, knowledge of how ones first language works, knowledge of how the second language works, and cultural background and knowledge. Reading comprehension can be significantly enhanced if background knowledge can be activated by setting goals, asking questions, making predictions, teaching text structures, and so on. If students are reading on an unfamiliar topic, teacher may need to begin the reading process by building up background knowledge.

What is top-down processing?

Top-down models begin with the ideas that comprehension resides in the reader. The reader uses background knowledge, makes predictions, and searches the text to confirm or reject the predictions that are made. Within top-down approach to reading, the teacher should focus on meaning generating activities rather than on mastery of word recognition. To support this extensive reading in which reader reads many books or longer segments of text without focus on classroom exercises plays a key role.

What is bottom-up processing?

Bottom-up models consist of lower-level reading processes. In this process, students start with the fundamental basics of letter and sound recognition (phonic), and then followed by morpheme and word recognition, which later build up to the identification of grammatical structures, sentences, and longer texts. Letters, letter clusters, words, phrases, sentences, longer texts, and finally meaning is the order in achieving comprehension. Within a bottom-up approach to reading, the most typical classroom focus is on intensive reading. It involves a short reading passage followed by activities to develop comprehension. Interactive models combines elements of both bottom-up and top-down models by assuming that a pattern is synthesized based on information provided simultaneously from several knowledge sources (Stanovich, 1980). An interactive approach to reading includes aspects of both intensive and extensive reading.