A Review on Reading Theories and Its Implication to the Teaching of Reading Essay Example for Free

A Review on discipline Theories and Its Implication to the Teaching of reading material Essay countermand Opini dan masukan untuk peningkatan pengajaran membaca kepada pembelajar bahasa Inggris sebagai bahasa asing, baik yang didasarkan pada hasil penelitian maupun pengalaman, tersedia sangat banyak dalam kepustakaan pengajaran bahasa. Tulisan ini merupakan sebuah rangkuman atas berbagai teori, temuan dan p dismissapat tentang pengajaran membaca. Pemahaman terhadap topik-topik terse still, terutama tentang teori top-down, bottom-up, dan meta-cognitive, diharapkan dapat dijadikan landasan untuk meningkatkan teknik pengajaran membaca.Dengan demikian, kemahiran membaca para pembelajar bahasa Inggris sebagai bahasa asing dapat ditingkatkan secara signifikan. Kata Kunci top-down, bottom-up, schemeta, meta-cognitive, pre-recital, during- rendering, after- practice session Introduction Among the four language skills, reading is possibly the most extensively and intensively studied by ex perts in the field of language teaching method. The results of the researches conducted for many a(prenominal) decades on nature of readinghow people learn to process school textual entropyhave contri simplyed contrasting theories roughly what works best in the teaching of reading.As a result, language educators jackpot choose among a wide variety of teaching methods and techniques for students learning to read in their second language (SL) or foreign language (FL). For students who ar learning a SL/FL reading is the most life-and-death skill to master due to several reasons. First, students can usually run at a higher aim in reading than in any other skills. They can quite accurately fancy written materials that they could non discuss orally or in writing with equivalent accuracy or thoroughness.Such condition will undoubtedly enhance their motivation to learn. Second, reading necessitates very minimum requirements. Different from speaking which requires opportuniti es to interact with sparring partner, or from writing which needs a lot of guidance and time to practice, reading necessitates whole a text and motivation. Third, reading is a service skill. After learning how to read effectively, students will be able to learn effectively by reading.Realizing how crucial reading is for our students, we can see the great importance of developing their reading king. To achieve it, we should improve our reading lessons by implementing the best method and techniques provided by theories. This h senior aims to describe principal theories of reading and examine nigh tips and guidelines for implementing a theory of reading which will help us develop our learners abilities. Theories of Reading So far, at that place be cardinal primary(prenominal) theories which beg off the nature of learning to read.First, the traditional theory, or bottom up processing, which focused on the printed form of a text. (2) the cognitive view, or top-down processing en hanced the component part of background knowledge in addition to what appe atomic number 18d on the printed page. Third, the metacognitive view, which is base on the control and manipulation that a commentator can have on the act of comprehending a text, and thus, emphasizes the involvement of the refs mentation ab bulge out what he is doing mend reading. 1. The traditional bottom-up view.The traditional bottom-up approach to reading was influenced by behaviorist psychology of the 1950s, which claimed learning was based upon habit formation, brought about by the repeated association of a stimulus with a response and language learning was characterized as a response system that humans acquire through automatic conditioning processes, where virtually patterns of language are reinforced (rewarded) and others are non, and only those patterns reinforced by the community of language users will persist (Omaggio 1993, 45-46).Behaviorism became the basis of the audio-lingual method, which sought-after(a) to form second language habits through drilling, repetition, and error correction. Today, the main method associated with the bottom-up approach to reading is known as phonics, which requires the learner to match earn with sounds in a defined sequence. According to this view, reading is a linear process by which readers decode a text word by word, linking the speech into phrases and then sentences (Gray and Rogers, cited in Kucer 1987).According to Samuels and Kamil (1988 25),the emphasis on behaviorism treated reading as a word-recognition response to the stimuli of the printed words, where little attempt was made to explain what went on inside the recesses of the mind that allowed the human to bring up feel of the printed page. In other words, textual comprehension involves adding the meanings of words to get the meanings of clauses (Anderson 1994). These lower level skills are connected to the visual stimulus, or print, and are consequently concerned wi th recognizing and recalling. Like the audio-lingual teaching method, phonics emphasizes on repetition and on drills using the sounds that drop up words.Information is received and processed jump with the smallest sound units, and proceeded to letter blends, words, phrases, and sentences. Thus, novice readers acquire a set of hierarchically ordered sub-skills that sequentially design toward comprehension ability. Having mastered these skills, readers are viewed as experts who comprehend what they read. The bottom-up model describes information flow as a series of acts that transforms the input and passes it to the next deliver without any feedback or possibility of later dos of the process influencing earlier stages (Stanovich, 1980).In other words, language is viewed as a code and the readers main task is to identify graphemes and convert them into phonemes. Consequently, readers are regarded as passive recipients of information in the text. Meaning resides in the text and th e reader has to reproduce it. The ESL and EFL textbooks influenced by this linear perspective include exercises that focus on literal comprehension and give little or no importance to the readers knowledge or inhabit with the reconcile depend, and the only interaction is with the basic frame of referenceing blocks of sounds and words.Most activities are based on recognition and recall of lexical and grammatical forms with an emphasis on the perceptual and decoding dimension. This model of reading has almost always been under attack as being insufficient and defective for the main reason that it relies on the formal features of the language, mainly words and structure. Although it is possible to accept this rejection for the fact that there is over-reliance on structure in this view, it must be confessed that knowledge of linguistic features is in like manner undeniable for comprehension to buzz off place.To counteract over-reliance on form in the traditional view of reading, the cognitive view was introduced. 2. The Cognitive View (top-down processing) In the mid-sixties a paradigm shift occurred in the cognitive sciences. Behaviorism became somewhat discredited as the saucily cognitive theory represented the minds innate capacity for learning, which gave new explanatory power to how humans acquired their first language this also had a tremendous impact on the field of ESL/EFL as psycholinguists explained how such internal representations of the foreign language develop within the learners mind (Omaggio, 1993 57).Ausubel (cited in Omaggio, 1993 58), made an measurable distinction between meaty learning and rote learning. An example of rote learning is simply memorizing lists of isolated words or rules in a new language, where the information becomes temporary and subject to loss. Meaningful learning, on the other hand, occurs when new information is presented in a relevant context and is related to what the learner already knows, so that it can be e asily integrated into ones existing cognitive structure.A learning that is not meaningful will not become permanent. This emphasis on meaning sluicetually informed the top-down approach to L2 learning, and in the 1960s and 1970s there was an explosion of teaching methods and activities that strongly considered the friendship and knowledge of the learner. These new cognitive and top-down processing approaches revolutionized the conception of the way students learn to read (Smith, 1994).In this view, reading is not just extracting meaning from a text but a process of connecting information in the text with the knowledge the reader brings to the act of reading. In this sense, reading is a dialogue between the reader and the text which involves an active cognitive process in which the readers background knowledge plays a hear role in the creation of meaning (Tierney and Pearson, 1994). Reading is not a passive mechanical bodily process but conceptionful and rational, dependent on t he prior knowledge and expectations of the reader.It is not merely a matter of decoding print to sound but also a matter of making sense of written language (Smith, 1994 2). In short, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game, a process in which readers sample the text, stick hypotheses, confirm or reject them, make new hypotheses, and so forth. Schema Theory other theory closely related to top-down processing called outline theory also had a major impact on reading instruction.It describes in pointedness howthe background knowledge of the learner interacts with the reading task and illustrates how a students knowledge and previous experience with the world is crucial to deciphering a text. The ability to use this schemata, or background knowledge, plays a fundamental role in ones trial to comprehend a text. Schema theory is based on the notion that past experiences belong to the creation of mental frameworks that help a reader make sense of new experiences.Smith (1994 14) c alls schemes the extensive representations of much general patterns or regularities that occur in our experience. For instance ones generic scheme of an airplane will allow him to make sense of airplane he has not previously flied with. This means that past experiences will be related to new experiences, which whitethorn include the knowledge of objects, situations, and events as tumefy as knowledge of procedures for retrieving, organizing and interpreting information (Kucer, 1987 31).Anderson (1994 469) presents research showing that recall of information in a text is affected by the readers schemata and explains that a reader comprehends a message when he is able to bring to mind a schema that gives account of the objects and events described in the message. experience is the process of actuate or constructing a schema that provides a coherent explanation of objects and events mentioned in a discourse (Anderson, 1994 473).For Anderson and Pearson (1988 38), comprehension is th e interaction between old and new information. They emphasize To say that one has comprehended a text is to say that she has imbed a mental home for the information in the text, or else that she has modified an existing mental home in order to let in that new information. Therefore, a learners schemata will restructure itself to accommodate new information as that information is added to the system (Omaggio, 1993). Content and formal schemata.Schema theorists divergentiate formal schemata (knowledge about the structure of a text) from surfeit schemata (knowledge about the subject matter of a text), and a readers prior knowledge of some(prenominal) schemata enables him to predict events and meaning as well as to infer meaning from a wider context. Formal schemata refers to the way that texts differ from one another for example, a reading text could be a fictional work, a letter to the editor, or a scientific essay, and each genre will have a different structural organization.Kn owledge of these genre structures can aid reading comprehension, as it gives readers a basis for predicting what a text will be like (Smith 1994). For example, if a reader knows that the typical format of a research term consists of sections subtitled Introduction, Theoretical Basis, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion, that knowledge will facilitate their interaction with the article and boost comprehension. On the other hand, if he is not acquainted(predicate) with this formal schema, teaching it to him could provide to improved reading ability with lasting and beneficial effects.Content schemata refers to the message of the text. Ones familiarity with the content will make much productive and efficient. As Anderson (1994 469) explains, a reader comprehends a message when he is able to bring to mind a schema that gives account of the objects and events described in the message. activate and building schemata Since the reader plays a fundamental role in the constructi on of meaning, his age, gender, experience, and culture are important considerations for teachers who want to select readings that will motivate their students.Anderson (1994) notes that when readers cannot localize a schema that fits a text, they whitethorn find it incomprehensible. In some cases readers may not have a schema that is significant to the text, or they may need help to activate the pertinent schema to be able to comprehend the text. In such cases it may not be possible for the reader to understand the text, and the teacher must be ready to engage in building new background knowledge as well as activating existing background knowledge (Carrell, 1988 248).In parallel with this, Bransford (1994) points out that difficulties in comprehension may be caused by the lack of background knowledge presumed by the text, and he sees the responsibility of instructors as being twofold to activate preexisting schemata and to help students to integrate isolated parcels of knowledge i nto a schema or to build a new one. If the texts to be read ask a cultural context that is different from the students, the issues of formal and content schemata become even more important.McDonough (1995), explains that, to a higher extent, this is the reason why ESL and EFL students find it difficult to read in a second language with texts that contain cultural assumptions of the target culture. They may lack the culture-specific background knowledge necessary to process the text in a top-down manner. His reports on several studies demonstrate how people outside a given culture may misunderstand events with unfamiliar cultural connotations. (Students from different cultural backgrounds taking standardized tests which assume common schemata for will also compositors case the same problem.)Applying schema theory to L2 reading Based on the aforementioned ideas, it is obvious that in order to teach reading effectively, the teachers role to activate and build schemata is paramount. T o achieve it, he should in advance select texts that are relevant to the students needs, preferences, individual differences, and cultures in order to provide meaningful texts so the students understand the message, which entails activating existing schemata and helping build new schemata.Then, after selecting the text, he needs to do the following three stages of activities to activate and build the students schemata. (1) Pre-reading activities, in which the teacher have students think, write, and discuss everything they know about the topic, employing techniques such as foretelling, semantic office, and reconciled reading. The objective is to make sure that students have the relevant schema for understanding the text. (2) During-reading activities, in which the teacher guide and monitor the interaction between the reader and the text.One important skill teachers can impart at this stage is note-taking, which allows students to compile new vocabulary and important information and details, and to summarize information and record their reactions and opinions. (3)Post-reading activities which facilitate the chance to prise students adequacy of interpretation, while bearing in mind that accuracy is relative and that readership must be respected as long as the writers intentions are addressed (Tierney and Pearson, 1994). Post-reading activities focus on a wide range of questions that allow for different interpretations.While schema activation and building can occur in all three stages, the pre-reading stage deserves special attention since it is here, during the students initial contact with the text, where their schemata will be activated. Pre-reading activities Pre-reading activities is aimed to activate existing schemata, build new schemata, and provide information to the teacher about what the students know. In their report on the positive effect various pre-reading activities had on reading comprehension, Chen and Graves (1995, 664), define them as devices for bridging the gap between the texts content and the readers schemata.Various activities and materials can help the teacher introduce key vocabulary and reinforce concept association to activate both formal and content schemata. Formal schemata will be activated by employing devices such as advance organizers and overviews to draw attention to the structure of a text. The content schemata will be activated by using various pre-reading activities to help learners brainstorm and predict how the information fits in with their previous knowledge. One of the most important pre-reading activities proposed by schematic theorists is prediction.According to bang-upman (1988 16), prediction is important because the brain is always anticipating and predicting as it seeks order and significance in sensory inputs. Smith (1994, 1920) defines prediction as the prior elimination of unlikely alternatives. According to him, predictions are questions the readers ask the world and comprehension is receiving the answers. He emphasizes that it is prediction that makes skilled readers effective when reading texts that contain familiar subject matter.Prediction brings potential meaning to texts, reducing ambiguity and eliminating in advance irrelevant alternatives. Thus, we are able to generate comprehensible experience from inert pages of print (Smith 1994, 18). Another pre-reading activity is previewing, where students look at titles, headings, and pictures, and read the first few paragraphs and the last paragraph these activities can then help students understand what the text is about by activating their formal and content schemata and making them familiar with the topic before they begin reading in earnest.Semantic mapping is another pre-reading activity that Carrell, Pharis, and Liberto (1989 651) describe as a useful way to pre-teach vocabulary and to provide the teacher with an assessment of the students prior knowledge or schema availability on the topic. This activity a sks students to brainstorm about the reading topic as the information is displayed on a graphic map. As students make associations, the map becomes a thorough summary of the concepts and vocabulary that they will encounter in the reading. It can also help build schemata and vocabulary that students do not yet possess.Again, it is important to know something about the students so the selected texts contain the type of material that is likely to be familiar and interesting to them. Reutzel (1985) proposes another type of pre-reading activity called reconciled reading lesson, which reverses the sequence presented by many textbooks where the text is followed by questions. Instead, the teacher develops pre-reading questions from the questions that appear at the end of the reading. Smith (1994) criticizes comprehension exercises presented at the end of a reading because they are like memory tests.He argues that using prior knowledge efficiently contributes to fluent readers, and he belie ves that there is a mutual relationship between visual and non-visual (prior knowledge) information the more the readers have of the latter, the less they need of the former. Although not all the post-reading questions can be easily turned into pre-reading ones, this strategy can be invaluable to activate schemata. 3. The metacognitive view According to Block (1992), there is now no more debate on whether reading is a bottom-up, language-based process or a top-down, knowledge-based process. It is also no more problematic to accept the influence of background knowledge on readers. Research has gone even further to define the control executed by readers on their trial to understand a text. This control is what Block has referred to as meta-cognition. In the context of reading, meta-cognition involves thinking about what one is doing while reading. Strategic readers do not only sample the text, make hypotheses, confirm or reject them, and make new hypotheses while reading.They also in volve many activities along the process of reading, whose stages can be divided into three, i.e. before reading, while reading, and after reading. The activities the readers involve before reading are to identify the purpose of the reading, identify the form or type of the text.In the second stage (while reading), they think about the general character and features of the form or type of the textsuch as trying to locate a topic sentence and follow supporting details toward a conclusion, project the authors purpose for writing the text, choose, scan, or read in detail, make continuouspredictions about what will occur next based on information obtained earlier, prior knowledge, and conclusions obtained within the previous stages.Finally, in the last stage, they attempt to form a summary, conclude, or make inference of what was read. Guidelines for Effective Teaching of Reading After discussing the ideas and concepts presented in the three reading theories, we are now on the position o f arranging tips and guidelines for implementing a theory of reading which will help to develop our learners abilities.These tips are arranged in three sections which are parallel with the three consecutive reading stages before reading, during reading, and after reading. Pre-Reading Tips Before the actual act of reading a text begins, some points should be regarded in order to make the process of reading more comprehensible. First, teachers need to make sure that the texts to read contain words and grammatical structures familiar to the learners. If the texts contain unfamiliar vocabulary, teachers can introduce key vocabulary in pre-reading activities that focus on language awareness, such as finding synonyms, antonyms, derivatives, or associated words.Second, teachers should make sure that the topics of texts chosen are in accordance with the age range, interests, sex, and background culture of the students for whom they are intended. If they are not, it is necessary to provide t he necessary background information to the reader to facilitate comprehension. This activity could be carried out by letting the class members brainstorm ideas about the meaning of a title or an lesson and discuss what they know. The followings are some activities teacher can use during the pre-reading stage.These activities will not take a very long time to carry out. However, they are very effective in overcoming the common urge to start reading a text closely right away from the beginning. 1. Teacher-directed pre-reading, in which some key vocabulary, ideas in the text, and the type of the text are explained. In this approach the teacher directly explains the information the students will need, including key concepts, important vocabulary, and appropriate conceptual framework.The text types are also necessary to introduce because texts may take on different forms and hold certain pieces of information in different places. The students familiarity with the types of the text they are reading will develop their understanding of the layout of the material. Such familiarity will, in turn, enable them to focus more deeply on the parts that are more obtusely compacted with information. Even paying attention to the year of publication of a text, if applicable, may aid the reader in presuppositions about the text as can glancing at the name of the author. 2.Interactive activities, in which the teacher leads a discussion in which he/she draws out the information students already have and interjects additional information deemed necessary to an understanding of the text to be read. Moreover, the teacher can make explicit links between prior knowledge and important information in the text. 3. thoughtful activities, in which students are guide to make themselves aware of the purpose and goal for reading a certain piece of written material. At the beginning stages this can be done by the teacher, but as the reader becomes more mature this strategy can be left to the r eaders.For instance, the students may be guided to ask themselves, Why am I reading this text? What do I want to do or know after finished reading this? Being aware of their purpose and goal to read, laterin during reading activitiesthey can determine what skill(s) to employ skimming, scanning, reading for details, or critical reading. During-reading tips The activities carried out in during-reading stage consist of taking notes, reacting, predicting, selecting significant information, questioning the writers position, evaluating, and placing a text within ones own experience.These processes may be the most complex to develop in a classroom setting, the reason being that in English reading classes most attention is often compensable to dictionaries, the text, and the teacher. The followings are tips that encourage active reading. Practicing them will help the students be active readers. 1. qualification predictions The students should be taught to be on the watch to predict what i s going to recover next in the text to be able to integrate and combine what has come with what is to come. 2. Making selections Readers who are more proficient read selectively, continually making decisions about their reading.3. Integrating prior knowledge The schemata that have been activated in the pre-reading section should be called upon to facilitate comprehension. 4. Skipping insignificant parts A good reader will concentrate on significant pieces of information while skipping insignificant pieces. 5. Re-reading Students should be encouraged to become sensitive to the effect of reading on their comprehension. 6. Making use of context or guessing Students should not be encouraged to define and understand every single unknown word in a text.Instead they should learn to make use of context to guess the meaning of unknown words. 7. Breaking words into their component parts To keep the process of comprehension ongoing, efficient readers analyze unfamiliar words by break them int o their affixes or bases. These parts can help them guess the meaning of a word. 8. Reading in chunks To ensure reading speed, students should get used to reading groups of words together. This act will also enhance comprehension by focusing on groups of meaning-conveying symbols simultaneously. 9.Pausing Good readers will pause at certain places while reading a text to absorb and internalize the material being read and sort out information. 10. Paraphrasing While reading texts, it may be necessary to paraphrase and interpret texts sub-vocally in order to verify what was comprehended. 11. Monitoring Good readers monitor their understanding to evaluate whether the text, or the reading of it, is meeting their goals. After-reading tips Post-reading activities basically depend on the purpose of reading and the type of information extracted from the text.Barnett (1988) states that post-reading exercises first check students comprehension and then lead students to a deeper analysis of the text. In the real world the purpose of reading is not to memorize an authors point of view or to summarize text content, but rather to see into another mind, or to engage new information with what one already knows. Group discussion will help students focus on information they did not comprehend, or did comprehend correctly. Accordingly, attention will be focused on processes that lead to comprehension or miscomprehension.Generally speaking, post-reading can take the form of these various activities (1) discussing the text written/oral, (2) summarizing written/oral, (3) making questions written/oral, (3) answering questions written/oral, (4) filling in forms and charts (5) writing reading logs (6) completing a text, (7) listening to or reading other related materials, and (7) role-playing. Conclusion Researches, opinions, and suggestions regarding the teaching of the reading exist in extensive amount, and this summary of reading theories is by no means exhaustive.However, with a ba sic understanding of the theoretical basis of top-down and bottom-up processing, teachers can better take advantage of the most useful methodologies associated with the different approaches. What is important to bear in mind is that relying too much on either top-down or bottom-up processing may cause problems for beginning ESL/EFL readers therefore, to develop reading abilities, both approaches should be considered, as the meta-cognitive approach suggests.Considering my own experience in teaching reading to Indonesian students, I have found that the students who managed to read English text effectively are those who approach texts in a painful, slow, and frustrating word-by-word manner. By improving their decoding skills, they are freed to concentrate on global meanings. 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