The Reading Process And The Interactive Process

Over the past few decades, researchers have proposed three reading models: the bottom-up (Gough, 1972; Rayner and Pollatsek, 1989), the top-down (Goodman, 1967,1988; Coady, 1979) and the interactive model (Rumelhart, 1980). The bottom-up model is a process that requires the reader to decode the printed words into sounds, and then decode the sounds into meanings (Brown, 1994). Subsequently, Weir and Urquhart (1998) stated that bottom-up model is text-driven, meaning the process starts with the text. The reader decodes a printed text serially, decoding the letter to words, words to phrases, and phrases to sentences in sequence (Gough, 1972). According to this point of view, if readers cannot recognize a word successfully they might have trouble

Rumelhart (1977) first proposed the interactive model. The interactive reading process requires the reader to use the bottom-up process and the top-down process simultaneously to understand a text (Carrell, Devine & Eskey, 1988). The proponents of the interactive model claim readers can understand a text by detecting the clues from the text (such as letters, words or sentences), and by retrieving their own background knowledge. As put by Nuttall (2000) ,“in practice a reader continually shifts from one focus to another, now adopting a top-down approach to predict the probable meaning, then moving to the bottom-up approach to check whether that is really what the writer says” (p.17). In other words, both the information of the text and the reader’s background knowledge are crucial elements of the reading

Bloom’s Taxonomy is widely used for setting up educational objectives, developing curriculum, or designing assessments. The original taxonomy includes six categories in the cognitive domain: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Each of the major categories contains its subcategories, except for Application. The organization of the categories was constructed from simple to complex and from concrete to abstract. In addition, the taxonomy was assumed to be a cumulative hierarchy which means to achieve the next more complex category requires the achievement of the prior one (Krathwohl, 2002; Kreitzer & Madaus, 1994). Subsequently, the model was further revised by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) and they divided the framework into two dimensions: Knowledge and Cognitive Processes. The knowledge dimension contains four types of knowledge: factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and metacognitive knowledge. Each type of knowledge is described as