The reading process

During my intensive training, I became interested in the reading skill and I read some books related to it such as: From Reader to Reading Teacher: Issues and strategies for second language classrooms by Aebersold ; Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language by Nuttall and The transactional theory of reading and writing by Rosenblatt. Here´s a brief outline of what I´ve learnt in those books.

The study of the reading skill in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) has undergone significant changes over the last century. In fact, the conceptual history of the reading skill can be traced back from its early role in the Grammar-Translation method to its current position in the latest approaches to TEFL. While in the past, the reading process was taken as a passive one, nowadays reading is considered to be inherently interactive.

Researchers in an attempt to describe the interaction between the reader and the text,have created models that account for what happens when people read. Three main models have been proposed: the bottom-up, the top-down and the interactive approach.

The bottom-up theory argues that the reader constructs the text from the smallest units i.e. from letters to words, from words to phrases. The top-down theory states that readers fit the text into the knowledge they already possess and that they check back when new or unexpected information appears. Finally, the interactive theory claims that both top-down and bottom-up processes occur, depending on the type of text as well as on the reader’s background knowledge, motivation and strategy used.

Not only did researchers create different models on reading comprehension, but they also attempted to identify the mental activities that readers use in order to construct meaning from a text. These activities are generally referred to as reading strategies.

Making sense of a text is facilitated not only by activating relevant schemata, but also by employing cognitive reading strategies which are determined by the type of text, the purpose for reading and the information that we need to obtain from the text.

From the teacher’s and learner’s point of view, the reading strategies proposed by
Harmer (1983) seem to be the most useful since he classifies them into two categories according to the students’ familiarity with a text.

Harmer classifies L2 comprehension skills into two types: Type 1 skills and Type 2 skills. Harmer stated that: “Type 1 skills are those operations that students perform when they tackle a text for the first time”. They include: predictive skills, skimming and scanning.

Type 2 skills imply detailed comprehension of a text and are used after students have performed Type 1 skills. They include extracting detailed information, recognizing functions and discourse patterns and deducing meaning from context.