One of the most critical aspects of early childhood education is reading. From letter recognition to focusing on speech patterns, language acquisition in young children is focused on helping them comprehend how spoken sounds and written words are related to one another and cultivating reading comprehension. Reading research has been contributed to by researchers from several fields, including cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and education. This mixture reflects the fact that reading studies are both theoretically and practically significant. Reading is a domain in which experimental psychologists may investigate essential topics, including how knowledge held in long-term memory influences people’s perceptions of the world.
Reading is another area where study findings have practical implications, such as classroom practice and identifying and treating learning disabilities. Reading and many other cognitive tasks require two different types of processing, according to psychologists. Bottom-up processes take in information from the outside world, such as reading, symbols from a writing system, and dealing with it without resorting to higher-level knowledge. The absorption of information in top-down processes, on the other hand, is influenced by people’s past expertise and expectations. Bottom-up and top-down procedures usually work together to provide quick and precise results.
Models of Literacy
Bottom-up Model
According to the bottom-up approach, reading is a skill that children learn one step at a time. This method takes a step-by-step process, beginning with the basics of phonics and phonemic awareness. The approach emphasizes that learners must first master the fundamentals before moving on to more complicated concepts like comprehension and inferences. The bottom-up reading paradigm entails a step-by-step mastery of reading components, with the learner’s goal finally being literate (Pearson, 2017). This paradigm depends on direct and explicit instruction of the five elements of reading throughout early childhood education.
Therefore, the following positive features of this approach can be distinguished. First, it is understanding the sounds that each letter of the alphabet corresponds to. This approach covers long and short vowels and other phonetic principles and the notion that letters make sounds and sounds create words. Secondly, it is understanding the meaning of words and being able to use them correctly. Third, it is the capacity to read quickly and clearly without making any mistakes. Fluent readers read as though they were speaking. Thus, the main positive feature is the development of skills without relying on the text, starting only from the topics and problems of the issues discussed, the studied vocabulary and grammar, as well as speech structures.
The disadvantages of this approach may be the following points. This way is used at the initial stage of training when students do not yet know how to read or when the educational texts for reading cannot offer a serious, meaningful basis for developing reading skills. It can also be argued that this approach is long enough to master the skills necessary for speaking, which is the main principle of language learning. Understanding grammar and phonetics of words improves, but the ability to use language in communication is relegated to the background.
Top-down Model
The top-down reading theory teaches children to read by assuming that the reader’s brain, not the words on the page, makes sense of what is written. Texts are evaluated as a whole rather than forcing new readers to interpret a text word by word. For understanding to occur, students do not need to know the meaning or pronunciation of every word. When someone applies background knowledge to forecast the purpose of the language they are about to listen to or read, this is known as top-down processing of language (Forstall, 2019). Rather than depending only on the words or sounds themselves (bottom-up), they form expectations about what they will hear or read, which they then affirm or reject as they listen or read.
The main advantage of this approach is that active readers are involved in the text in a meaningful way. One of the main reasons for this is that engaged readers are more likely to explore texts they are interested in. Top-down readers learn by reading authentic texts that they pick and begin to decode with a teacher’s aid, rather than just reading the words from an exercise sheet. Another advantage is that speaking and listening abilities are also emphasized, with the teacher rarely interrupting oral readers to correct errors. Mistakes are seen positively by teachers, who feel that they demonstrate a student’s willingness to take a chance and try to learn new vocabulary.
The following disadvantages of this approach can also be identified. Students may make mistakes in the pronunciation of words, constructing sentences, which are then reflected in their active vocabulary, which will directly lead to misunderstandings in communication, reading, or writing. It can also be noted that this approach is not suitable for beginners in learning a language since it requires already acquired knowledge that will be used to understand certain words.
Conclusion
Summing up, it should be noted that for a complete mastery of the language, both these approaches in teaching are required. First of all, they approach entirely different situations. Bottom-up learning is applicable to beginners, while the top-down method is more suitable for improving the language level. Therefore, they cannot be applied separately since these methods are inextricably linked.
References
Pearson, A. (2017). The top-down theory of literacy learning. The Classroom.
Forstall, M. (2019). Bottom-up theories of the reading process. The classroom.