L2 Reading

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L2 Reading

• ESOL2 Class 12

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Bottom-up Processing

• The Meaning is in the Text
• Meaning is extracted from the text
• Reader acts as a decoder (phonics)
• Linear process
• Letters gt words gt phrases gt sentencesgt paragraphs
  gt text

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Bottom-up Processing

• What problems do you see with this view?

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Top-down elements

• The Meaning is in the Reader
• What the reader brings to the text is more
  important than the text itself
• Reader has an active role in the reading process
• Background knowledge and knowledge of the world
  are more important than the clues in the text.

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Top-down elements

• What problems do you see with this view?

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Schema Theory

• Organizational Units
• Scenarios, scripts
• Content and formal schemata
• According to schema theory, the process of
  interpretation is guided by the principle that
  every input is mapped against some existing
  schema and that all aspects of that schema must
  be compatible with the input information
  (Carrell Eisterhold, 1988, p. 76).

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Schema Theory

• The readers knowledge or expectations influence
  that to which he or she pays attention, and
  ultimately, how the text is interpreted.
• New information can sometimes be assimilated into
  existing schemata.
• Other times, however, existing schemata have to
  be altered to accommodate new information.
• Thus, in successful reading, the schema and the
  information are compatible.

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Interactive Approaches to Reading

• Successful readers use both bottom-up and
  top-down at different times during the reading
  process.
• Both the text and the reader interact in a
  meaning creation process

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Sociocognitive View of Second Language Reading
(Bernhardt, 1991)

• p.15 Text is no longer characterized simply by
  its linguistic elements (semantic and syntax),
  but also by its structure, its pragmatic nature,
  its intentionality, its content, and its topic.
  These sets of features interact with the reader
  in process.

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Bernhardt

• The model also posits that readers are not static
  entities, but are individuals who change and
  react differentially in other words, are
  different readers at different items.

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Bernhardt

• The character of these interactions yields a
  selection of different features for the
  processing of the text, Simply put, certain
  reader see different things in texts, They make
  individual decisions about what is important in
  texts and make sense of it or reconstruct it
  according to those decisions. As a result, the
  input text and the output text are, in this
  integrated view, different entities.

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Bernhardt

• p.16 Critical within the second language
  framework is that readers and the texts they
  encounter represent separate and distinct social
  entities.
• Second language readers approach a text from
  their first language framework.

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Bernhardts Model

• Text factors
• Word recognition
• Phonemic/graphemic decoding
• Syntactic feature recognition
• Reader factors
• Intratextual perception
• Metacognition
• Prior knowledge

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Critical Literacy

• Texts are representations of culture
• The meanings of texts are determined by Discourse
  Communities
• Meaning flows from an understanding of the
  cultural, social, and political contexts in which
  the reading takes place.
• For example Freire

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Reading as Design (Kern, 2000)
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Immediate and Eventual Communicative Contexts
Social Roles
Physical situation
Purpose
Topic
Audience
Task
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Sociocultural Context
SC Practices in FL classroom
SC Practices in target society
SC Practices in home community
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Activities