Reading Strategy Duan Lifu Reading Strategy Duan Lifu Contents 1. Background Information 2. Four Reading Models 3. Three Kinds of Reading Strategies 4. Reading Process Pritchard (1990) defines a strategy as a deliberate action that readers take voluntarily to develop an understanding of what they read. Kellerman (1983) defines a strategy as a “anized approach to a problem”. Olshavsky (1977) claims that a strategy is a purposeful means prehending the author’s message. 1. 1 What is reading strategy? The importance of using strategy If a reader knows how, when and where to use an appropriate strategy, this would help him to improve prehension. Strategies aid readers to process the text actively, to monitor prehension and to connect what they are reading to their own knowledge and to other parts of the text. 2. Four Reading Models The reading model has gone through three stages. Bottom-up reading model Top-down reading model. Interactive reading model (interaction of bottom-up reading model and top-down reading model). The schema theory The bottom-up processing Bottom-up model means that the reader constructs the text from smallest unit (letter to words to phrases to sentence, etc) and that the process of constructing the text from those small units es so automatic that readers are not aware of how if operates. (Eskey, 1988) This can happen if our world knowledge is inadequate, or if the writer’s point of view is very different from our own. In that case, we must scrutinize the vocabulary and syntax to make sure we have grasped the plain sense correctly. Thus bottom-up processing can be used as a corrective to “tunnel vision (seeing things only from our own limited point of view)”. The top-down processing The top-down model is that readers bring a great deal of knowledge, expectations, assumptions and questions to the text and, give a basic understanding of the vocabulary; they continue to read as long as the text confirms their expecta