Reading theories for both first language (L1) and second language (L2) can be categorized into three

perspectives: structural, cognitive, and metacognitive. These perspectives offer insights into how readers
engage with texts and construct meaning.

1. Structural Perspectives (Bottom-Up or Outside-In):

Focus: Primarily on the printed form of the text.

View: Readers are passive recipients, decoding written symbols into aural equivalents.

Criticism: Overemphasis on formal features (words and structure) with insufficient attention to
contextual comprehension factors.

2. Cognitive Perspectives (Top-Down):

Focus: Highlights the interactive nature of reading and constructive comprehension.

View: Reading as a psycholinguistic guessing game where readers sample, hypothesize, confirm or reject,
and develop new hypotheses.

Importance: Background knowledge and schema development are crucial for cognitive inferencing
through contextual cues and hypothesis testing.

3. Metacognitive Perspectives:

Origins: Proposed due to the limitations of structural and cognitive views.

View: Reading is an active meaning construction process where readers use both linguistic information
from the text and internal background knowledge.

Strategies: Skillful readers employ flexible metacognitive strategies to activate background knowledge,
identify and plan reading tasks, and monitor their own comprehension.

Reflection: Metacognition involves being aware of one's reading process and reflecting on
understanding.

Grabe's Synthesis (2014):

Lower-Level Processes: Include automatic word recognition, lexico-syntactic processing, and semantic
processing of the immediate clause into relevant meaning units.

Higher-Level Processing: Involves using strategies for understanding more difficult texts, such as
identifying main ideas, recognizing related information, forming a text model of comprehension, and
creating a situation model of reading through inferencing, background knowledge, strategic processing,
and context constraints.