The Lan-guage Based

Approach

Mainly Taking behaviourists’ view

Pre-teaching vocabularyAnd grammarReading short passage to learn grammar.

Simplified texts and graded readers (tomlinson et al., 2001)

Critiques in 1970s Understanding the linguistic meaning of a text

does not equal understanding of the textual mean-ing (Goodman, 1976; Schank and Abelson, 1977; Smith, 1978; Hymes, 1979)

Need to use of readers’ prior knowledge.

Strong support for the Language-based approach to reading.

Due to eye movement studies, Skilful readers use contextual guidance

to pre-select the meanings of the words they are going to read.

But meaning is selected while the lan-guage is being processed.

The speed of solving the ambiguity of the text gives the impression of the con-text pre-selecting the meaning.

Bottom-up process (1970s)

Fluent readers read indi-vidual words.

Linear and se-rial from the bottom to top.

Bottom-up & Top-down (1980s-1990)

Parallel occur-rence

of both at the same time (Adams, 1994)

To be fluent readers

Vocabulary knowledge

To be fluent readersFast and automatic word identification (recogni-tion)

Extensive knowledge of the lexicon;

The ability to attribute the most appropriate meanings to lexical items in relation to their context and co-text.

Current trend: PPPTeaching grammar and vocabulary, (us-ing written text) (Vocabulary teaching=learning?, pre-select vocabularies will be the one the reader wouldn’t know? Reading style? Make aware of their weakensses? Deprive opportunities for guessing the meaning of unknown words)

Controlled PracticeDo some freer com-municative activities (Tomlinson et. Al, 2001)

Aims for L1 readingGetting information to suit our different purposes at the time of reading

For gaining pleasure and stimuli

For attaining social ad-vancement,

Taking L1 reading aims, in L2

Delayed reading until have flexible and ex-tensive aural-oral knowledge

Intuitive knowledge of English syntax

(Alderson, 1984; Tomlinson, 2000)

So need proto-reading experience

Listening to bedtime sto-ries

Unknown can be inferred, ex-plained either visually or verbally in interaction with a parent or just be ig-nored until the pre- schoolers’ needs and wants arise.

The language based approach to reading pedagogy seems to hy-pothesize an

Equation between

General syntactic ability outside a discourse context (grammar test) and the ability to disam-biguate syntactical patterns

during reading