Reading and Writing Processes: An In-depth Look
Oral Language Lesson 5 Summary
What is Reading? What is Writing?
Glossary
Visual Field: Fragment of the text covered in each stare. Inexperienced readers use a very small field of view. Skilled readers, however, cover a much larger field of view in each fixation.
Displacement: Oscillation of the eye from one fixation point to another.
Outlines of Knowledge: Mental structures that the subject constructs in interaction with the environment. These structures organize their knowledge and how to use it. All that is known is organized and reorganized every time new information is entered in a kind of inter-networking system.
Reading Strategies: A reading strategy is a scheme to collect, evaluate, and use information. Readers develop strategies to construct meaning from text.
- Prediction Strategy: The ability to predict what will be assumed in a text and how it will continue or finish, the structure of a complex sentence, the end of a word, etc. Through these strategies, prior knowledge is activated and used to construct meaning from the text.
- Inference Strategies: Ability to complement the text information using conceptual knowledge and linguistic patterns already possessed. Readers use inference to understand what is not explicit in the text and what is developed further below.
- Self-Control Strategy: Ability for readers to actively manage the process while reading. This is a metacognitive activity of self-assessment on the actual process of making sense of the text.
Fixing the Gaze: During reading, the eyes do not move smoothly through each line. They range, hopping and making small tugs. Each of the intervals in which the eye comes to rest is called fixation. During each fixation, the brain processes the information covered in each eye piece.
Visual Information and Non-Visual Information: Visual information is information from the text, obtained through the eyes of the reader. Non-visual information is provided by the reader: their knowledge of the world and language.
Short-Term Memory and Long-Term Memory: Both types of memory are used in reading. Short-term memory is characterized by limited capacity both in time and quantity of information received. It is also called working memory. Long-term memory is characterized by its duration and capacity. Thanks to it, you can retain all that is known about the world, provided that the information has been organized in a way understandable and meaningful to the subject.
Capsule View: A phenomenon that occurs when visual information is very important and the reader cannot use their prior knowledge. This creates an over-reliance on visual information, and the result is that at a glance, the reader only gets to see a few letters instead of whole sentences.
What is Reading?
Reading is a process of interaction between a reader and a text, the process by which the reader tries to meet the objectives that guide their reading.
Readers interpret the texts they read in terms of their reading objectives. Although the content of the text is unchanged, readers may be motivated by different purposes and extract different information. The reader actively constructs the meaning of the text according to their prior knowledge, experience, and the objective guiding their reading.
The goals of reading can be to obtain information, follow instructions to perform a task or activity, read for pleasure, or for entertainment.
The texts that are read can have very different characteristics, and that also influences the transmission of information.
Factors Involved in Comprehension
There are two factors that are considered essential:
- Visual and Non-Visual Information: In the process of reading, it is essential to activate the two sources of information: visual and non-visual information.
Visual information is obtained through the eyes and is the information from the text, but it is not enough. Knowledge of the language in which the text is written, the purpose of reading, and familiarity with the subject matter are needed to decipher the code.
There is a close relationship between visual and non-visual information. There is a reciprocal relationship between the two: the more non-visual information you have, the less visual information is needed. The less non-visual information you have, the more visual information is needed.
The possibility of exchange between the two types of information, however, has limits. It is not that the reader can decrease the reading speed to absorb a greater amount of visual information when the reading becomes difficult. There is a known bottleneck between the eyes and the brain. The brain can easily be overwhelmed by visual information, in which case visual information will be restricted and may even be blocked for a short period. Thus, a basic skill associated with reading is to make the most of what you already know and rely on the minimum amount of information from the eyes.
Reading Goals
Reading is searching for meaning, and the reader must have a purpose to find meaning in the text.
The use of texts and materials without a purpose does not favor any type of goal.
It is therefore essential that students, from the very beginning of learning, are aware that reading is always done with a purpose and that reading without a purpose is meaningless.
Each and every one of the readers who perform activities in the classroom must practice this. In kindergarten, the teacher must act as a model. It is good to read often to students and explain why it is done: to find information on a natural science topic that students are interested in, to locate a phone number in the guide, to consult the dictionary on a matter of spelling, or to enjoy an interesting story.
Cognitive psychology states that all information-gathering processes used by people work in the same way and need the same mental mechanisms for information processing. The information captured begins through the senses and is then stored in the forms of knowledge. Any comprehension activity in general, and therefore reading comprehension, modifies the networks that organize knowledge, that is, develops and modifies the structures of knowledge that the individual had prior to understanding this new information.
The Visual Perception
The first step in the process of reading begins with the acquisition of certain stimuli through the eyes and in close relation to the intentions of the reader to select the stimuli that interest them.
It was believed necessary to train children to properly discriminate a series of strokes: the letters.
Today we know that no type or exceptional degree of visual acuity is needed to discriminate between letters or words in print.
When reading, the eyes are not moving smoothly and continuously, but jump spasmodically from one focal point to another.
These oscillations, hopping and small tugs, in the context of reading, are called fixations. During the jump, the text is not seen.
During each fixation, the brain processes the information covered in each eye piece. It was found that fixations occupy most of the reading time. Fixation time is different depending on the category of the word.
According to Colomer and Camps, the fundamental difference between the perceptual skills of beginning readers and efficient readers lies in the number of signs perceived in each fixation.
Smith highlighted another issue of great importance for the teaching of reading: reading a text with meaning will be much easier than reading a disjointed text.
lkafiojeoighewgioejgoiej
How many letters can be displayed in this list of random letters?
Usually no more than four or five.
Memory
Memory is vital to any process of obtaining and processing information.
There are two types of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory, also called working memory, is of a temporary nature and is specifically required to make sense of what is being processed at any given moment.
Long-term memory is the one that retains information for a long time. We use it when we recall something that happened several days, months, or years ago.
Both types of memory are important for reading.
Short-Term Memory
It is our working memory, where we store what we are currently addressing. It disappears almost instantly so that you can move on to the next task. It is a system so effective that we are rarely aware of its existence. It is characterized by a limited capacity both in time and quantity of information retained.
When we pay attention to what is being stored circumstantially in short-term memory, we cannot attend to anything else.
Reading does not consist of identifying letters or single words. In reality, when reading, short-term memory is not used at all to store letters or even words. This avoids overloading the short-term memory, allowing us to provide the minimum of attention to detail on the printed page and give the greatest possible meaning to what we are viewing. In giving meaning to the words and text in general, the individual ceases to worry about the letters.
Long-Term Memory
It is defined by its high durability and capacity. Each person can hold everything they know about the world in their long-term memory, provided that the information has been organized in an understandable and meaningful way for them.
It is a real network, a structure of knowledge. When you learn something new, the organization of the information already stored in long-term memory is changed or reworked.
The organization of information in a data structure with links is the key for it to be remembered. You can easily check how difficult it is to permanently retain certain information, words, or musical notes that are unconnected. However, it is easy to remember a phrase, a musical melody, or even organized knowledge about a topic.
Both types of memory, therefore, have some limitations. If these limitations can be overcome easily, reading materials must be significant, and the reader should not be too anxious about the possibility of making mistakes or forgetting details.
Knowledge on the Written Language
1. Paralinguistic Knowledge:
This section includes knowledge of various types of conventions: conventions on the distribution and separation of text and conventions in the organization of information for each type of text. Also included is knowledge of typographic elements.
2. Knowledge of Graphophone Relations:
In an alphabetic writing system, understanding the points and their relation to different phonetic units is considered essential. All reading instruction programs should provide children with access to the code.
Learning to decode involves learning the correspondences between the sounds of language and the graphic symbols that represent them.
One difficulty that is presented to the child is to become aware of and identify the sounds of language. When we speak and listen, we do not perceive sounds in isolation, but fused with each other.
To access the code, the child needs to develop a certain phonemic awareness, an awareness that there are abstract units such as phonemes.
The difficulty of this learning means that teachers often forget a basic principle: access to the code must always occur in meaningful contexts.
The decoding strategy has the same weight in the different stages of reading. The expert reader has automated these skills and uses them when reading a word in a foreign language, for example. The apprentice needs to consciously use those skills.
3. Morphological, Syntactic, and Semantic Knowledge:
The expert reader captures the text’s meaning from its organization and division into syntactic units.
The rapid recognition of words or groups of words is one of the key factors. The richness of vocabulary is therefore crucial for students in the comprehension of a text.
It is important to distinguish between words that are important and those that are not important to understand the text.
4. Textual Knowledge:
Recent studies on the language of the text have expanded the traditional description of the linguistic system to consider the text as a larger unit.
Colomer and Camps highlighted new knowledge about text structures: established concepts such as coherence, which is the adaptation of writing to the communicative context, and cohesion, which refers to the meaning relationships between elements of the text that conform to the general superstructure and content.
The knowledge and distinction of the various types of text is also helpful for the reader, allowing them to foreshadow the development of the text in a more predictable way and making it easier to understand the fundamental ideas.
When talking about types of text or superstructure, it is suggested that they act as schemas to which speech writing adapts. This means that regardless of the content, if the author wants to tell a story, it will fit the formal structure of the story.
Knowledge About the World
Understanding is a process by which readers relate what the text says to the information they have stored throughout their lives. Readers need to have a lot of knowledge to understand what they read. New information is understood based on prior knowledge. Since not all readers have the same background, the same experiences, or the same values, it is clear that there will be large differences in the understanding of information.
The Process of Reading: Interactive Perspective
What process does the reader follow to understand a text? There is no single answer to this question. Currently, there are three theoretical models that attempt to explain how understanding is achieved.
Bottom-Up Model
This model proposes that reading processing occurs from the smallest units (letters) to the largest (sentences, paragraphs, text). Educational proposals based on this model emphasize the teaching of decoding skills as a prerequisite for comprehension.
Top-Down Model
This model proposes the opposite of the bottom-up model. Reading processing occurs from more global units to the most discrete. Educational proposals based on this model are based on meaningful units (words and phrases), then proceed, if necessary, to analyze their components. The most radical conceptions deny the necessity of learning decoding skills and have even come to regard them as harmful to good reading.
Interactive Model
It does not focus on the text, like the bottom-up model, or the reader, like the top-down model, but emphasizes the use that the reader makes of prior knowledge for text comprehension. What the subject sees in the text and what the reader contributes are two simultaneous threads in close interdependence.
Reading is an ongoing process of issuing and verification of hypotheses that leads to the construction of meaning and control of that understanding.
The interactive model argues that the understanding of the text is achieved from the interplay between what the reader reads and what they know about a topic. The reading process begins before the reader starts to process the text itself, when the reader begins to raise their expectations about what they are going to read.
Prior to beginning reading, the individual also sets mental goals.
Readers use strategies to construct meaning from the text: strategies for prediction, inference, and self-control:
- Prediction: Prediction is the ability to anticipate what is not specified in the text, to predict or guess what will happen: how a text will continue or end, using grammatical, logical, or cultural clues. We could say that this is practically a reading attitude: to be active and to anticipate what the words say. To train students in the use of this strategy, it is important to develop pre-reading questions that encourage the child to activate association schemes that allow them to formulate hypotheses and subsequently confirm or reject them as they read. An example: What do you think happened?
- Inference: It is a powerful means by which people complete the information available using the conceptual and linguistic knowledge and schemas they already possess. Inference is the ability to understand some particular aspect of the meaning of the text from the rest. That is, it is to overcome the various gaps that appear in the process of building understanding. Exercises should emphasize inference in difficult vocabulary, complex fragments, etc. Students should also be required to interpret meaning from the context.
- Self-Control: Readers actively monitor the process while reading. There are risks involved in predictions and inferences. Sometimes readers make predictions that later turn out to be false, or they find that they have made unsubstantiated inferences. So the reader also has to confirm or reject their previous predictions. The control mechanism involves the reader’s alertness that allows them to detect errors both with respect to subsequent processing and checking hypotheses and their integration into an overall understanding of what is read. The most common problems encountered by students in reading are due to ignorance of the meaning of a word or an ambiguous phrase. These problems must be addressed and corrected in the classroom, and it is good that teachers know what solutions good readers use, such as:
- Ignore the error if it is not indispensable for understanding the text.
- Leave the interpretation suspended until the text provides new information.
- Go back in the reading with the intention of finding the discordant element: rereading a word, considering the above information, the immediate context, etc.
- Find an external solution to the text: consulting the dictionary or encyclopedia, asking a person who understands the topic, and so on.
What is Writing?
Writing is the process by which a meaningful written text is created. The term “writing” is very confusing. We talk about writing referring to the physical act of writing, to reproduce letters on paper.
The first conception focuses on calligraphy. The second, on the graphophone relationship, that is, the correct correspondence of each phoneme of spoken language with its corresponding written form.
These conceptions are prevalent in schools.
In the last period of early childhood education, the focus is on learning graphophone correspondence. You start with the simplest letters and go on to combine each of the consonants with vowels. It is customary to always graduate difficulties.
It is not until 1st or 2nd grade of primary school when the school begins to address the so-called written composition, materialized in the form of writing.
It follows that the social dimension of the written text is neglected in some schools, especially in the first levels.
It was explained that the written text has specific properties that go beyond the simple matching of sounds with spelling.
According to L. Tochisky, these properties are of two types: formal and instrumental. Formal properties are those that characterize writing, and instrumental properties are those that characterize written language.
The learner must master both formal and instrumental properties to write. Learning should contemplate all of them from its inception, including, of course, the first years of early childhood education.
The Process of Writing
Following the theoretical model most widely applied to education, Flower and Hayes argue that the act of writing is composed of three basic processes: planning, drafting, and reviewing, and a control mechanism that is responsible for regulating and deciding which process must act at any given time.
They also involve two other components: the writer’s long-term memory and the communication situation. This will be explained in detail in the following paragraphs.
The Communication Situation
The communication situation contains all the elements external to the writing: the rhetorical problem, the set of circumstances that make an individual decide to write, and the text, which is the answer or solution to this problem.
The rhetorical problem is the concrete situation that produces the writing: topic, audience, and purpose.
The rhetorical problem is the most important element to begin a composition process. The author must begin by analyzing and evaluating the conditions and characteristics of the various points of the problem. A proper analysis of all these aspects is the first step in developing the solution to the problem: the text.
As the text is written, it generates constraints and becomes part of the context.
Long-Term Memory
It includes all the knowledge the writer has registered and stored in their brain: on the thematic content, on the audience, and on the different text structures being used. It also includes the graphic aspect, or the layout of the letters.
For very young students, from early childhood education to the first years of primary school, the knowledge stored in memory will be very limited: very limited content on topics, little knowledge of text structures, and little or no knowledge of the formal properties of writing.
The Writing of Literature
It is a complex activity. It involves basically two types of difficulties interrelated with each other:
- Perceptual-motor and fine motor difficulties: the implementation of writing on a support using a tool.
- Cognitive difficulties: knowledge of the layout of written symbols.
Children are motivated to write and often imitate adult writing. This imitation often occurs in the absence of a model and contains some unconventional forms. Some of these writings are clearly influenced by cursive writing and others by print.
Garton alerts us to this last aspect:
“There is now compelling evidence showing that one-third of children, in their first year of formal schooling, do not have perceptual-motor skills developed enough to produce the forms of the letters with the size and clarity that is so often expected of them.”
And Garton added:
“It is very likely that these children develop an extremely negative attitude toward the writing process as a whole, as it involves spending substantial periods of time practicing and perfecting the shape of the letters. It is surely better to encourage the child to write for fun and to allow them to gradually refine their graphic skills.”
The Process of Writing
The composition of the text develops through various processes and threads that do not occur in a linear fashion.
During the planning process, the writer creates a mental representation. The generating thread brings into play the information that the writer has stored in memory and that is activated during the composition at different times for various purposes. The organizing thread is responsible for classifying the data emerging from memory while formulating objectives. It develops the objectives that will guide the composition process. These processes can be carried out mentally or with some external support.
In the writing process, the writer transforms the generated ideas, the draft text, into a speech that is intelligible and understandable to the reader. In this process, a lot of knowledge is used, some of it low-level, such as composing words and physically organizing the text.
In the reviewing process, the writer reflects on their writing, rereading and revising those aspects deemed necessary to improve the text.