Reading Approaches of Bottom-up and Top-down

Reading Approaches of Bottom-up and Top-down

The main two approaches to reading, top-down and bottom-up have

produced a great debate towards which is the best approach to teach

children to read. Top down reading is also known as the whole

language approach in which the meaning of the text relies upon the

reader’s background knowledge and his/her use of prediction to

anticipate the meaning of the text.

(http://www.sedl.org/reading/topics/balanced.html [23.10.01]). The

bottom-up approach to reading involves the use of phonics and the

decoding of text, word by word after which meaning and understanding

will follow (http://www.sedl.org/reading/topics/balanced.html

[23.10.01]). Phonics is referred to a method of teaching children to

read by relating certain letters or sequences of letters with certain

sounds (R.L. Trusk, 1997, p.168). Phonics involves mastering the

alphabetic principle by learning the grapheme-phoneme correspondence

rules (rules of relating letters or groups of letters to sounds). A

grapheme is a small unit of written language, whereas a phoneme is a

small unit of spoken language (Beard, 1993, p.63). Margaret Cooper

informs us that we have approximately 44 speech sounds but we have

only 26 letters which can represent them, this presents the complexity

of the English alphabetic system (Cooper, 1996, p.34). However, Jane

Oakhill comments that mastering the alphabetic principle leads

children to independent reading (Beard, 1993, p.63). Jenny Curtis (in

her article, phonics v. whole language, which is better?) informs us

that whole language, unlike phonics, is not so focussed on rules and

repetition. (http://www...

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...lume 20, number 1, Longman Group,

Harlow, U.K.

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