in their pedagogies. Throughout the review, more attention is given to the reading process than the writing process, mainly because there has been more emphasis on reading in the literature.
For instructional purposes, however, the two are closely related and reference to the writing process is included when it is relevant to the argument.
For convenience of expression, the more widely used terms “top-down” and “bottom-up” will be used in this argument. It must be noted, however, that in the literature these terms are
used with different understandings. From a theoretical point of view, the “top” refers to the reader and, more specifically, “the conceptual hypotheses” which the reader generates based on
“knowledge of both the world and language”; the “bottom” refers to the print of the written text McCormick 1988:9. From a more pragmatic point of view, when considering the linguistic
hierarchy of a text, the “top” is considered by some to be the whole piece of prose with which the reader interacts to interpret the meaning, while “bottom” is considered to be the smaller elements
that make up a word letter, morpheme, syllable for example, Rempel 1993:19. Samuels and Kamil 1984 summed up the difference:
One way to look at the difference between top-down and bottom-up models is that the bottom-up models start with the printed stimuli and work their way up to the higher-level stages, whereas the
top-down models start with hypotheses and predictions and attempt to verify them by working down to the printed stimuli Samuels and Kamil 1984:212.
The nature of the reading process is such that whatever theoretical orientation one adheres to top-down or bottom-up, the other is included by most theorists at some stage. For fluent
reading, both the reader and the text, with all of its linguistic features, are necessary; the difference is in the relative influences and the direction of the information processing.
Rising out of research into the reading processes of mature readers, a further theoretical stance has developed and become known as the interactive theory of reading. Before looking
more closely into interactive models of the reading process, it is important to sketch briefly some of the theoretical trends of the literacy process through history and give a background for the two
methods relevant to this research.
2.1.2. Historical background to the theoretical debates on the nature of reading
In the early part of this century, emphasis on reading shifted from perception to cognition with the well-known work of Huey [1908] 1968, who showed that as readers mature they shift
to longer units of perception:
we read by phrases, words, or letters as may serve our purpose best. But … the reader’s acquirement of ease and power of reading comes through increasing ability to read in larger units Huey
1908:116.
A further shift away from emphasis on specific units was developed when Thorndike 1917 defined reading as reasoning. Subsequent research Monroe 1932; Holmes 1953 showed that
reading ability was involved with a multiplicity of skills and processes as discussed by Singer 1985a:11. In the following section on the practical application of theory of the nature of reading,
it is shown that the debates at this time were confined to the significance of the word and meaning, in contrast to the elements below the word level. It was at this time that Gudschinsky
developed the method which came to dominate adult literacy practice in non-industrialised countries for over two decades. Lee 1982:23 puts the method into perspective in this debate by
noting that “as early as 1951 she compiled the Handbook of Literacy which was revised in 1953 and 1957.” The method in the historical setting is further developed below, but it is important to
note here that it was formed before the impact of the “top-down” psycholinguistic theoretical model of reading, which influenced so dramatically the practice of literacy instruction in
industrial nations.
It was not until the mid-1960s, when Goodman began publishing on the topics “miscue analysis” Goodman 1965 and the importance of decoding to meaning, that the emphasis shifted
to psycholinguistic theory. In 1967, his publication of Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game Goodman 1976 had a lasting influence on the debates about the nature of the reading
process e.g., Nicholson 1985; Stanovich 1986. From 1965 to 1976 Goodman worked out his model, publishing a flow chart in 1970. Frank Smith’s publications e.g., 1971, 1978 on
psycholinguistic theory, which strongly supported contemporary linguistics and cognitive psychology, added to the thrust of this new emphasis into the debate. Both Smith and Goodman
were influenced by the general linguistic theory of Chomsky 1965 and Chomsky and Halle 1968. They supported the notion that a basic requirement for a person learning to read is to be
able to handle efficiently both the deep structure which gives meaning and the surface structure sounds and written representations of language. Of Smith’s 1971 publication, Samuels and
Kamil noted the following:
It is not so much a model of reading as it is a description of the linguistic and cognitive processes that any decent model of reading will need to take into account. … Perhaps the greatest contribution
of Smith’s work is to explain how the redundancy inherent at all levels of language letter features, within letters, within words, within sentences, within discourses provide the reader with enormous
flexibility in marshaling resources to create a meaning for the text at hand Samuels and Kamil 1984:184.
This comment shows that, as the theory developed as it was related to the mature reading process and meaning, the emphasis on linguistic and cognitive processes of reading took
precedence.
During the 1970s, however, the debate heightened with proliferation of research into the nature of the reading process. Carroll put forward a list “to specify the components of reading
skills,” where some of the components came out of an analysis of the mature reading process, others came out of a further analysis of those components Carroll 1976:15. During the next
decade, much of the research centred around similar types of important research questions as those put forward by Carroll 1976:16–18, which were concerned with the
•
mature reading process, that is, the way certain components of reading skill affect learning, and
•
ordering of components in the teaching process. At this time, Gough 1972 suggested a linear model which assumed serial, letter-by-letter
reading, but argued that although letters “must be associated with meaning,” how this is accomplished is “the fundamental problem of reading” Gough 1972:513. He concluded that the
child “really plods through the sentence, letter by letter, word by word” Gough 1972:532. Later, he published a postscript and admitted that the serial assumption was wrong, but he still
showed a commitment to the view that “the letter mediates word reading” Gough 1985:687. This bottom-up view was in direct contrast to the views of Goodman and Smith that were
strongly top-down. Apart from Gough’s 1972 controversial model about basic processes, the models most cited in the literature in this time frame deal with the reading process in an
interactive way. The idea of interactivity within the reading process is at the heart of the questions stated above, regarding the
