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that call upon the reading abilities needed to integrate information Enright, et al.,
2000; Perfetti, Rouet and Britt, 1999
Reading for general comprehension, when accomplished by a skilled fluent reader, requires very rapid and automatic processing of words, strong skills
in forming a general meaning representation of main ideas, and efficient
coordination of many process under very limited time constraints.
3. Skills for Reading Competence
According to Brown 2004: 187-188 there are two skills in reading, micro- and macro- skills.
1 Micro skills
a Discriminating among the distinctive graphemes and orthographic pattern of
English. b
Retaining chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory. c
Processing writing at an efficient rate of speed to suit the purpose. d
Recognizing a core of words, and interpret word order patterns and their significance.
e Recognizing grammatical word classes noun, verbs, etc. system tense,
agreement, and elliptical forms. f
Recognizing that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical form.
g Recognizing cohesive devices in written discourse and their role in signalling
the relationship between and among clauses.
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2 Macro skills
a Recognizing the rhetorical forms of written discourse and their significance
for interpretation. b
Recognizing the communicative function of written text, according to form and purpose.
c Inferring context that is not explicit by using background knowledge.
d From events, ideas, etc. infer links, and connection between events, deduce
causes and effect, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
e Distinguishing between literal and implied meaning.
f Detecting culturally specific references and interpret them in a context of the
appropriate cultural schemata. Developing and using a battery of reading strategies, such as scanning and
skimming, detecting discourse markers, guessing the meaning from context, and
activating schemata for the interpretation of text.
4. Model of Reading
It is stated by Grabe and Stoller 2002: 31-36 that there are two kinds of models of reading, namely: metaphorical models of reading and specific models
of reading. There are three main models of metaphorical models of reading. 1
Bottom-up reading models Bottom-up models suggest that all reading follows a mechanical pattern in
which the reader creates a piece-by-piece mental translation of the
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information in the text, with little interference from the reader’s own background knowledge.
2 Top-down models
Top-down models assumes that reading is primarily directed by reader goals and expectations. Top-down models characterize the reader as someone who
has a set of expectation about text information and samples enough information from the text to confirm or reject these expectations.
3 Interactive models
The seeming compromise to satisfy everyone is to propose interactive models of reading. The simple idea behind this view is that one can take useful ideas
from a bottom-up perspective and combine them with key ideas from a top- down view. So, word recognition needs to be fast and efficient, but
background knowledge is a major contributor to text understanding, as in inferencing and predicting what will come next in the text.
There are four main models of specific models of reading. 1
Psycholinguistic Guessing Game Model This model portrays reading comprehension as a universally applicable
iterative process of: a hypothesising, b sampling and c confirming information based on background knowledge, expectation about the text, a
sampling of surface features of the text and context information from the text. 2
Interactive Compensatory Model This model argues that: a readers develop efficient reading processes, b
less-automatic processes interact regularly, c automatic processes operate
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relatively independently and d reading difficulties lead to increased interaction and compensation, even among processes that would otherwise be
more automatic. 3
Word Recognition Model Most current version of word recognition models are based on connectionist
theories of how the mind organises information and learns from exposure to text. The key point is that these models are fundamentally bottom-up in
orientation, and they account for a considerable amount of what we currently know about word recognition processes under time constraints.
4 Simple View of Reading Model
This model argues that reading comprehension is composed of a combination of word recognition abilities and general comprehension abilities typically
measured by listening comprehension.
5. Types of Reading
