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ABSTRACT
An attempt has been made in this paper to outline principles that readers, skilled
or beginners, may use to identify linguistic units and how these may be integrated
with planning instruction in reading. We have attempted to isolate what readers
seem to learn, how they refine strategies at the early stages of reading so that
these may be used for instructional purposes. The features that distinguish written
language at various levels have been identified and the abstract relations between
written and spoken codes have been related to reading. The problem of how written
information is divided into chunks of the use of letter sequences in the light
of constraints on sound sequences has been considered. The question of integration
of new and old skills has been raised and the discussion is concluded by outlining
the training of efficient readers. Most of the theoretical points discussed need
further testing and validating in Indian conditions.
In
India we need to establish reading research in a fully co-ordinated manner since
sporadic and unrelated studies do not present a coherent picture. What is needed
is a reading research programme run by linguists, psychologists and educators
to study acquisition of reading, reading skills, transfer from perceptional and
analytic skills, reading speed, reading habits, goals and problems in reading
etc. This is by no means an exhaustive list but only intended to indicate the
wide ranging area of reading research. When one turns to current reading research
(Gibson & Levin : 1975) from other countries to see what lines of development
it projects, it appears that it has mainly concentrated on he school going child
(6 + ) as the typical reader. Research with this age-group leads to the concurrent
study of language acquisition as a maturational process and as a set of acquired
skills. These children learnt to read in literate societies. Can this research
have any implications for the problems of an adult learning to read ?
In Indian rural contexts we get literate as well as semi-literate societies. Are
the learning strategies determined by age, by the amount of previous linguistic
experience, or by transfer of skills from tasks which involve mental skills similar
to those involved in reading ?
Studies that are concerned
with adult learners have focused on the skilled reader. Although there are some
studies of the would be reader, more attention has been paid to the accomplished
reader. Experiments have measured the rate of reading, the degree of comprehension,
the modes of organization of the meaning and the retention of content. There is
also a great deal of interest in how new reading skills are integrated with old.
(Wright, 1964 ; Kolers, 1964 ; Levin and Willliams, 1970 ; Smith, 1971).
From the perspective of this research adult educators may be able to see the relevance
of the problem solving, how information derived from a written page is classified
and the eventual integration of new knowledge with that already acquired.
An adult, who is learning to read, brings to the task of two kinds of well established
strategies ; strategies for processing visual information and strategies for processing
linguistic codes as far as the spoken language is concerned. In order to survive,
the adult constantly determines which features of visual information are relevant.
Similarly in problem solving, the adult lives. If adult educators wish to relate
formal learning situations, then these situations must be observed and analysed.
Learning to read involves discrimination of visual cues and therefore acquisition
of reading is facilitated by the general strategy for problem solving which includes
the sequence of collection of information and record keeping (Eisorfer and Lawton
: 1973 ; Cole and Scribner : 1974) It has been pointed out that behaviour, which
means using senses for oriented or observing, shares many functional properties
with systematic search necessary to problem solving. Even in children, by the
age of six or seven, which is the school going age, random trails give way to
systematic search in problem solving-systematic search which is deliberate, sequentially
organized and has internally consistant logic. This search involves formulating
of a hypothesis and testing ; consequentially rejecting or accepting the hypothesis.
A skilled reader goes through a similar process and his skill can be measured
in terms of the number of correct allowable predictions he make about the still
unread portion of the text as well as his earlier knowledge of the language.
Attention is a known prerequisite of any learning behaviour and it is equally
important in selection, organization and interpretation of visual information.
The child at six plus, learning to read, is selecting distinctive features of
graphemes, organizing those in sets and interpreting visual information at different
linguistic levels. Can children and adults be pretrained in selective attention
so that reading is facilitated? It is not only possible but advisable to plan
on pertaining in problem solving or selective observation. The situational context
in such pretraining must be varied so that the skills trained can be transfered
to discrimination of graphemes, associating of grapheme phoneme pairs and wholistic
recognition of words and sentences or texts.It is interesting to note at thus
point that children and adults who cannot read can discriminate between varities
of written information, between prose and poetry, between bills and advertisements,
between information works at higher levels of structure before it works at lower
levels needs more careful study and discrimination. What is cited here are casual
observations.
While the transfer of skills from observational
behaviour is known, the problem of possible interference from irrelevant observing
response has not as yet been investigated. In order to understand interference,
cross model interference i.e., auditory as well as visual, it is necessary to
look at basic psychological processes involved in reading which explain how selective
attention is developed, how irrelevantstimulation is eliminated. That irrelevant
visual stimulation does not interfere beyond a certain limit points to the existence
of a filtering process i.e., that which separates for distinctive features and
a unique pattern combination of these features. The other interesting question
is about the nature of the scheme which the reader has focussed his attention
on and with which he compares the stimulus pattern. This is the reader's search
stratergy about which we do not know much.
The next question
to be determined is the role of naming letters If letters are bundles of distinctive
features, naming them sets them apart from other letters. If he discovery involves
subvocal naming of letters, what kind of auditory background confusions will hamper
this process especially when the medium of instruction is audio-visual ? The mediation
of names of letters suggests further lines of inquiry and experimentation in methods
of teaching reading.
Critical discrimination, it may be
predicted, will be equally important in letter discrimination. Another thing we
do not know about search strategy is whether inputs which share certain features
are processed in a parallel fashion neisser or through a hierarchy of differentiating
features. Further, we need also to find out whether age influences search strategy
and if it does then we need to use different techniques in reading readiness programmes
for children and adults.
Reading involves not only association
of patterns of visual stimuli with aural-oral pattern but also retention of these
associations and recalling these in new contexts. Skill in reading depends on
the facility with which the reader learns to decode new visual sequences. on the
establishing of transfer from known to unknown patterns, It can be predicted that
such a transfer of skill is found only where the components of the code have been
learnt. This would mean that reders taught by the whole word method and who as
yet have not learnt component to sound correspondences, will not makes this transfer,
However, it is possible to hypothesize that with adult learners it may not be
necessary to teach component correspondence overtly and deliberately ;they would
very probably the code themselves. This needs extensive testing.
The role of higher order units in facilitating perception and retention of written
language has been known for some time now, but is has had no impact on the teaching
of reading. While there is evidence to show that syntactic and spelling patterns
influence the perception of written language, it is not clear what role the sequential
probabilities of one letter following another play in the perception of a word.
Beyond the letter to letter probabilities, are there any rules for mapping sequences
of letters to sound which might help in forming units of reading ?
In his book on "Linguistics and Reading" Fries explored he role of spelling
patterns in orthography, Hocket and venezky worked out for spelling to sound mapping.
A hypothesis derived from this work that spelling sound correspondences facilitate
unit formation was tested in tachitoscopic experiments in the Cornell Laboratory
and the finding was that pronounceable combinations are read better than unpronounceable
ones. This is evident in the response of young subjects at the age of nine plus.
Surprisingly enough even congenitally deaf subjects (College students) read pronounceable
combinations with greater ease. This indicates that spelling patterns have a structure
of their own. Sound is not necessary for processing higher order units in reading.
A skilled reader uses his knowledge of such rules and of the structure of his
language and higher order relation between systems. A skilled reader may process
written material at different levels probably simultaneously and in so doing use
graphic information processed into chunks ; and how he does this needs to be studied.
How does a non-accomplished reader, child or adult, discover rules for himself
in mapping sequences of letters to sound which process graphic material into units
for reading ? This has been explored by Gibson et al (1967). They tried to find
out whether when a beginning reader (5 + ) learns to discriminate members of a
set, he makes use of the structural constraints within he stimulus set and then
does he learn to look for such structure in new problems consisting of similar
kind of material. Further, does this interself faciliate abstraction of patterns
where the structure involved is different ? The finding showed evidence of forming
learning sets progressive increase in problems solved correctly. This should be
of great interest to adult educators in planning their work and such findings
need to be duplicated with adult learners.
For a long time
now reading research has tried to integrate structural discoveries of linguistic
science with reading instruction in an attempt to improve it. Great deal of thought
has been given to how young readers use their knowledge of spoken language in
learning to read. More recent developments in the formal analysis of syntax and
semantics could also be used to understand different aspects of reading skills.
There can be two ways in which grammar can be used in the acquisition of reading
skill. (Bever and Bower, 1966). While great many readers process visual inputs
directly without recourse to the mediation of auditory process. It can be hypothesized
hat 'Visual readers' can comprehend written language faster and better than 'auditory
readers'. This implies that reading can and should be taught as a visual skill
enabling the reader to analyse written sentences into their fundamental psychological
dieectly structure, with-out auditory intervention. If a reader can be trained
to arrive at linguistically correct ans pertinent syntactic and semantic interpretation
from the way written sentences look rather than form the way they might sound
than dependence on habits learnt in auditory perception call be avoided.
Most transformational linguists today will accept that the perception and comprehend
of a sentence involves the discovery of an appropriate deep structure for which
the semantic rules can provide an interpretation and that the phonological and
the surface phrase structure is more directly representated in speech but the
deep structure is not represented directly. However, many experiments indicate
that the discovery of the underlying structure is the perceptional goal of the
listener or the reader. REaserch has shown that subjects use the underlying structure
of sentences to form perceptual sets, and to remember sentences. Skill in reading
m,ay then be viewed as an ability to exract from the visual information the undeeerlying
structure of sentences. Of course, any reader, child or adult, has a well developed
perceptual routing for analysis of spoken language and he can choose to use auditory
perception routine in reading. However the reader also has well established routines
in processing visual information and therefore nothing can interfere if he wants
to develop an entirely visual perceptual strategy for the comprehension of written
sentences. Readers using this independent strategy would develop underlying structures
directly from visual inputs. In both non-visual and visual reading there is maximization
of the use of available psychological processes. Non-visual or auditory readers
may be limited in the speed and accuracy with which they read, comprehend and
remember, since there is a normal speed at which spoken language proceeds. Several
studies indicate that while an auditory reader gets superficial details of sentences
correctly, the visual reader is less concerned with the phonological and actual
surface structure of the sentences and more with the underlying structure. Another
finding is that while 'auditory readers' tend to process material from left to
right to left depending on the way their language is written, 'visual readers'
are free to process written material in any order that facilitates direct visual
discovery or underlying structure.
It appears that the
first word recognized by 'visual' readers was the underlying subject regardless
of the phrase relation in the phrase structure. Since visual readers can comprehend
faster and better than non-visual readers and are unable to identify the syntactic
form of the sentences, it is necessary to test these findings at levels higher
than the sentence and then study the methods by which a visual reader may be trained.
It has been found that the attentional process underlying visual reading is docile
and easily trained. Therefore, a visual reader is not only more efficient but
it is easy to learn to become a visual reader. The significance of this to reading
programmes in adult education is obvious.
R E F E
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ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
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