Fundamentals of Translation by Colina Sonia

Author:Colina, Sonia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2015-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

5.1 Reading comprehension: An interactive process

Top-down and bottom-up models of reading comprehension

In a bottom-up model of comprehension, reading proceeds from smaller units on to larger ones: from letters, to words, to sentences, to paragraphs and texts. It is a serial process that moves up from part to whole. According to these models, in an alphabetic system, the reader starts by identifying letter features, which then help him/her recognize letters; letters are then combined into phonemes and spelling patterns (phonotactics), that assist with word recognition; words are grouped into syntactic units, and syntactic units combine to form sentences and paragraphs; paragraphs are combined into texts. Traditional and decoding views of reading are often based on a bottom-up approach to reading comprehension, also used in the phonics methods of teaching reading in some educational contexts.

In a top-down model, a reader relies on world knowledge (i.e., background knowledge), contextual information and other higher-order processing strategies to understand a text. Reading is seen as a process of constructing meaning. A top-down approach can be recognized behind such statements as: “readers can comprehend a selection even though they do not recognize each word”; “readers should use meaning and grammatical cues to identify unrecognized words.” It is a common experience to read words that are not physically in the text; for instance, while proofreading, one may not be able to spot a missing word if it is a common function word (e.g., an article) or part of a fixed expression. This is evidence that when we read we use a top-down strategy, whereby linguistic background knowledge fills in information that is not actually present. An important contribution of the top-down model is increased awareness of the role of background knowledge and schemata in reading comprehension.

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