Reading Process And Reading Skills

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction In the world today, the place English language has earned as an international language is indisputable. Gaining access to loads of information that is at our disposal through journals and websites and TV channels, etc requires proficiency in English. Reading skill is one of the four basic skills needed to become a proficient language user. It is the combination of a long range of human mind processes working in harmony that helps us achieve understanding. A reader needs to simultaneously decode words, access their meaning and build comprehensible meaning from sentences to larger pieces of text, while bringing together and integrating meaning from prior text information and relying upon his background…show more content…
According to these theories; these processes are two types: the bottom-up processing and top-down processing. The first one deals with the words and the systematic way in which they are grouped together, usually with little or no consultation to the higher level knowledge. As for the second one, on the contrary, the understanding of the text is based upon our prior knowledge of the world and how we expect the meaning of the text to form. There have been disputes among the language theorists about which processing model to be given priority. Those in favor of the bottom-up processing lay their focus on the processes readers use in order to get information from the printed text. The essence of what they believe is that the reader deals with letters and words in a complete systematic way (Gough, 1972). On the other hand, theorists lining up behind the top-down processing theory believe that the human mind generally involves in some kind of hypothesis testing while reading. This hypothesis is about what words are to come next, based on what has been read so far and then only take in minimal information to test that hypothesis (Goodman, 1967; Smith,…show more content…
Cohen (1998) and Macaro (2001) believe that, should teachers realize the type of strategies their students use and the specific way, in which they employ them in different contexts, they will come to a firmer grasp of the root of the students' issues with reading strategies. This study could be innovative considering the fact that it may contribute to the betterment of the reading courses in Iran, and help the teachers locate the specific metacognitive strategies employed by Iranian English language learners, specifically the upper-intermediate level. It is this level that students are more likely to start to engage in complicated reading activities. So, for the teachers of this level, it would be of crucial importance to know their students' strengths and weaknesses in coping with a reading comprehension text and what processes they go through to complete the task. To sum up the pedagogical implications of this study, private language institutes and the department of education could benefit from the results of this research to revise their existing books and teaching methods or devise new ones. They can also use the results of this research to inform their English teachers of these issues in dealing with reading comprehension texts, so that they can direct their methods in class towards the

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