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
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mature reading process, that is, the way certain components of reading skill affect learning, and
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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
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main characteristics
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necessary components, and
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best ways of teaching reading and writing. The interactive models will be covered as a group in the next section.
2.1.3. Interactivity in theoretical models and the nature of reading
As early as 1969, Ruddell in his first model of reading, drew upon current linguistic theory and psycholinguistic research and made use of feedback loops and the reader’s “affective
mobilizers” and “cognitive strategies” to indicate the reader’s interaction in the reading process at each phase shown in the model Ruddell 1969:464–465. In referring to the significance of
theoretical models of the reading process for second or foreign language readers, Barnett noted the importance of remembering that “models are usually partial rather than complete, that they
are often subject to later revisions, depending on research conducted, and that they are not programs for reading pedagogies” Barnett 1989:3–4.
There was an explosion in empirical research and theoretical explanations at this time and Barnett’s statement appeared to hold true for a number of models. Ruddell revised his model in
1972 Ruddell and Bacon 1972 and again in 1985 when it was called “the interactive model,” which set out to demonstrate clearly the many different processes shown to act simultaneously in
the reading process. This revised model Ruddell and Speaker 1985
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includes all aspects of the reading process
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demonstrates the simultaneity of the different components, but
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gives little indication of sequencing to guide the practitioner. The matter of simultaneity is one of the major difficulties for the practitioner, because the
application from theory to practice is not clearly defined in these models. In 1974, LaBerge and Samuels developed the Automatic Information Processing Model, a
bottom-up view of reading which has gone through several revisions. In this model, the criteria for fluent readers is accuracy and automaticity at the decoding stage, with heavy emphasis on the
role of attention. After Rumelhart’s 1977 Interactive Model appeared as a reaction to the strictly bottom-up emphasis of the first model and to Gough’s bottom-up model, the second
revision included feedback loops as interconnecting components. These feedback loops in the second model permitted the “end products of comprehension to influence what occurs earlier in
the processing sequence” Samuels and Kamil 1984:196. This addition put the model in the interactive category and subsequent research led to a number of further modifications to the
model.
In Rumelhart’s 1977 model, both bottom-up and top-down processes occur simultaneously or alternately. Rumelhart made a significant contribution to the debate by contending “that
reading can be described only in terms of a system of highly interactive, parallel processing units, completely bidirectional in their interaction” Lovett 1981:6. The importance of this
model is put into perspective by Lovett:
Rumelhart’s 1977 model maintains the conceptual gains of the analysis-by-synthesis approach— that is, the characterization of reading as an essentially cognitive activity achieved through a very
active mode of perceptual processing; it is superior to this class of models generally, however, for its heuristic promise and particularly for its potential to generate testable hypotheses. … In the analysis-
by-synthesis tradition, the mechanisms to accommodate interactional feedback are unidirectional,
operating exclusively from the top i.e., most cognitive level down. In contrast, Rumelhart’s model is noteworthy for its complete bidirectionality and for the extent to which an interaction of processes
truly defines the act of reading Lovett 1981:6.
The “complete” bidirectionality of the model incorporating “perceptual processing,” as well as processes from the top the “most cognitive level”, sets it apart in terms of practical application
with “an interaction of processes” which Lovett claims “truly defines the act of reading.”
The empirical research that followed the publication of Rumelhart’s model verifies its importance and, as mentioned above, models were revised to accommodate the bidirectional
feedback looping. In 1981, Goodman also stated that his model was interactive, however, in 1984 when discussing the unity in reading, he favoured the transactional view. In this view, both
the writer and the reader construct a text “through transactions,” the first with the “developing text” and the second “with the published text” Goodman 1984:80. Regardless of these
differences in theory development, the top-down bias is still prominent in the practical outworking of Goodman’s model: “whole language teachers operate from an examined theory of
how language, thought, and knowledge develop holistically and in support of each other” Goodman 1992:49.
Likewise, in the Interactive Activation Model of McClelland and Rumelhart 1981 the decided bias toward bottom-up processes is evident where perceptual processing takes place in a
system in which there are several levels of processing with a representation of the input at different levels—feature, letter, word—and with input from higher levels.
Stanovich 1980, 1984 followed on from Rumelhart’s “basic interactive idea that recognition takes place via the simultaneous amalgamation of information from many different
knowledge sources” Stanovich 1984:15, but added a compensatory factor. The assumption was that “a deficit in any knowledge source results in a heavier reliance on other knowledge sources,
regardless of their level in the processing hierarchy” Stanovich 1980:63.
The research movement of model-building from the unidirectional linear models to bidirectional, interactive parallel-processing models, such as those developed by Rumelhart and
Stanovich, has a bearing on the development of the two methods used in the project: the Gudschinsky method more representative of the former unidirectional and the Multi-Strategy
method more representative of the latter bidirectional. The detail given to the models in this section has relevance to the practical outworking of the models in the classroom, as will be
shown in a later section.
Stanovich 1991b added to the ongoing debate when he emphasised the central place of word recognition in the reading process. He drew on documentation of research related to the
“contemporary” models which diverged from the “earlier ‘classic’ bottom-up and top-down” models discussed above. His discussion covered
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the concept of word recognition in relation to reading comprehension
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automaticity LaBerge and Samuels 1974
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the role of context, and
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phonological coding within the word recognition process. In conclusion, he stated:
Word recognition remains the central subprocess of the complex act of reading. This statement in no way denies that the goal of reading is to extract and construct meaning from textual material. It only
serves to emphasize that developing skill at recognizing words is the major determinant of reading
