READING FOR COMMUNICATION

▣ READING FOR COMMUNICATION 

▶ THE INTERACTIVE NATURE OF THE READING PROCESS 

■ In trying to understand a written text, the reader has to perform many simultaneous tasks: decode the message by recognizing the written signs, interpret the message by assigning meaning to the string of words, and finally, understand what the author's intention was. There are at least three participants in this process: the writer, the text, and the reader.



■ The writer may be distant in time and space from the particular reader of the text and the act of reading; nonetheless, it was at the time of writing that the author produced the text to transmit a message to a potential reader and, therefore, the dialog between reader and writer via the text can take place at any time after that. Reading is, therefore, inherently interactive, involving the three participants. 



■ Historically, two separate approaches to reading developed in the literature and research: bottom-up and top-down approaches. Bottom-up approaches view reading as "a series of stages that proceed in a fixed order from sensory input to comprehension" (Hudson, 1998:46). Gough (1972) is one of the proponents of this approach. On the other hand, top-down approaches view the interpretation process as a continuum of changing hypotheses about the incoming information. Smith (1971, 1988, 1994) and Goodman (1968, 1976) are significant proponents of such an approach. More recently, methods that take an interactive view of reading require integration and a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches to describe the reading process.