Reading Is A Conscious And Unconscious Thinking Process Essay

Reading is a “conscious and unconscious thinking process” (Mikulecky, 2008, p. 1) in which several reading strategies need to be applied in order to have a better understanding of a particular text. In order to make this understanding happen, the reader has to compare the information that is presented in the text and connect it with the schemata he or she has (Mikulecky,2008). In order to teach students to read in an effective way, teachers need to make the use of interactive lessons which will allow students to activate their schemata, provide them opportunities to talk about what they comprehended from the text. At the same time, teachers need to make students aware of the benefits of reading extensively (developing …show more content…
Some strategies that are part of this approach are scanning, anticipation, questioning, re- reading the text, think aloud, summarizing, locate key words, text structure, etc. which help students to focus on specific details of the text. A good example that is based on the bottom up approach is the one suggested by the British council which consists on asking learners to read aloud a passage of a text and it is considered as based on this approach since it do not encourage students to focus on the meaning of the text, instead of that its goal is to focus on word forms (2006). Another example is asking the students to try to get “understanding of affixation to guess meaning” (British Council, 2006), which is a clear example of a bottom up approach since with it, students focus particular parts of a word instead of the whole text (Alderson, …show more content…
On the one hand, we have the strategies which are part of the top down approach: inferring, making connections, predicting, visualizing, schemata, and context clues. The first strategy known as inferring refers to the process of “reading between the lines” (Moore, n./d.); this process basically consists on using the information available in a text in order to guess the information that is not explicitly expressed (Kispal, 2008); a good example of inferring is the one suggested by Lofthouse (n./d.) in which the reader reads: the waves rushed up around his legs and he could feel the coarse sand between his toes, and infer that this person was at the beach. The second reading strategy is making connections which is refered to the process of “Reading beyond lines” (Moore, n./d.); it consists on taking the new information presented in the text and draw on the memories, knowledge, experiences and emotions the students already have about it and realate them with the new information in order to understand it (Adolescent Literacy Learning, 2016); an example of this strategy is when students consider the variety of texts they have experienced before, and relate them with the new text by using the phrase this reminds me of.... in order to get a better understanding (Kardash, 2004). The third strategy known as predicting is