6. • Reading ability will best be developed in
association with writing, listening, and
speaking activity.
7. • Even inthose courses thatmay be labelled “reading” your
goals willbe best achieved by capitalizingon the
interrelationshipof skills, especially the reading-writing-
connection.
• So we focus on reading as a component of general second
languageproficiency, but only in the perspective of the whole
picture of interactive languageteaching.
8. 1. Reading:A psycholinguisticguessing game.
• This title of Goodman’s (1970) seminal work
on reading captures the spirit of the bottom
up of the process of decoding meaning from
the printed page.
• Readers must first recognize a multiplicity of
linguistic signals (Letters, morphemes,
syllables, words, phrases, grammatical cues,
discourse markers) and use their linguistic
data, processing mechanisms, to impose
some sort of order on these signals.
9. • These data-driven processing obviously
requires sophisticated knowledge of the
language itself. Then the reader selects
from among all these information those
data that makes some sense, that cohere,
that “mean”. Virtually all reading involves a
risk-a guessing game. Beacause readers
must, through this puzzle-solving process,
infer meanings, decide what to retain, and
not to retain, an move on.
