Beyond the Sentence: Finding a Balance Between Bottom-Up and Top-Down Reading Approaches

Writer(s): 
Padraic Frehan, The British Council Tokyo

This paper argues that drawing students' attention to the advantages of activating their background knowledge and helping them to activate and start developing their prediction skills, both at the pre-reading stage and during reading of a text, can help them develop into more effective readers.

The students who were the subjects of this study were already capable of utilizing bottom-up processing skills acquired in past learning environments but were deficient in, or unaware of, the benefits of utilizing top-down skills. Since they consistently used a word-for-word text approach, I decided to focus on the top-down skills of predicting and activating background knowledge in order to provide them with a wider range of skills when reading a text. I will demonstrate that, when provided with alternative approaches, students are capable of processing a text more efficiently. Evidence will be based on written feedback from the participants and observations of what occurred during the study, which took place during one three-hour lesson at The British Council English School Tokyo. The retrospective written work was submitted by the students the week following the study.

The Reading Process

A brief synopsis

The last four decades have seen the emergence of three reading models. In the bottom-up (data-driven) reading process, the reader decodes, letter-by-letter, word-by-word the written symbols in the text and then reassembles the pieces to form meaning. However, this process creates problems such as fragmentation and memory overload because the reader attempts to store too many separate pieces of information without any higher-order relationship between them (Carrell, 1988b). Despite these deficiencies, the bottom-up approach has remained popular in the teaching of reading in Japan (Kitao & Kitao, 1995).

The second model, the top-down (concept-driven) reading process, arose out of psycholinguistic research by such scholars as Goodman (1971) and Smith (1971). In this model, the efficient reader does not need to use all of the textual cues (Carrell, 1988a). Goodman (1971) described reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game" (p. 135) and later wrote that the better the reader is able to make correct predictions, the less confirming via the text is necessary (Goodman, 1973, in Carrell, 1988a).

The third model is the interactive processing approach, developed in response to the deficiencies of both bottom-up and top-down approaches. In this model interaction refers to the constant interaction between bottom-up and top-down processing skills (Eskey, 1988).

Stanovich's (1980) interactive-compensatory model deals with the shortcomings of both approaches. The bottom-up model assumes background knowledge cannot be activated before lower level decoding while the top-down model does not allow lower level processes to influence or direct higher level ones. The basic premise of Stanovich's model is that reading involves an "array of processes" (Grabe, 1988, p. 61). Therefore, a reader who is weak in one particular skill area will compensate by bringing into effect other reading processes. Grabe's (1991) interpretation of an interactive approach is one that takes into account the critical contribution of both lower level processing skills (identification) and higher level comprehension and reasoning skills (interpretation) The process then, is reciprocal.

Advantages of an interactive approach

An overemphasis of either a bottom-up or a top-down approach will not realize a reader's potential for comprehension of a text. Developing readers must work at perfecting both their bottom-up recognition skills and their top-down interpretation skills. Thus, the reading process can be viewed as a combination of interactive bottom-up and top-down procedures (Clapham, 1996). Readers often decontextualize and just think about the words so that by the time they reach the end of a page they have forgotten what the top was about (Eskey & Grabe, 1988). This was a pronounced problem with the students in this study: Their word-by-word text approach resulted in a very slow comprehension rate. Such a slow reading process can cause tunnel vision because the brain is overloaded with visual information when the reader is reluctant to use non-visual information and/or when the reader is unwilling to predict what may follow in the text (Smith, 1985).

Kitao and Kitao (1995) found that most Japanese students read by replacing all English words with Japanese words one by one. Students ascribe equal importance to each word and use only their syntactic knowledge to understand the sentence. They work very slowly through the text and struggle to comprehend its overall message (Kitao, Kitao, Nozawa, & Yamamoto, 1985). The reading experience my students bring to class reflects the above. Further, they tend to read a passage through from beginning to end without surveying the reading beforehand or making predictions based on the title or illustrations (Kitao, 1994). The present study focuses on this last point.

The Study

The subjects

The subjects for this study were eight Japanese students in an Academic Study Skills class, whose average age was 26. Their English level was lower advanced and their primary reason for attending was to prepare for postgraduate study in the U.K. Since the focus of the class was on developing academic reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills, only a limited time could be allocated to reading.

Materials

The subjects were provided with a selection of reading materials drawn from Japanese (L1) and English (L2) magazines and a number of texts from our coursebook, Campus English (Foreman, Donoghue, Abbey, Cruden, & Kidd, 1990). I also transferred two of the texts from the coursebook to overhead transparencies (OHTs) in order to display them separately on the whiteboard and thus facilitate the elicitation of prediction ideas from the class as a whole.

Procedure

I began by asking students to choose an article to read from a selection of L1 magazines (Executive, Newton, and Online Today Japan). Next, we repeated the procedure with the L2 magazines (The Economist, New Scientist, and New Statesman). Students discussed their choices together, first the L1 articles, then the L2 articles, focusing on what they chose and why, and how they made their choices. I then summarized the results on the whiteboard under the headings L1 magazines and L2 magazines. The class discussion which followed revealed that the students applied similar strategies when choosing both the L1 and L2 articles. The students thus realized that the selection strategies which were applied in L1 had similar and useful applications in L2. The points noted were:

  • they knew something about the topic already and wanted to know more
  • they became curious about the article after reading the title
  • they had a personal interest in the topic
  • they already had some idea as to the focus and contents of the article and wanted to clarify this and pursue it further.

The students were thus activating schemata (Rumelhart, 1980) relevant to the topics chosen. Furthermore, the activity demonstrated that they were activating their prediction skills unconsciously in L1 and in L2 in order to make a choice which in turn led to conscious thinking about the articles they had chosen.

After establishing that certain skills were identical or similar in L1 and L2 prior to reading the text itself, the next set of exercises focused on prediction from titles of texts.

Prediction from titles

I shall regard prediction in its general sense as outlined by Tadros (1994), which is guessing or anticipating what will come next in the text based on the reader's common-sense knowledge of the world.

I wrote the title of an article from The Economist magazine on the board, "Webbed Flight" (The Economist, 1997), and asked the class to predict the contents of the article. Key words from their predictions were written under the title. I then placed the article on the overhead projector (OHT) and asked the students to scan the article for the key words to check if their predictions were correct. Most were, but not all. Rather than predicting correctly all the time, it is more important for readers to be actively involved in the processing of the possible contents and meaning of the text (Nuttal, 1996).

I repeated the activity twice, each time using new material, once as a group exercise, then individually. Following this, students came up with the following advantages of prediction: (1) it recalls what you already know about the topic and so can help prepare you better for the reading; (2) you are thinking about the topic before you begin to read so this can help you associate what you already know with the contents of the text; (3) it makes it easier to understand new information if you already know something on the text; (4) it may help improve reading speed; and (5) the reader can feel less anxious approaching a text due to the familiarity already established between reader and text.

Prediction from within the sentence and paragraph

Next, I used an exercise, "Prediction within the sentence" (Nuttall, 1996, p. 14) which consisted of group discussions followed by class consolidation. Students applied their syntactic (e.g., third person singulars) and semantic knowledge (e.g., collocation) to predict what words would follow consecutively in the sentence, thus speeding up their progression through the sentences. This was an important awareness-raising exercise: Since the word order in English sentences is different from Japanese, students usually replace English words with Japanese ones to make (Japanese) sentences before trying to comprehend meaning (Kitao & Kitao, 1995).

Using an OHT projection of Nuttal's, "Predicting our way through a text" (1982, p. 13) I conducted a class discussion, monitoring comprehension using the questions provided in the text, drawing the students' attention to both the syntactic and semantic relationships within the text, and reiterating that predictions were not always correct. The purpose of the above exercise was to make the students more aware of an interrogation factor which Swales (1990) refers to as "a reciprocity of semantic effort" (p. 62), so as to instill in the students the necessity to continually question the direction of the author and thus place themselves in a better position to comprehend the text as it unfolds.

Finally, I gave the students a complete text with title from their coursebook and asked them to apply the strategies they had practiced. After this, a class discussion took place reviewing all the exercises. To conclude, I invited feedback from the students on their impressions and thoughts of the strategies covered. This mainly revolved around the points written on the board during the previous exercises.

As a follow-up task , students wrote their opinions and comments on these exercises for homework, three examples of which appear in Table 1.

 

 


Table 1: Students' retrospective comments on the exercises (unedited)

 

Student #3

The method you've introduced us made me conscious my subconscious. I tended to read a text word for word until then, being afraid to misunderstand the contents. Now I'm trying to skip as many words as possible even when I'm going to read about something not familiar, and I am picking up some key words when I am going to deal with the text I've already had quite a few knowledge.

Student #4

I have never noticed the importance of prediction in reading without your lecture. So far, I have paid attention to the sentence structures and the word meanings rather than the whole meaning of a story. Therefore, it takes a long time for me to read through a whole story. I am afraid that the English classes which I have attended in Japan made me read like this.

Student #5

There are many positive aspects of using "prediction skill". Firstly, we immediately thinking about the topics helps us to understand contents of articles. Secondly, we can improve our reading speed by predicting the following contents. Thirdly, we can associate our knowledge we already have concerning the topics and it can help to make our learning much more easier.

 

Evaluation

The students' written feedback suggests that they became more aware of the positive roles that activating background knowledge and prediction can play in the L2 reading process: "I learned ... that predicting is one of the most important aspects in reading" (Student #1); "I have understood and reconfirmed that the 'prediction,' or the 'active reading' is very important and useful skill (sic)" (Student #2).

In the "prediction within the sentence," exercise, students focused on how words can be anticipated and chunked together rather than on the individual meaning of each word. It showed students how to read fewer words and hypothesize more.

The extended "prediction within the paragraph" exercise helped students become more aware of how a writer's ideas can progress in the paragraph. One student commented, "So far, I have paid attention to the sentence structures and the word meanings rather than the whole meaning of a story."

It is difficult to judge whether the students really began to utilize the skills just introduced during the final reading exercise. However, because they were more willing to discuss the possible overall meaning of the text than on previous occasions, because the exercise took less time than previous exercises of this kind, and because the students refrained from using dictionaries during the reading of the text, it is reasonable to assume that they were beginning to utilise these new skills. The above points, supported by the students' retrospective comments on the exercises, illustrated their increased confidence in approaching and reading a text with a more balanced reading approach.

Conclusion

Students have different reading abilities, possess different background knowledge, and have different linguistic competence. The focal point of the study was highlighting the positive benefits in the activation and use of the two skills regardless of the different elements present in each student's reading and linguistic background.

No substantial changes can be expected after one or two lessons, but it is important to set such reading strategies in motion and to give students ample exposure to them. Reading skills develop gradually and the reader does not become fluent suddenly. Instead, fluent reading is the product of long term effort and gradual improvement (Grabe, 1991).

Teachers need to continually adapt their teaching methodology to their teaching environment, regardless of what is currently fashionable in ELT. By taking into account the learners' background learning experiences we can adapt our teaching to allow for the maximum benefits to our students.

 

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