Models of Reading: Bottom-Up Approach

Characteristics Central Idea

1. Students must develop print awareness Reading is a process of
2. Students make meaning of a text by building on a decoding a series of written
foundation of analyzing the smallest units of meaning symbols
3. Help pre-readers recognize that printed words provide
information
4. Depend on phonetic awareness and word-by-word
decoding strategies
Steps
1. Learn to pronounce
individual sounds
Problems
2. Learn to pronounce
1. Difficult to account for common letter
sentence-context effects Bottom-Up Approach combinations, such as “th”
and the role of prior
or “st.”
knowledge of text topic
3. Learn to recognize similar
words with differing
Examples of activities The Process pronunciations, such as
1. Print/Text "baked" and "naked, " and
1. Exploiting Analogy
2. Coding Simple Vowels 2. Discriminating every letter words with multiple
3. Coding short and long vowels 3. Matching phonemes and spellings or exceptions to
4. Coding more complex sounds graphemes common phonetic rules
5. Guided Discovery 4. Blending sounds
6. Reading Aloud 5. Pronunciation
6. Meaning
Models of Reading: Top-Down Approach

Examples of activities Definition: encourages students to focus more on understanding

1. Conversation Can the main ideas of a passage than understanding every word
2. Opinion Paragraphs
3. Picture Prompts

Principles:
Goodman’s Processes in reading
Top-Down 1. Students begin to use context
1. Recognition-initiation clues to decipher unfamiliar
2. Prediction Approach words
3. Confirmation 2. Encourages students to rely on
4. Correction
their own knowledge and use
5. Termination
context clue to understand
new concepts or words
Limitations 3. Allows students to choose
Problems
1. Tend to emphasize books to read based on their
1. For many texts, the reader has higher level skills at own interests
little knowledge of the topic and the expense of lower 4. Encourage readers to develop
cannot generate predictions skills speaking and listening skills by
2. Even with a skilled reader, it 2. Tend to deemphasize reading aloud to the class or to
would take much longer than it the perceptual and a smaller group of students
would to recognize the words encoding dimensions
Models of Reading: Language Experience Approach

To build their confidence in the reading
and writing process
Example of Activities
1. Field Trip
2. A practical activity
like cooking
3. Special events like
sports day and
celebration
Steps
Mainly Opportunity to use the social Advantages
restricted to vocabulary they are acquiring
conversational through their interactions with 1. Requires more
English peers and teachers personal involvement
from the child
2. Positive impact on the
child’s self esteem
Language Experience
Disadvantages
Approach (LEA) 1. Requires a significant time input
from the teacher
2. Child’s spoken dialect differs from
standard written English
3. In groups, language structures of
students are varied

1. A Shared Experience
- Something the class does together or sequence of picture
2. Creating the Text Definition:
- Verbally recreate the shared experience in a large-group discussion Uses the student’s own
3. Read & Revise experiences, vocabulary, and
- Read the story aloud and discusses it language patterns to create texts
4. Read and Reread for reading instruction and make
- Read in choral or echo style or both in small groups or pairs and then, reading a meaningful process
individually
5. Extension
- A variety of literacy activities
Models of Reading: Sight Word Approach

Important in 2 situations: Example of sight word lists

1. Where a child encounters high-frequency words 1. Dolch

2. Where a child encounters phonetically irregular 2. American Heritage
word 3. Kuchera-Francis

Definition
Example of activities
Teaches recognition of the
whole word 1. Word Wall
Sight Word 2. Tic-Tac-Toe
3. Oh, No! Game
Objectives
Approach 4. Rainbow Words

1. Enable pupils to associate

the appearance of each
sight word with its
sound/pronunciation
2. Read sight words in
context
3. Recognize sight words
quickly and effortlessly
Characteristics of sight words
1. Words that appear so often in a text that readers
are able to read by sight without having to
decode them
2. Words that cannot be decoded and must be
memorized by sight
Models of Reading: Phonics Approach
Primarily stress on the bottom-up
approach where students process
letters and words
Require a great deal of
explicit instruction in the
rules of printed text
Focuses on individual letters
and sounds, repetition, and
practice
Example of Activities
1. Fish for Letters
2. Read the Word
3. What’s the Word?
4. What Do I Already
Know?
5. Irregular Word Road
Race
Phonemic Awareness: ability to recognize that words are
made up of a discrete set of sounds and to manipulate
sounds
Children must learn to
convert the unfamiliar
printed words into their
familiar spoken forms “b”
is pronounced as /b/, that
Phonics Approach “c” can be pronounced as
/k/ or /s/,
Principles
1. Lessons must be systematically delivered, not haphazard or “hit and miss”
2. Daily instruction should build on the skills of yesterday’s lesson
3. Use a variety of types of text for reading practices
4. Use words kids can read and have them analyze them
5. Avoid rules, or at least avoid insisting that they learn the rules
6. Language play-exposure to books, songs, poetry, and chats-make learning
phonemic awareness and phonics fun
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