In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

38 Chapter 3 Taking It from the Top: The Growth and Care of Genres Charles J. Quinn, Jr. Hypotheses about the nature of reading commonly refer to “top-down processing ,” the inferences a reader makes about some subcomponent of a discourse, based on some higher-level knowledge. Top-down processing proceeds from larger, more inclusive contexts down to the more local context that is the focus of one’s immediate attention, such as an individual sentence, phrase, or word. The “top” might be the reader’s understanding of that discourse so far, hypotheses about where it is headed, knowledge of the genre it belongs to and the uses of that genre in the reader’s culture, and, indeed, whatever memories seem relevant to understanding what the reader is now attending to. “Top-down” has an antonym in “bottom-up,” which in reading refers to interpretive processes that work from component parts to the integration of larger wholes. Teaching foreigners to read Japanese has traditionally focused most explicitly on bottom-up aspects of the process , especially on orthography—with the greatest amount of time spent on kanji— but also on deducing the meaning of sentences from their component words and grammatical structures. Yet there is general agreement that “top-down processing” is a featureof skilled reading,especiallyas demonstratedby native-speakingreaders.1 It is common to take the nature and provenance of this “top-level” knowledge for granted, that is, to assume thathowever much readers depend on knowledge not encoded in the language of the text they are now attending to, the nature and origins of that knowledge do not much matter. So long as readers have this knowledge, it matters little what it is or how they got it. This assumption presumably follows from Quinn / The Growth and Care of Genres 39 the fact that such information is not “in” the text but is, rather, “background,” a matter of the worlds—culture-speci¤c common sense, genre conventions, preferred rhetorical strategies, and more—that precede and inform what a reader makes of any particular text. So long as the reader knows those worlds, the “top” can be taken for granted, at least most of the time. But the fact is, not all readers know the worlds a text assumes. The foreign reader-to-be, in particular, needs to know not only words, constructions, and their written representations, but also the larger practices and conventions that motivate the deployment of such linguistic resources and that make any text an instance of a genre, provisionally de¤ned as a bundle of mutually implicated expectations about “what’s going on here.” This chapter explores these expectations and what they mean for the skill of reading a foreign language. Just where do they come from? How are they related to the meaning of individual words, constructions, and their representation in writing ? How do teachers inculcate knowledge that serves the ¶edgling foreign language reader well as a “top” in “top-down processing”? To understand fully the hypotheses that have been framed about interpretation in general and the pedagogy of foreign language reading in particular, one needs to understand the nature, origins, and in¶uence of this knowledge that a skilled reader uses in producing an interpretation. Focusing on the importance of such questions for the foreign learner, ironically enough, can also remind us as teachers of what we so conveniently forget of the interpretive skills we enjoy in our native languages. Language Games, Rhetorical Skills, and Growing into Genres Language games? Is that as in TV games like Password and Rensôgëmu, children’s games like shiritori, and jump rope rhymes? (Yes, but also as in asking and answering , extending an invitation, and even referring and predicating.) Are “rhetorical” skills like communicative competence also considered language games? (Not if “communicative” refers to encoding and decoding meanings.) And how do you grow into a genre? This chapter elucidates the signi¤cance of such questions for the pedagogy of spoken and written foreign language, and considers their implications for foreigners learning to read Japanese. It does so by exploring a view of language as a “way of life,” a view shared, more or less, by a variety of philosophers, literary critics, and social scientists. In its more basic aspects, the account of language sketched here applies to far more than reading Japanese, but if its claims are valid, any serious account of reading Japanese will have to come to terms with it.2 Just what the term...

Share