- Two important functions of reading are, first of all, reading for communicative

purposes, and second, reading for educational purposes

- Top-down processing:
- Involves using our pre-existing knowledge (our schemata) to make sense of
what we read.
- Top-down: the reader begins with an hypothesis, or set of hypotheses, about
the meaning of a text that they are reading.
- Top-down reading: begins with the idea that comprehension resides in the
reader. The reader uses background knowledge, makes predictions, and
searches the text to confirm or reject the predictions that are made. Grabe
and Stoller (2002) point out that in a top-down model of reading,
comprehension is directed by the reader’s goals and expectations. A reading
passage can thus be understood even if not all of the individual words are
understood. Within a top down approach to reading, the teacher focuses on
meaning-generating activities rather than on mastery of the bottom-up skills of
letter, sound and word recognition.
- Bottom up:
- Bottom-up reading begins by matching individual letters of the alphabet with
their corresponding sound and then blending these together to form words
- Words are combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences, and then
these are combined to form longer stretches of text such as paragraphs.
- In reading, bottom-up Reading processing involves decoding written symbols
into sound
- Interactive reading:
- Combines elements of both bottom-up and top-down approaches.
- For example, most readers begin reading by using top-down reading
strategies until there is a problem and then they shift to bottom-up strategies
(slowing down to decipher new words in the text).

[For what I can infer, the students of my lesson would be using top-down processing as the
lesson is in the middle of a unit. The students have been working with the general topic for
some lessons already but concentrating on other skills etc. But they are using pre-existing
knowledge to complete the activities.]

- Build a strong vocabulary base: without the words to express our ideas,
communication is impossible.
- Teach comprehension: It is important for readers to be thinking about what they’re
doing as they read, a process that Anderson refers to as comprehension monitoring.
A useful technique for doing this is called ‘questioning the author’
- Encourage Readers to Transform Strategies into Skills: Strategies are ‘the mental
and communicative processes that learners deploy to learn a second language.
Skills, on the other hand, reside within the language user. When a learner has
practiced a particular strategy to the point where he or she can apply it automatically,
without consciously having to do so, we can say they have acquired the strategy as a
skill.
- Extensive reading involves reading a lot with the goal of overall understanding, not
100 percent comprehension. When you encourage your learners to read extensively
 outside the classroom, make sure that you emphasize the fact that they should be
reading for meaning.
- Intensive reading involves the detailed reading of shorter texts than extensive
reading. The goal is 100 percent comprehension as well as an explicit focus on
language features such as grammar items and unknown vocabulary
- Extensive reading is a fluency-oriented activity, while intensive reading is accuracy-
oriented.
- Graphic organizers are visual representations of the content or concepts in a written
text. Most also show the relationships between the concepts. In other words, they
present the content of the text as a visual rather than as a continuous stream of
written words.
- Pre-task: you could give your students a graphic organizer, and ask them to
study it and discuss the ideas contained in it. The students could then read a
text on which the graphic organizer is based.
- Task: learners could be required to create their own graphic organizer by, for
example, reading a text and transforming the content into a table, chart,
diagram, or concept map. This task can be made easier for weaker students if
you give them a partially completed graphic organizer.