Essay On Process Of Reading

II. ANALYSIS

Reading is a complex process and it would be a good idea to see how it is defined. In general terms, it is an interactive process between a piece of text and the reader and it is meaningful as long as the reader is able to create meaning. According to Anthony, Pearson, and Raphael (1993), “Reading is the process of constructing meaning through the dynamic interaction among the reader’s existing knowledge, the information suggested by the written language, and the context of the reading situation” (p. 284).

It seems almost impossible to agree upon and adopt a single definition of reading without exploring the reasons for getting involved in this process. In daily life, we read for many reasons. We may be reading a timetable to

During top-down processing, we draw on our own intelligence and experience by making predictions based on the schemata we have acquired to understand the text. During this processing, we interpret assumptions and draw (Nuttall, 1996). In other words, the information we get and the inference we make from the text are guided by our prior knowledge, past experience and expectations. In bottom-up processing, on the other hand, the reader tries to understand the text based on the grammatical structures, letters, words or any other components of the language. As suggested by Nuttall (1996, p. 17), “in bottom-up processing, the reader builds up a meaning from the black marks on the page: recognising letters and words, working out sentence structure”. According to the third model of the reading process, the Interactive Model, suggested by Stanovich (1980), when a person reads a text, both top-down and bottom-up processes occur. Farrell (2002, p. 135) outlines the interactive processing in the figure

Scanning refers to reading quickly while seeking certain items. While we scan a text, we quickly run our eyes over it to find specifically required information and tend to use our hands, fingers or a pen to focus our attention. The focus is on key word(s), phrases, dates, numbers, etc., as the main aim is locating specific piece of information relevant to our purpose. We often do not follow the linearity of the passage to scan a text, glancing at it until we find what we are looking for, whether it be a name, a date, or a less specific piece of information (Grellet, 1981). In this sense, the reader should be able to anticipate how the information that is going to be retrieved might appear and what kind of clues will help him to find the