Acts of Reading: Exploring Connections in Pedagogy of Japanese

Chapter 5 Toward a Theoretical Understanding of Reading

87 Chapter 5 Toward a Theoretical Understanding of Reading Fumiko K. Harada And so to completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of a psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind, as well as tounravel the tangled story of the most remarkable speci¤c performance that civilization has learned in all its history. —Edmund B. Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading This chapter is concerned with studies that shed light on issues in L2 reading, particularly in Japanese.1 It addresses how reading research has developed from the early days, how various studies have informed the discipline of reading research , and especially what contributions have been made to understanding reading in a foreign language such as Japanese. To this end, I ¤rst sketch a historical perspective on early breakthroughs in reading research in the native language (L1). Then, I review research in L2 reading in general and explore various aspects of L2 reading in Japanese. I examine closely two models of reading—a general model by LaBerge and Samuels (1977) and my own model for Japanese—before concluding with some pedagogical recommendations. Historical Perspective Reading is one of the most complex cognitive activities humans engage in. In order to understand the process of reading, a number of theoretical models have been 88 Theoretical Orientation proposed in the last one hundred years or so. They seem to fall into two large categories , bottom-up models and top-down models, at least until recently, when the division between the two categories has begun to be questioned. These models are classi¤ed according to how much emphasis researchers place on either or both of these two major processes. In a sense, the recent history of reading research can be viewed as a push to recognize top-down information processing for its vital role in reading after the dominance for many decades of bottom-up views of reading. Bottom-up models generally hold the view that reading begins with the graphs on paper. The reader perceives the language-speci¤c orthography and connects arrangements of graphs (e.g., words) with meanings. These meanings are composed in a functional manner with the mediation of the reader’s morphological and grammatical knowledge into progressively larger meaning units. These component semantic units eventually come together to constitute the meaning of a sentence, a discourse, and a text. Although most researchers no longer hold this view steadfastly , studies by Gough (1972), LaBerge and Samuels (1974) (but not the later version of their reading model), and Carver (1977–1978) have been identi¤ed with this view of reading. It fueled such pedagogical approaches as the grammar-translation method, which emphasized the acquisition of vocabulary and grammar—and kanji in the case of Japanese—as a primary means for achieving skillful reading ability. The grammar-translation method is a natural product of the post-Bloom¤eldian structuralism of the 1950s, which espoused the view that language could be characterized as a system of structured paradigms that are to be understood in terms of their relation to each other and to the linguistic system as a whole. A structuralist analysis of a language would typically begin with a study of its sounds and arrive at a system of phonemes that underlie all linguistic phenomena. Once the language is phonemicized following a speci¤c procedure, words can be analyzed into distinct meaning units (morphemes). Words are then composed into a sentence and schematically displayed in a graph (a tree) of dependency relations. These compositions are accomplished through a process called “the immediate constituent analysis.” The structuralist approach is inherently data driven and bottom-up. Many descriptions of language (i.e., lexicon and grammar) before the mid-twentieth century also followed this general methodological perspective. The structuralist approach gave rise to a general mind set regarding how to go about learning and teaching a foreign language, including reading. Thus, various linguistic paradigms, such as conjugation tables and a chart for counting systems, ¤gured prominently in language textbooks based on the grammar-translation approach. Although the in¶uence of this approach has weakened of late, the use of both the linguistic paradigms and a bottom-up approach of this sort remain today in foreign language education. The top-down view generally conceives of reading not as primarily data driven, but rather as an activity that is initiated and negotiated by the human mind. Some...