The main two approaches to reading, top-down and bottom-up have produced a great debate towards which is the best approach to teach children to read. Top down reading is also known as the whole language approach in which the meaning of the text relies upon the readers background knowledge and his/her use of prediction to anticipate the meaning of the text. [//www.sedl.org/reading/topics/balanced.html [23.10.01]]. The bottom-up approach to reading involves the use of phonics and the decoding of text, word by word after which meaning and understanding will follow [//www.sedl.org/reading/topics/balanced.html [23.10.01]]. Phonics isshow more content
Let us first examine the positive contributions and limitations of each approach.
Goodman, [1971] a top-down theorist, describes reading as a pscholinguistic guessing game [p.135] and he stresses that readers benefit by making predictions from their knowledge to understand their reading [Goodman, 1973 in Carrell, 1988a] [//langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/99/jan/frehan.html [16.10.01]]. Paul Abraham, in his article Field Notes states that the bottom-up approach in comparison does not recognise what students can contribute to the reading material. [//www.sabes.org/f02abrah.htm [16.10.01]] Padraic Frehan of the British Council English school of Tokyo comments that the bottom-up approach reveals problems like fragmentation of words and overload of memory due to keeping a lot of separate bits of information in the mind without any higher order connection between the separate pieces of information [Carrell, 1988b] [//langue.hyper.chubu.ac.jp/jalt/pub/tlt/99/jan/frehan.html [16.10.01]]. This shows that the bottom-up approach has limitations but let us observe how this approach can benefit childrens reading. Phonics can be applied to using rhymes which is a way of developing phonological awareness [the