Learner’s Contribution
Readers themselves may be the best source for feedback. Teachers can check comprehension by asking their students open-ended questions, having them justify answers, or by collecting summaries. Celece-Murcia (1991) presents many approaches to analyzing text and developing understanding of the author’s intent depending on the reading. She especially advocates pre- and post- reading discussions with children to allow them to realize schemata is brought to a text and becomes modified by it.
Inessential unknown vocabulary words disrupt comprehension unless the reader recognizes that they can be ignored. Strategy is an integral part of learning, more relevant than specific linguistic knowledge. How readers solve problems is a better focus than looking at what is problematic for them (Cohen et al. 1979). Language based and schema based problems for readers are dealt with in a variety of ways researchers are only beginning to be aware of. Learners who question and monitor what they read should realize it is a natural part of good reading not a weakness of their knowledge in the new language. Block, (Ibid.) suggests recognizing the source of the problem is the first step in applying a strategy and quotes Carrell (1989) as saying that the difficulty in the application of a strategy is when it is appropriate and why this is useful.
Conclusions
Perceptions of reality are restricted by the conventions used to record them. Meaning is decoded in a mysterious process that still is not fully understood. Work done on AI has led towards a new respect for human potential by developing models of how minds work. Software attempting to imitate top-down processing alone has not resulted in perfection, lending support to other ideas. The task of reading is accomplished through an interaction of top-down and bottom-up processing. A person’s past knowledge allows text deconstruction but is simultaneously added to during the process by new information. Technology is evolving and models depicting the paradigm of gaining knowledge are being built upon (Ackley, 2001 in the Economist).
Becoming a fluent reader involves finding connections to one’s own life and making new information part of one’s own knowledge. The development of principled flexible skills that can be applied to different reading tasks is one of the most effective things from a reading class (McDonough and Shaw Ibid. p. 112). Learners as well as educators can better understand what messages are in a text by examining it with a number of approaches.
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Schema theory offers insight on the way knowledge is constructed but is far from a complete unveiling of the mysterious process of reading.