Goodman and Smith's top-down model

Goodman (1967) wanted to refute that reading is a precise process involving ‘exact, detailed, sequential perception, and identification of letters, words, spelling patterns and larger word units’ (p.126) as suggested by bottom-up models. He advocates the top-down model of reading, and refers to reading as ‘a psycholinguistic guessing game’ which:

Involves an interaction between thought and language … selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. (Goodman, 1967, p.127)

In Goodman’s model, readers use their background knowledge to make sense of what they are going to read. In other words, the reader uses a general knowledge of the world to guess what might come next, which will either confirm or contradict that guess, and consequently impact on whether s/he rejects or accepts these guesses.

In my case, applying Goodman’s procedures to reading the above text also failed. I was unable to comprehend the sentences because I could not use the graphic meaning such as word and sentence structure. Furthermore, I was unable to access the meaning of the passage using my background knowledge because there was nothing in the text that corresponded to my experience and so to that background knowledge. Even when my supervisors explained the text to me, I was unable to continue because of my inability to understand the words in the sentences that came later. However, and as the bottom-up model suggests, I should have been able to do this. I demonstrated word-reading ability but had no comprehension ability. I was able to pronounce words but I could not understand their meaning. I read the text almost correctly, despite not knowing what the words meant.

Goodman calls this, adapting the idea from Chomsky (1966), a ‘recoding operation’ in which ‘the reader recodes the graphic input as phonological or oral output. Meaning is not normally involved to any extent …’ (cited in Goodman, 1967, p.131).

According to Konza (2006), decoding each word in Goodman’s model is less important than the reader’s expectations and understanding of semantics in order to guess what might be ahead. For Goodman (1976), decoding is not reading the precise word in the text but the meaning should be correct if ‘the basic decoding is directly from print to meaning’ (p.482).

Goodman (1988) stated that, although his model was built on the study of English reading, it might ‘be applicable to reading in all languages and all orthographies’ (p. 20). For EFL readers who attempt to read it might be ineffective, even impossible, to be an intelligent guesser but, following Goodman, they might reduce their dependence on the text and focus on sampling (looking through the text seeking familiar information).

Goodman (1968) argues that decoding any text could entail three sequential components (cited in Hedgcock and Ferris, 2009), which are phonological or phonemic:

GRAPHEMES → PHONEMES → MEANING

Decoding from Goodman's point of view is either direct ‘graphemes to meaning’ or mediated ‘graphemes to phonemes to meaning’ (cited in Samuels and Kamil, 1988, p.23).

To know whether reading requires decoding or phonological encoding, Goodman (1968) argues that reading ‘is exceedingly complex’ (p. 15), and to understand this we should know how written and oral language interact to make communication possible:

We must consider the special characters of written language and special uses of written language. We must consider the characteristics and abilities of the reader [that] are prerequisite to effective reading. (Goodman, 1968, p.15)

Goodman (1976) views reading as a process which depends on ‘partial use of … minimal language cues selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader’s expectation’ and that readers process partial information from a text so that ‘tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected, or refined as reading progress’ (p.498). A L1 reader may execute these processes efficiently, but it is unlikely that a person from Libya studying EFL would be able to read and understand a text about the fictional town of Kinraddie based on his/her expectations, or by breaking the text into graphemes and phonemes. Meaning at all levels would be elusive. A similar view of reading as a psycholinguistic, top-down process is suggested by Smith (1978) who states that:

Readers do not normally attend to print with their minds blank, with no prior purpose and with no expectation of what they might find in the text. Readers normally look for meaning rather than strive to identify letters or words. The way readers look for meaning is not to consider all possibilities nor to make reckless guesses about just one, but rather they predict within the most likely range of alternatives. (Smith, 1978, p.163)

Smith suggests that readers understand the meaning by predicting in order to identify new words. I consider how this works by applying Smith’s (1978) theory to the following extract.

I started by reading the topic ‘The Unfurrowed Field’ to think ahead and anticipate the content of the text. I tried to read the topic and link the information that I had to the new information. For example, from the title, I expected that the text would be about agriculture because of words such as ‘field’ and ‘unfurrowed’, though I had to look up 'unfurrowed' in my dictionary. As I continued reading, I found it speaking about ‘beasts’ and ‘ghosts’, which disrupted my comprehension. As it had no relation to agriculture, I was unable to guess or make hypotheses. Contrary to Smith’s (1978) ideas, my mind was a blank. I was looking for meaning and trying to identify letters or words. I had no 'possibilities' to choose from a 'range of alternatives' and 'reckless guesses' were possible since I had no clues or cues with which to work. For me anything or nothing seemed equally possible. People learn by exploring new information by reading new things but the reader’s knowledge of any topic is often based on some knowledge of, for example, their cultural, linguistic, and historical background. The reader usually uses prediction skills with topics s/he already knows to some degree. For instance, EFL readers from Scotland might know about gryphons and lairs, and readers from the North East of the country will understand what 'miekle' means. Students from Arabic countries are unlikely to know these words.

Smith (1978) refers to the primary role of ‘prediction’ rather than to what Goodman calls

‘psychological guessing’ but the concept is similar. From Smith’s point of view:

The good reader can confirm the identity of a word from the upcoming words or by sampling just a few words in the visual display of new words. (cited in Stanovich, 2000, p.25)

I agree with Samuels and Kamil (1988), who consider that Smith’s proposal is not really a model but a 'description of the linguistic and cognitive processes that any decent model of reading will need to take into account’ (p.24). Smith’s contribution, according to Samuels and Kamil (1988), is to explain how the redundancy that occurs at all levels of language (letters, words, and sentences) provides the reader with the flexibility to create meaning.

Later, Smith (1988) differentiated between information and meaning, stating that reading is receiving information from the text and decoding what the writer encodes (and see Chapter Three). He argued that ‘information becomes understanding when it gets into the brain…or it remains an isolated fact’ (p.247). Smith no longer believes that reading is the acquisition of information from the text, but is the brain dealing with meaning and understanding,

‘how the brain resolves uncertainty is related to visual input from the eyes’ (p.62).