THEORIES OF READING

Theories of Reading

Theories of Reading

Introduction

Reading is a dynamic and complex process with a curricular history that stretches back more than 1,000 years. The practice of teaching reading has changed across the centuries as cultures moved from primarily oral traditions to written textual communication (1000 CE) to present concerns of a 21st-century technological era.

Discussion

Theories of Reading

Various reading theories shape contemporary reading curricula, each positing different ideas concerning the roles of readers and authors in the reading process, the nature and sequence of learning to read, and the role of culture in literacy learning. The cognitive processing model, which emerged in the late 1920s, asserts that all meaning resides within the text. In this model, the reader's job is to understand the author's message on a literal level, without question, often through memorizing minute details of the text and conducting painstaking literary analysis. (Kamil, 2000)

In contrast, socio cognitive approaches that emerged in the 1940s posit that meaning arises from the interaction between the text and the reader's background knowledge and experiences. David Rumelhart's interactive reading theory was the first to suggest that the reader brought background knowledge and personal purpose to the text. The interactive theory later evolved into the transactional reading theory, also known as reader-response theory, with a deeper consideration of the reader's stance.

Postcolonial theory has been used to analyze how governments manipulate formal curriculum and language to colonize the cultures of those they invade. As the Internet has emerged as a primary print medium, postmodern and semiotic approaches to the reading process emphasize the variety of texts people “read” and the myriad of communicative modes available. Unlike previous centuries in which printed, linguistic text was the dominant site for reading practice, present-day readers must include sign systems such as visual images, art, audio, and moving and hybrid texts in their reading repertoire. Multimodal reading acts, considered new literacies, are typically found within Internet social networking sites, student-created digital videos, blogs, and Web pages. These developments have changed the nature of what we define as texts and have spurred changes in what people read, how humans interact with text, and thus, reading curriculum.(Ruddell, 2004).

Current Approaches

Current reading approaches encompass what scholars term the four-cueing systems of reading. These language systems assist the reader in processing the text: the grapho-phonemic system (print knowledge), syntactic (grammatical systems of language), semantics (word meanings), and pragmatic systems (knowledge of the ...