Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Teaching Reading

Fall 2005

Nuttall Chapters 1, 2, and 3 - Answers

1. What is reading and what is it used for?

Reading is the ability to be able to interpret codified language and, in dong so, glean meaning from a reading text. This is particularly interesting once one realizes that language is really no more and no less than codified thought. Now, since the written code of language is abstracted from the spoken form it means that reading is really twice removed from our consciousness or the thoughts the writer wishes to extend. Simply put, the content of any given text has been codified twice, or in two different ways. This double codification makes reading, in principle, more difficult than speaking. In the end, however, reading really is no different in its function than any other type of language use. People communicate (use language) to get information, which, inturn, makes things easier for themselves. Language and communication is a tool that humans have developed (or has developed in evolution) and while it is a cognitive and not necessarily a physical tool it is no less a tool much like a hammer, for example. Based on this we need to understand that people read in order to get meaning which will somehow help them, which is of use to them. Therefore, there has to be a clear purpose in the reading endeavor. Everyone reads for some sort of effect. To do otherwise would be a tremendous loss or waste of time and energy and that is fantastically demotivating. Reading takes time and it can be very difficult. Therefore, no one is going to waste their time and energy doing something which has no value. When people read to do so really requires focus on the situation, purpose and that will affect the language used itself. In the end readers are simply interested in getting what they want out of a particular text and that is usually new forms of meaning, i.e., information.

2. How do the ideas of shared assumptions, schema, and presupposition work to make a text more comprehensible to a reader?

As mentioned above reading is not necessarily an easy thing to do. At the same time, however, we know that certain texts are easier to read than others and some others are even impossible to read even if they are codified in which seems to be a language that we are familiar with and have a high level of competence in. As readers our main goal is to try to be able to understand a text and get the necessary meaning from it. There are several psychological processes that we can use in order to be able to do this. All of the psychological processes come from our background knowledge: what we really know about the world in the form of linguistic codes generated from known concepts. This information is stored and organized, for the most part, in the mental lexicon of the human brain. The mental lexicon is not just the place where words are listed. There are connections between words, concepts, episodic memories, visual input, emotions, and other sensory modes. It is here that all our impressions of the world are stored and more importantly codified into language or languages.

Assumptions are ideas we have about how the world works. They are formed basically based on experience, both direct and indirect and are highly personal yet cultural in their viewpoint. Thus, we would expect people who grow up in similar cultural surroundings to have similar or at least more similar assumptions about the world. As mentioned above these assumptions are codified in the mental lexicon through connections from lexical units (words and phrases) to other aspects of our consciousness. So, when a lexical unit (word) is activated as we read automatically predominantly assumptions that go with those units are also activated. These assumptions allow us to understand a text. Writers are betting on the fact that readers will be able to share some of their assumptions and that they do not have to explain everything exactly and in minute detail. This is one of the driving assumptions that writers have about readers. Assumptions are the first basic skill among other things that people need to be able to use to read. Not all texts, however, are going to support a reader's assumptions. Thus, readers need to be tolerant and open-minded because not all their assumptions are going to be supported or are going to play out exactly in the text and if they did the would be no point in reading a text. One of the reasons people read a text is to be able to acquire new ideas about the world and, following that, assumptions will be changed. As humans we are constantly altering old assumptions and creating new ones.

Schema is the raw data that revolves around a particular word, concept or more often a particular semantic field. For example we have the semantic field of houses. This semantic field is going to contain all the information we have about houses. There are going to be vast connections which extend from concepts into all different types of related conceptual areas in the brain, but they still form one basic and interconnected field. It is the schema that allows us to deal with subject matter. Therefore, if you are reading a text and you do not think of the subject area of the text then the text will be much more difficult because you have a very limited schema in relation to this text. Without a relevant schema, or a schema that matches fairly closely to that of the writer, the reader is going to have tremendous difficulty making assumptions about the text which actually help them understand the text. From this comment we can see that our schema is what allows us to make certain assumptions about the content of text.

Presupposition is a term that comes from the discipline philosophy and semantics. It is the confluence of several assumptions and the end result or the product of these assumptions. We can simply introduce this as a mathematical construct. If A equals B and B equals C (these are our assumptions) then A also equals C (this is our presupposition). This is basically how presupposition works in texts. Presupposition goes one step further than assumption. If we presuppose it means we try to make a decision based on available knowledge and assumptions before an event will actually occur. We can draw conclusions prior to the conclusions having been drawn themselves in the physical world or in this case within the text. The point to remember is that writers create texts based on certain presuppositions. The writer is betting that the reader will share certain schema with them. Based on this their writing, all writing in fact, has holes in it. Nothing is ever explained fully and it does not need to be because certain presuppositions can be made. Imagine how terrible a piece of writing would be if everything had to be explained perfectly. A writer makes presuppositions in order to be efficient in her or his writing.

All three of these different psychological processes are essential to be able to dealing with a text effectively.

3. How is it that reading is an interactive activity?

Many practicing teachers among many others believe wholeheartedly in the fallacy that reading is a kind of passive activity in which a reader reacts to text. True, reading is often quiet and it is something that people need to do alone in part but good readers are never passive. They can't be because passive reading is failed reading. As was mentioned above, readers need to use different psychological processes to be able to deal with a text. This in its basic workings is an interaction with a text. It might seem strange to say that reading is interactive but it is even though the interaction is a long distance type interaction between writer and reader with the text as kind of an intermediary. To be a good readers the reader needs to be able to get into the head of the writer and make a wide range of decisions about what they think the writer was trying to indicate. Obviously they can not do this directly because of distances in space and time so the reader really has to do this with the text itself. Thus, good readers need to engage (go through) a text constantly asking questions and making decisions going deeper into the text. Readers can't just analyze the surface forms; they need to go deeper and ask questions; what does this mean, why is this here, what the hell is going on in this damn text? This is the type interaction that good readers do, but often subconsciously. Of course it all depends on the text. Some texts are relatively easy to read while others are extremely demanding. The more demanding the text, and this is often a product have familiar the reader is with the content area or whether the reader shares a lot of assumptions with the writer, the more the reader is going to have to try to interact with the text.

4. How does predicting work?

Predicting is fun, easy, and absolutely essential when reading. Good readers are always one step ahead of the text. As they are reading they are constantly making guesses and basically predictions about what could possibly come next in the text. These predictions should develop even before they start reading the text itself. A title is usually written so that readers can make predictions about what they think is going to come in the text, or at least they can predict he basic topic area of the text as well as the genre. That's really the purpose of a title. The same holds for section headings, as well as a table of contents. The table of contents for a book, for example, is basically an outline of what is going to come in the book. A good reader always goes to check the table of contents first in order to try to make predictions about what they think will be in the book as well as enable them to go to the parts they think they need to read and avoid the parts they really don't want to read. Bearing in mind that reading takes a lot of energy and time it should be clear that we want to be selective readers, at least when dealing with long texts. Predicting is not just something that is used by readers in spy novels or detective novels or something else of that nature. Predicting is a strategy it is used by all good readers in all different types of texts. All good readers make guesses about what they think is going to come and use this to activate schema and make more assumptions which will allow them to make more predictions. The only one thing that we need to worry little bit about it is that our predictions are often wrong. And writers will often write in a way so that our predictions will be foiled in the end by their writing and in certain types of writing that's what makes the writing interesting. It depends on the genre of writing. This type of deliberate work against how readers really read is not acceptable in academic type writing. You probably did not read very many textbooks that constantly had you making the wrong guesses. It would be way too frustrating especially since the goal of textbook is to get you to develop and enhance, to a large extent, schema which you do not have or which you are interested in developing further.

5. Which is better to use, bottom-up or top-down processing in reading? Why?

I think we're all sickeningly familiar with the terms bottom-up and top-down. In Korea there has been a very strong tendency in the past on top-down types of teaching in relation to grammar instruction. Based on that there is a swing to the opposite side where there seems to be an overemphasis on bottom-up types of teaching and trying to get students to use bottom-up processes in relation to grammar and production. In reality both of them are necessary, and particularly in reading. Good readers will use both top-down and bottom-up and, more importantly, they will know when to use one or the other. They will be frustrated by being stuck only using one. As with the most everything else, flexibility is the best case scenario. This can be frustrating for teachers because it's actually something that it is extremely hard for a teacher to teach. It's not easy for teachers to be able to tell their students, "Okay now you need to shift into bottom-up processing" or "OK in this text, right now top-down is good". Students really need to be able to learn how to make the these decisions by themselves and the only way for them to do this is by interacting with longer and diverse texts that challenge them and do not coddle them. If the text is too easy then students really are not going to learn much from it. Yes, they might get some content but they're not going to be able to develop any strategies for dealing with reading texts. Whether the students are going to use top-down bottom-up processing to read really depends on the text and we know that there are lots of variables there. If the title is good then the students will be able to start using top-down processing, but if they run across an area where their assumptions don't work where their presumptions have failed and where they have limited schema, then they are really going to have these bottom-up processing to try to figure out deeply what the hell is going on in the text. I use these terms, the rough ones, to try to show the type of frustration that people experience and a daily basis in dealing with texts, particularly second language readers. We English teachers, therefore, really need to be able to prepare our students well for the vast world of reading by using appropriate texts for building skills.

6. What are the four different kinds of meaning and why are they important?

According to this book and according to many theories of semantics and pragmatics there are, basically put, four different types of meaning. These are conceptual, propositional, contextual, and pragmatic meaning. It is important for us as language teachers and particularly as teachers interested in teaching reading to be able to understand the distinction between these different meanings. Once more, we need to be able to get our students to understand their differences because if they don't they might be extremely frustrated as they read. If reading is about being able to glean meaning then we need to know what type of meaning we are looking to get.

Very often people simply think about conceptual meaning as being a kind of general meeting or the meaning that is always around in language and in texts. The conceptual meaning is basically the core meaning of a word. At this point you need to remember that words do not have just one meaning. All words have several meanings and some words have hundreds of different meanings and possible uses some of which are meaning-free as we shall see below. The conceptual meaning as I mentioned is the core meaning of the word. It is, for the most part, the dictionary meaning; that is the meaning that is found in the dictionary usually listed as No. 1 under a word. Usually readers do not have difficulty being able to interpret the core meanings of words and if they do they can simply go to the dictionary and be able to look them up. The same cannot necessarily be said for propositional meaning.

Propositional meaning is the meaning that a sentence has on its own. It is a collected meaning of all the parts of the sentence and this collective meaning can be stored as basically one proposition. So, for example, if I have a sentence which reads, pigs are man's best friend, this makes a particular proposition which the reader can either reject or accept. The entire sentence itself performs one basic propositional idea based on its component parts, none of which are sufficient alone in understanding the proposition. What's more the parts are essential for making up the whole and the entire meaning is interpretable only from the parts taken together.

The contextual meaning is different. A contextual meaning is really the claim that words and sentence only have meaning with a given context. This is what is hard for students to understand. So, for example, in the sentence John is flat broke, the word flat does not mean it's dictionary meaning here and for a student to look toward up in the dictionary is only going to confuse them even more because the meaning of flat is virtually irrelevant. The sentence simply means that John is extremely broke and the word flat is really just used as an intensifier. Based on this, in really it is very important for students to be able to deal with context and meanings and context and contextual meaning in general. This also helps because students will not know the meaning of every word in the text. Nobody ever does. One thing that they can do is be able to try to interpret meanings from the context. This is still is essential for good readers. Good readers must be able to deal with context and meanings and context because in language 1 plus 1 often equals 101. To understand the contextual meaning one needs to think about the larger point the writer is trying to make based on what preceded the phrase/sentence and what the reader predicts might come after. The idea here is that meaning is not always literate, and may actually rarely be so depending on the genre of the text.

The last type of meaning that we need to discuss is pragmatic meaning. Like contextual meaning, pragmatic meaning is the meaning that sentences, words, chunks have only within a text, but more from an interactional point of view. There are two different levels of pragmatic meaning. The first and simpler level relates to specific linguistic units whose meaning is derived from the text and relates to the text. When we take these words (units) out of the text they are meaningless and almost impossible to describe. For example think about words like although or if. How are you going to define these words? It's impossible without linking them to the text. These words therefore really only have pragmatic meaning and are only really used in a text for pragmatic purposes. These pragmatic units are there to help the reader to interpret the text and act as pointers in that they act as guides to the text. Aside from these predominantly pragmatic units mentioned above pragmatic meaning on the next level, the level of larger units, works to reveal both feelings and motives. Larger pragmatic meaning works to reveal elements of interaction and motivation in the text. We can think of pragmatic as revealing the underlying functions of a particular unit in a text.

7. How are reading programs different from looking at texts and why are they important?

There's a common fallacy in classrooms all around the world that just because students are dealing with texts they are reading. Nothing could be further from the truth. Reading and dealing with texts are two totally different animals. In dealing with texts often we focus on language. The texts are used, and rightfully so, as a means of teaching language structure, particular vocabulary items, as well as pronunciation. There is certainly nothing wrong with doing this, but a reading teacher or a language teacher needs to know what they are doing with the text. Dealing with the text needs to be a conscious process and to be fair to the students teachers must be aware of exactly what they are doing, what the purpose is, and what the supposed effect is going to be. Reading is different. When you use the text for reading you need to focus on gleaning the meaning from the text, and making interpretations that the text has in relation to meaning. Language is just a vehicle to convey to meaning so in this case when we read for meaning language is very much secondary. It is here the main distinction lies.

8. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using longer texts as opposed to short ones?

This question was phrased with the idea of longer text vs. shorter ones, but the distinction is made in the book is between extensive vs. intensive type of reading programs. I avoid using those terms because generally in Korea we don't have reading programs we simply have texts that are used and more often than not, in fact almost exclusively, it is shorter texts that are used in classrooms. The reasons for this are probably many and there are a lot of advantages to using shorter texts in particular types of classrooms. They are motivational (because it's easy finish them quickly students get a sense of accomplishment), they are easy and quick to do, they are also easy to test on. In short, shorter texts seem to be or are deemed partly more efficient. At the same time however, and I think I mentioned this above, shorter texts don't really work to be able to get our students to develop strategies for dealing with texts. Their shortness is often an indication of their simplicity. The short text and what we are generally using in Korean schools are not often not authentic in their adoptions and simplifications of what possibly were more authentic texts. They have been specially crafted for their simplicity. There are government regulations on the length of the text, the type of grammar that can go into the text, as well as the vocabulary not to mention the subject matter. Looking at this we all see that these texts are created almost to be unchallenging for all students except for the very lowest level ones in class. If there is no difficulty then how are strategies for reading going to be activated. Necessity is the mother of invention and if students do not need to work hard and with the text than they won't develop ways to do so. Following this it is easy to see that sometimes we need to give students more extensive reading even though it harder for the teacher to manage and the teacher loses a fair bit of power in the classroom in doing so.

9. What should a teacher not do in a reading program?

There are lots of things that a teacher should not to in a reading class, or during a reading lesson. One thing is that they really shouldn't do give the answers to students. Often when teachers are trying to activate schema they end up telling students the whole damn story. They simply summarize thus making the reading of the text unimportant. Who cares once you know the story? Another thing that teachers often due which is probably not particularly good is too overtest the students. The students need freedom when they read, especially when they are trying to deal with longer texts. They need their own timing and they need to develop their own ways for dealing with the text. So teachers really need to do is just encourage the students. Be there to help them and provide some guidance and motivation.