Approaches to Reading: Bottom-Up, Top-Down and Interactive Approaches

BBI3223: Approaches to Reading and Writing (2nd and 3rd Lecture)

I know it is super late to be posting this, but hey, better late than never.
So, here's my update on the second week of Reading and Writing class.

Dr. Ikhlas gave a quick recap on what was taught on Tuesday's class (which I did not attend, I'm so sorry Dr. Ikhlas 😭). Luckily, she had uploaded the slides on Putrablast, and I did manage to do some self-study. I was super stoked when I saw 'Macavity' there! It got me all curious as what was taught in the previous class. Turns out Macavity was an example to a reading approach called 'Bottom-Up'. The Bottom-Up approach talks about the smallest unit of comprehension and building it to something meaningful. This approach is suitable for children and foreign language learners.

Fast forward to Thursday's class (which I attend), we talked about 'Top-Down and Interactive Approaches'. The Top-Down Approach had huge emphasis on the reader (you) and our own backgrond knowledge. It is an approach where we read for meaning, and NOT for the mastery of letters our sound etc. It works firstly by making an assumption. Then, we identify words that confirm our assumptions. It was important to know that, meaning is brought to the print, and NOT derived from the print.

Since our schemata played a role in this approach, I was told that schematic knowledge is cultural specific. Later, Dr. Ikhlas played a clip from the television series 'Fresh of the Boat', to engage our schematic knowledge on Asian-American contexts.

Then we talked about the Interactive Model, which was a combination of the Bottom-Up and Top-Down approach. Self-knowledge is not enough so we have to go through a book or a dictionary. Both schematic and language knowledge are important.