This document discusses various aspects of reading comprehension and effective reading strategies. It addresses topics like top-down and bottom-up processing, coherence and cohesion, referencing, and features of well-written texts. It also discusses how good readers adjust their skills based on the text, use metacognition to connect different processing levels, and combine old and new strategies. Lexical accessibility and using various clues and knowledge sources are presented as ways to improve understanding.

1. Language and Writing expression IV
Stella Saubidet
I.S.F.D. N°18
HALLER, Susana
ZARZA, Cristian
CONTRERAS, Abigail
QUINTANA, Alejandro
CASTORINA, Carla.
READING

2. DECODE
READING INTERPRET
UNDERSTAND

3. TOP-DOWN PROCESSING
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE DISCOURSE KNOWLEDGE PURPOSE FOR READING
PRAGMATICS
METACOGNITION
INTERPRETATION OF THE TEXT
LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE READING STRATEGIES
BOTTOM-UP

4. EFFECTIVE READERS
ADJUST TO THE MATERIALS
FIT THE SKILLS TO THE TYPE OF TEXT
FIT THEIR PERSONAL OBJECTIVE FOR READING.
ABANDON NONSUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES
SELECT NEW ONES
COMBINE OLD- NEW

5. GOOD READERS
TOP-DOWN BOTTOM-UP
MENTAL
QUESTIONS
ONGOING
QUESTIONS
REASON
OR
PURPOSE
COMBINE
CO-TEXT

6. METACOGNITION
METACOGNITIVE AWARENESS PROCESSING STRATEGIES
CONNECTS
TOP-DOWN BOTTOM-UP
COMBINE

7. FEATURES OF A WELL-WRITTEN TEXT
FACILITATE THE INTERPRETATION OF THE TEXT DURING THE READING
PROCESS.
COHERENCE COHESION

8. COHERENCE
COHERENCE COHESION
TEXT BASED
READER CENTERED TEXT-SCHEMATA
USE OF STRATEGIES MATCH THE TEXT

9. COHERENCE
THE WRITER THE READER
THE WRITTEN TEXT
INTERACTIVE
PROCESS

10. COHERENCE
COHERENCE IS:
THE
RESULT OF
THE
WRITER’S
PLAN
RELATES TO
THE
DISCOURSE
WORLD
PRAGMATICS
FEATURES
CONTENT
AREA
RHETORICAL ORGANIZATION-SEQUENCE-
STRUCTURE

11. COHERENCE
WIDDOWSON DIALOG
READER (NONRECIPROCAL PARTICIPANTS) WRITER
PERSUASION
DECLARATION
TO BE UNDERSTOOD SUGGESTION

12. COHESION
Overt feature of
the text that
provides:
UNITY CONNECTEDNESS

13. COHESION
“Linguistic
knowledge”
It relies
on:
GRAMMATICAL
DEVICES
LEXICAL
DEVICES
It relates to the reader’s linguistic
competence.

14. COHESIVE CHAIN
➔Elements in a text that have the
same referent or classification.
➔It ties the parts of a text into a
whole.

15. TYPES OF REFERENCE:
❖ENDOPHORIC REFERENCE: WITHIN THE TEXT (BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING)
ANAPHORIC (BACKWARDS)
“I went out with Jo on Sunday. She looked awful.”
CATAPHORIC (FORWARD)
“ When he arrived, John noticed that the door was open.”
❖EXOPHORIC REFERENCE: CONTEXT OUTSIDE THE TEXT (TOP-DOWN
PROCESSING)

16. COHESIVE BUT NOT COHERENT
Example:
You may not fully understand the reasons underlying the incident, so let me
try to explain. Namely, it may help your understanding to know that Peter had
not been happy about the oranges, after all. Nor was the other Peter ever
again able to fly after the aforementioned fruity explanation. Then, weeks
later, he realised that it was because my fruit and wings rationale is lacking in
substance. If that is all, you may find it hard to get the point of what I'm driving
at. Nevertheless, I think it was worth trying to explain.

17. COHERENT BUT NOT COHESIVE
Example:
Summer was over. The boy went to school. The building: Peter had
never liked it. All the other class members became easy targets of the
lawmaker's son's gun. At 8:15 the massacre began. 7 children would
not go home. The last words of the juvenile perpetrator: "I hate
Mondays".

18. Comprehension problems
General characteristic
We, as readers, often face a dilemma with respect to the interpretation of a
message or information in a text.
This issue partially occurs when there is a mismatch between the writer’s
point of view and the reader’s point of view.
Reader’s expectation can also lead to misinterpretation of a text even if
there is no mismatch.

19. Comprehension problems
Complex problems
• Noun phrases can sometimes cause misunderstanding in texts as we often can
not determine which is the head of the sentence. (e.g “common prescribed
drugs”)
• Adjectival clauses with deleted subjects can also be misleading as they
interfere with the identification of the head and its modifiers. As a result, this will
mislead the reader. (e.g “Science-based technology has been described as the
principal tool”)
• Reference is another problem as English often creates ambiguity in sentences.
(e.g “Peter talked to Carl, and then went to his house”)

20. How can we improve it?
We can improve reading comprehension by doing the following things:
• try to find where the text appeared. (e.g book, magazine, newspaper, etc.)
• try to find when it was published and think of the issue it was concerned at that time.
• find out who the writer is.
• get a general idea of the writer’s posture.
• scan the text and search for key sentences that can help you to construct all the coherence
of the text
• rely on grammar books in order to understand the structure of complex sentences and the
identification of head nouns.

21. Understanding a text
● Lexical Accessibility: systematic organization of vocabulary
● Strategies for reading: sets of steps that good readers use to make
sense of text

22. Read the sentence
“...And the bird haunted me for the rest of my life...”
What does HAUNT mean?

23. Lexical Accessibility
How to cope with interpretation;
Personal Knowledge Textual information
Interpretation
Tittle
General
knowledge Semantic
clues
Syntactic
clues

24. Strategies for reading
● Language knowledge
● Discourse and sociocultural knowledge
● General knowledge (Prior)

25. Bibliography
BOOK: Celce-Murcia, M and Olshtain, E. (2000): Discourse and Context in
Language Teaching- A Guide for language Teachers. Chapter 7 U.K: CUP