Our Model of Reading Process 

After our group discussion about reading process, the following illustration is what we came up with to explain the process of reading. We used inspiration software to draw our map. click here to view the map larger.

  

 

Since last week, going through the activities during the class, reading different articles about reading process and related Models made me realize what a simplistic idea I had about reading. So in the following section I am trying to make an attempt to explain my understanding of reading process after reading the literature and provide some resources for the readers.

Reading Process

Definition: Reading process is a psycholinguistic process. It starts with a linguistic surface representation encoded by a writer and ends with meaning which the reader constructs. There is thus an essential interaction between language and thought in reading. The writer encodes thought as language and the reader decodes language to thought.

Reading is an interactive, problem-solving process of making meaning from texts

History: Reading research is just a little more than 100 years old. In fact, it was the year 1879 when Emile Javal published his first paper on eye movements; James McKeen Cattell's still-cited paper on seeing and naming letters versus words was published in 1886. Surprisingly, serious attempts at building explicit models of the reading process - models that describe the entire process from the time the eye meets the page until the reader experience the "click of comprehension" - have a history of a little more than 30 years. 

There are a variety of factors that accounts for the observed burst in model-building activity from 1965 to present. Surely the changes that occurred in language research and psychological study of mental processes played a major role. The advent of what has come to be known as psycholinguistic perspective (Goodman, 1967/1976, 1970, SMITH, 1971) pushed the field to consider underlying assumptions about basic processes in reading...

... from 7 Models of the Reading Process by S. Jay Samuels and Michael L. Kamil

A reading model is a graphic attempt “to depict how an individual perceives a word, processes a clause, and comprehends a text.” (Singer and Ruddell 1985). A good model is model that has three characteristics:unfold the past, explain the present, and predict the future. 

Some Resources: 

• Resource # 1 - very interesting with related videos
• Resource # 2
• Resource # 3
  
• Resource # 3
• Resource #4
• Resource # 5

The reading process involves:

• Pre-reading
• Reading
• Responding
• Exploring
• Post reading
• Applying 

Stage 1: Pre-reading - Pre-Reading Strategies Include:

• Activating Background Knowledge
• Setting purposes for reading
• Making predictions and previewing a book
• Going on a Picture Walk
• Making a KWL map
• Questioning and making predictions about a story

Stage 2: Reading – Responding and Exploring

There are a variety of ways to engage students in the reading process.

• Modeled reading (reading aloud to students)

• Shared reading
• Guided reading
• Independent reading

• Making Connections
• Predicting

• Before reading
• During reading
• After reading

• Developing Language skills
• Synthesizing

Stage 3: Post-Reading – Applying

Strategies Include:

• Story retelling all or part of a story
• Discussing favorite parts or elements of a story
• Answering questions
• Comparing to another book
• Writing new ending
• Drawing a picture about the story
• Playing a game related to the story
• Creating a radio play or other kind of performance

The Cuing  System of English Language

1- Graphophonic (Visual) - Letter-Sound correspondences 

2- Semantic (Meaning) - Context of the sentence, Background Knowledge 

 3 - Syntactic (Grammatical Patterns)