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Date Posted: 13:12:20 06/13/07 Wed
Author: Viviane
Subject: Task Four

Reading: an active process

Reading is present in our daily life; this activity is good to relax and also to acquire knowledge. Most people believe that reading is a process that only allows us to receive information, ideas and so on, meaning that reading does not ask more than simple decoding words from the reader. On the other hand some specialists believe that reading depends of the reader interaction with the text. So the interaction between reader and text makes it impossible to classify reading as a passive skill.

What demonstrate this not passiveness of the text is the fact that “Reading is not a simple process of decoding a text letter-by-letter, word-by-word, clause-by-clause and sentence-by-sentence” (Zaki & Ellis).Often it involves forming hypothesis about the text meaning and later confirming and rejecting them. “Reading is like a ´psycholinguistic’ game” as Goodman suggests, and of course errors can happen when the meaning is guessed but they do not destroy the context of the text. Reading according to this theory, involves previous knowledge (schemata) of the reader and is called top-down process.

However, some specialists have suggested that reading does not proceed only with top-down process. When the reader does not have the schemata to understand the text, it is necessary to decode some words. Also when the reader has the schemata to understand the text some words need the correct decoding. So the use of Top-down and Bottom-up is common and sometimes necessary on the reading process. The use of both processes is called interactive process. Even seeming that Bottom-up is a passive process, it is not. Because lots of words have more than one meaning and the reader needs to dialogue with the text to know which one fits with the sentence of the text.

The text provides clues to the reader achieve understanding, and also to decode necessary words. Using these clues the reader involves in an inner dialogue with question and answer to interpret the text. Because written discourse is non-reciprocal in nature, it requires the reader to function as both addresser and addressee (Widdowson, 1979). Without the dialogue the information does not make sense and the reader needs to read again to try to understand the text. And it will only happen if the dialogue happens.

To sum up, reading can never be passive because the information it has needs to interpret by the reader. The reader can use three processes to achieve this understanding, Top-down, Bottom-up and dialogue. Top-down can happen with or without Bottom-up, that is process that only happens when lacks schemata to the reader. But dialogue is always necessary to achieve a complete understanding.

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