1. THEORIES OF
READING
INSTRUCTION
By: Lenie Mangubat

2. WHY TEACH THEORY
GUTKNECHT and KEENAN (1978)
stated that “competent reading instructors were
able to do more than just follow explicit directions in
reading materials.”
THORNDIKE (1920)
postulated that reading is reasoning
WILLIAM S. GRAY (1939)
believed that reading consisted of four
hierarchical steps or skills.

3. VIEWING READING AS
DEVELOPMENTAL:

Word perception

Comprehension

Reaction

Synthesis

4. GOODMAN and SMITH (1978)
reported on research being conducted that had as
its foundation on the observation of children as they
learned language and reading.

THE THREE CUING SYSTEMS WERE
IDENTIFIED AS:
The Grapho-phonemic or sound symbol system

The Syntactic or word order system

Semantic or meaning based system

5. These psycholinguistic theorists
postulated that reading took place in the
reader’s head where they sampled the print
and made predictions about what the author
would say next.
The PROFICIENT READER was
defined by the psycholinguists as the reader
who sampled from all three cuing systems
simultaneously and predicted more accurately
what the author was saying.

6. ADVANTAGES OF THESE THEORIES:

they would be able to organize instruction based on the
systems that reader use to read

they should be able to more quickly spot the place at which
the reading process broke down and then be able to provide the
necessary instruction

if instruction is to be individual at a point of need, teachers
must develop skills that will empower them to be careful and
knowledgeable observers of children and their literary growth

if reading and the language arts are truly seen as intertwined
communication skills, then teachers must be able to prepare
instruction that echoes that language and reading are interactive
processes

7. GRAYS’ MODEL OF THE READING
PROCESS
Gray’s model also called a process model for its
attempt to explain what goes on in the reader’s head
while reading. It became the forerunner of the
underlying philosophy of the first basal readers.
Looking at the model, teacher must recognize that until
the child is able to visually discriminate likenesses and
differences and then be able to associate those
perceptions into what the word is, they cannot get to
meaning.

8. The fallacy lies in making early reading
programs training grounds for such discrimination
skills as has been done in the past. Such
programs spent countless valuable hours in
circling on a workbook page the object s that are
alike or different. This is totally artificial and does
not lead to real reading. Helping children to see
the words that are connected to meaningful
activities produces greater reading achievements.
Children will construct develop their own
discrimination skills as they read, write and print
words and pictures.

9. Being unaware of a pupil’s overall reaction
to the print may skew decisions that the teacher
may make. This would be particularly true if the
teacher uses only one sample day for evaluation
and ignores the overall view
SYNTHESIS
such evidence points to the step, when
pupils begin to commit to use their comprehension
and reactions to a word, sentence or larger piece
then they have truly read and interacted with the
print.

10. PSYCHOLINGUISTIC READING MODEL
The Psycholinguistic Model of Reading
is the marriage of two disciplines;
psychology the study of how the mind
works and linguistic the study of language
and how it develops.

11. USING RESEARCH FROM BOTH SCHOOLS OF
THOUGHT HAS LED TO THE FOLLOWING
CONCLUSIONS:

Good readers construct a scenario as they read and
predict what the author will say.

Good readers use all three cuing systems
simultaneously without mediation.

The task of reading is more difficult than that of the
writing of the printed piece, because the reader must
assign the appropriate meaning to the passage.

12. 
There is no reading without comprehension.
Readers who do not understand the test and cannot
discuss or react to the text have not read the text even
if they have called (pronounced) every word correctly.

Good readers bring a wealth of world knowledge
as well as language knowledge to the printed page.

Reading is an active process where readers
contribute as much if not more than the author.

13. FRANK SMITH (1973)
stated that reading as a process of
communication transfers information from a
“transmitter” to a receiver. It is an active process
whereby the receiver , who is defined as the reader,
contributes to the transfer by decoding the printed
symbols and assigning the intended meaning of
the transmitter, defined by Smith as the author.
GOODMAN (1976)
defined reading as a psycholinguistic
guessing game where the reader reconstructs a
message which has been encoded by an author as
a graphic display.

14. INTERACTIVE READING THEORIES
DURKIN (1992)
calls the common sense approach to teaching
reading.
defining reading as an interactive activity where
the reader samples from the text, language knowledge,
background of experiences and their own schema for
a topic or narrative leads educators to teach in
interactive manners. Such a theory accepts that
reading involves many levels of analysis at the same
time but a different levels. These varying levels
include skills, reasoning, decoding and hypothesis
generation, confirmation or rejection.

15. Interactive theory hold that reading is an
active process in which to comprehend, the
reader interacts with a multitude of factors related
to himself, the text being read, and the context the
reading takes place.

16. PRINCIPLES OF READING INSTRUCTION:

Reading and writing are language processes.

Literacy learning is a developmental process.

Reading and writing are interrelated and interactive
processes and literary instruction should

Always capitalize on this relationship.

Early in the reading process, the learner must acquire
ways of recognizing words independently.

The use of quality literature should be an integral part of
literacy instruction throughout the school curriculum.

Literacy instruction needs to be an integral component
in all content areas.

Teachers need to foster learner’s abilities to reason and
critically evaluate written ideas.

17. 
Proper literacy instruction depends on the ongoing
assessment of each learner’s reading strengths and
weaknesses.

Any given technique is likely to work better with some
learners than with others.

Motivation contributes to the development of literacy.

The key to successful literacy instruction is the teacher
not the material or the technique

Teacher must provide for the needs of exceptional
children in regular classroom literacy instruction.

Teacher must be able to create, manage, and maintain an
environment conducive to learning.

Teachers of literacy must forge partnerships with the
home and community to promote reading growth.

18. BALANCED READING APPROACHES
While balance reading programs may look
different in various classrooms or school districts,
there are common elements that they embody.
TOMPKINS list these as:

Literacy is viewed comprehensively, as involving
both reading and writing.

Literature is at the heart of the programs.

Skills and strategies are taught both directly and
indirectly.

19. 
Reading instruction involves learning word
recognition and identification, vocabulary, and
comprehension.

Writing instruction involves learning to express
meaningful idea and use of conventional spelling,
grammar, and punctuation to express those ideas.

Pupils use reading and writing as tools for learning
in the content areas.

The goal of the balanced reading program is to
develop lifelong readers and writers.

20. WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN TO THE
CLASSROOM TEACHER?
Each teacher will choose certain activities,
materials , and methods to instruct the young reader.
All of these decisions will be based on the teacher’s
definition of reading. If the only definition of reading
that the instructor possesses is one that is implied by
the basal reader in use, then the teacher will be locked
into grading rather than true evaluation. An
instructional model consists of all the decisions that
the teacher makes planning and delivering instruction.
This includes but it is not limited to materials,
activities, procedures, room arrangement, methods
and evaluation.

21. The teacher’s instructional model is a very
personal model that has the most direct impact on
pupil learning. For this reason teacher must have
developed their instructional models from sound
research-based theories.

22. THERE ARE SOME BASIC “TRUTHS” FROM WHICH ALL

READING PROGRAMS SHOULD BE DESIGNED:
Readers need to know how to decode printed
symbols into meaningful words.

Readers need to be able to assign meaning to words
based on the context.

Readers need to read in meaningful texts that are
free of artificial constraints such as limited phonological
controls or restricted vocabulary.

Readers need to have prior knowledge of text topic
or content in order to easily comprehend the reading
material.

Readers need more opportunity to read real text and
less fragmented “practice” of a drill nature.

23. THE IMPLICATIONS OF INSTRUCTION
readers. Both direct and indirect methods are
appropriate.

All forms of decoding should be taught to
Phonics

Sight words

Use of context clues

Structural analysis

Dictionary and Glossary Skills

24. PSYCHOLOGY OF READING
DECHANT and SMITH (1977)
stated that there were certain principles of
psychology of reading that teachers need to be
aware of and use when planning and implementing
reading instruction.
The following is a summary of those findings:

Reading is a sensory process.

Reading is a perceptual process.

Reading is a response.

Reading is a learned process.

Reading is a growth process.

25. In summary, the factors that seem to influence the learning of
reading are the child’s general intelligence, socio economic level,
language facility/ability, motivation to read, physical and social
development, and opportunity to practice.

Generally brighter students learn more than less bright student
do.

Pupils who come from homes which have provided them with
opportunities to do and see the community or world will have an
advantage over pupils who come from homes that have not
provided such opportunities.

Pupils who have the advantage of being healthy, well-fed, and
rested will be able to achieve more in reading than pupils who do not
have the advantage.

Pupils who come from homes that have read to them and have
print materials around and about the home are more likely to be
motivated to learn reading.

Pupils who have been read to and allowed to have their own
books are more likely to be ready to learn to read than student
without these advantages.

26. READING MODELS
A reading model is a graphic attempt “to depict how
individual perceives a word, processes a clause, and
comprehend a text”.
KIND OF READING MODELS:

TOP-DOWN. It emphasizes what the reader brings to
the text, such as prior knowledge and experiences.
Comprehension begins in the mind of the reader, who
already have some ideas about the meaning of the text;
proceeds from whole to part.

BOTTOM-UP. Emphasizes the written or printed text.
Comprehension begins by processing the smallest
linguistic unit (phoneme), and working toward larger units
(syllables, words, phrases, sentences.)

27. THE FOLLOWING ARE SOME VIEWS OF
RESEARCHERS ABOUT THE BOTTOM-UP
READING MODEL
LEONARD BLOOMFIELD
the first task of reading is learning the code of the
alphabet principle by which “written marks…conventionally
represent… phonemes.”
MCCORMICK (1988)
the meaning of the text is expected to come naturally
as the code is broken based on the reader’s prior
knowledge of words, their Meaning, and the syntactical
patterns of his/her language.
Lexical, syntactic, and semantic rules are applied to
the phonemic Output which itself has been decoded from
print.

28. BLOOMFIELD and BARNHART (1961)
Writing is merely a device for recording speech.
PHILIP B. GOUGH
reading is strictly serial process: letter-by-letter
visual analysis, leading to positive recognition of every
word through phonemic encoding.
EMERALD DECHAN
bottom-up models operate on the principle that
the written text is Hierarchically organized.

29. CHARLES FRIES
the reader must learn to transfer from the
auditory signs for language signals to a set of visual
signs for the same signal. The reader must learn to
automatically respond to the visual patterns. The
cumulative comprehension of the meanings signal
then enable the reader to supply those portions of the
signals which are not in the graphic representations
themselves learning to read means developing a
considerable range of habitual responses to a specific
set of patterns of graphic shapes.

30. SOME FEATURES OF A BOTTOM-UP
APPROACH TO READING:
BOTTOM-UP ADVOCATES BELIEVE THE READER
NEEDS TO:

Identify letter feature

Link these features to recognize letters

Combine letters to recognize spelling patterns

Link spelling patterns to recognize words

Proceed sentence, paragraph, and text level
processing

31. INTERACTIVE READING MODEL
An interactive reading model is a reading model that
recognizes the interaction of bottom-up and top-down
processes simultaneously throughout the reading process. An
interactive reading model attempts to combine the valid
insights of bottom-up and top-down models.
THE FOLLOWING ARE VIEWS OF SOME RESEARCHERS ABOUT
THE INTERACTIVE READING MODEL:
EMERALD DECHANT
The interactive model suggests that the reader
construct meaning by selective use of information from all
sources of meaning without adherence to any one set order.
The reader simultaneously uses all level of processing even
though one source of meaning can be primary at a given time.

32. KENNETH GOODMAN
An interactive model is one which uses print as input
and has meaning as output. But the reader provides input,
too, and the reader, interacting with the text, is selective in
using just a little of the cues from text as necessary to
construct meaning.
DAVID E. RUMELHART
Reading is at once a perceptual and a cognitive
process. It is a process which bridges and blurs these two
traditional distinctions. Moreover, a skilled reader must be
able to make use of sensory, syntactic, semantic , and
pragmatic information to accomplish the task.

33. INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAM
An interactive instructional program is a
program for teaching reading and writing. It focuses
in teacher-directed interaction between whole
language and phonics activities. The rationale
behind it is based on the belief that learners need
explicit instruction about various reading strategies
that they can use to help them understand a text.

34. BOTH INTERACTIVE AND WHOLE LANGUAGE
INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAMS ARE BASED ON A READING
THEORY THAT SAY THE FOLLOWING:
1) Readers construct meaning from text by selective
use of information from a variety of sources of
meaning such as:

Prior knowledge

Experience

Print

Context
2) A reader can choose to draw more heavily on any
source of meaning at anytime, yet can process
information simultaneously from a variety of
sources.

35. THEORETICAL INFORMATION
An interactive instructional program is based on
the interactive model of reading.
SOME MATERIALS NEEDED FOR AN INTERACTIVE
INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAM:

Plenty of interesting text which people are highly
motivated to read. These can be reprinted or student-generated,
or both

A phonics or syllable-based primer with lessons
linked to meaningful texts.

A teacher guide listing the sounds or syllables to be
taught.

36. PARTS
OF THE PROGRAM

Reading readiness

Language experience

Shared reading experiences

Primer lesson (optional)

Writing lessons to teach letter formation

Writing lessons to encourage process writing

Opportunities to develop fluency

37. FEATURES
The major focus of the reading program is to
assist reader to construct meaning from texts.
HUFFMAN (1998)
Structured activities are scheduled to encourage
the development of various reading strategies.