Learning how to read is an essential skill that we learn during our early childhood education. The skill generally sets the basis for academic success. Since there are numerous methods of approaching the reading process, teachers depend on different reading theories.

Kids in kindergarten to 3rd grade are all in the learning-to-read phase. And children from the 4th grade onwards are reading to learn. Students must have a strong reading foundation to successfully go through middle and high school.

One of the best ways to ensure students have the necessary reading skills is for educators to identify whether students are on, or below their age group level. Teachers must also know three more levels for each student, which include frustration, instructional, and independent reading level.

In this article, you’ll learn more about reading theories and approaches. What is a bottom-up strategy? What does it involve?

Read on.

Theories About Reading

Generally, there are lots of theories concerning the right way to teach reading and the ways people learn to read. Like many instructional practices, some reading theories have much success, while others come and go in popularity.

Let’s look at the bottom-up theory.

Bottom-Up Theory

As previously stated - there are numerous theories regarding how to teach reading, but some have greater success than others. The bottom-up approach is a good example.

Typically, this theory entails a step-by-step process of instilling proficiency in reading components that enable the student to be literate. The theory involves direct and explicit instruction in a building-block approach implementing the 5 reading components during early childhood education.

“Bottom-up” is the term that applies directly to how the reading process works. The primary purpose of early literacy is to develop the key, foundational skills required for mastery of reading.

The bottom-up theory consists of reading activities that entail students learning to read from the foundation (bottom) up to concepts such as phonics and phonemic awareness. That means that kids are first taught the basics to develop a strong foundation and are then advanced to studying vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.

What Are the Key Reading Components?

The entire reading process consists of five central components. Students must acquire a few concepts to develop their literacy skills correctly. These include:

Phonics

The term refers to understanding the sounds that match up with the letters of the alphabet, such as short and long vowels. However, when it comes to education, the word phonics has a more functional meaning. It describes a particular type of literacy education relying on teaching how certain letters and syllables sound instead of individual letters or words.

Phonemic Awareness

Simply put, this is comprehending the sounds that letter combinations have. It includes complete words, syllables, and consonant blends.

Vocabulary

It’s the understanding of the actual meaning of terms and how to use them correctly and adequately in sentences and paragraphs.

Fluency

This is the capacity to read with the appropriate speed and expression, without errors. Generally speaking, fluent readers should read exactly as they speak.

Comprehension

The ability to recall events, characters, and the main concept of the story or passage once read, comprehending what has been read properly.

Are There Other Reading Strategies?

Let’s look at other approaches to reading.

Top-down strategies (or processing). This instruction prioritizes activities that construct meaning instead of mastering bottom-up skills. Students create meaning by utilizing background insight, making predictions, as well as searching the text to reject or confirm the predictions that are made.

Based on supporters of this strategy, comprehension usually resides in the reader. And the reader employs background knowledge, assumptions, expectations, and questions and interacts in pre-reading strategies, e.g., previewing the text, activating background knowledge, and predicting.

Interactive approach. In general, this approach is regarded as the most all-inclusive description of the reading process. The interactive reading approach is commonly used by the best readers. It typically combines elements of both top-down and bottom-up reading processes. For instance, a reader might start reading a text with top-down strategies to understand the text, and later change to bottom-up strategies when s/he comes across an unfamiliar word. So the reader implements bottom-up approaches to decode the new term before progressing.

Which Reading Strategy Is Better?

According to research, bottom-up strategies are the most commonly used followed by top-down. The students specifically use strategies like reading the title to identify the text’s main concept, reading the first paragraph, focusing on the first and last sentences, reading the difficult part aloud, concentrating on the first sentence, reading the passage fast, guessing the meaning, as well as taking notes.

Mostly, students adopt bottom-up reading strategies to understand the actual meanings of terms by considering the context. One aspect of bottom-up strategies is trying to read the difficult paragraph aloud. Undoubtedly, reading aloud assists students to gain confidence when it comes to pronouncing new or unfamiliar words. It also improves their ability to memorize words.

The bottom-up strategy consumes a lot of time when reading. However, most students claim that it doesn’t matter since online learning during the pandemic era allows them more time to read the entire text. Top-down reading strategies are another second set of strategies often used by students.

The students who employ top-down reading strategies tend to guess what the text’s substance or theme will be about and apply their prior knowledge to understand and overview the text. They briefly consider what they may confront in the literary texts to have an overview of the author’s concepts. Readers may utilize predictions, actuating background knowledge, and checking refutations or confirmation of the predictions in top-down strategies.

Students also use scanning. Scanning implies reading slowly and keenly and picking out specific keywords or phrases. They often utilize scanning whenever they find questions about specific info. Aligned with top-down reading strategies, one of the characteristics is marking important parts. Students with top-down reading strategies like to underline important parts while they’re reading English text. They commonly use this approach to identify important information. Simply put, it helps them to find the specific details more easily. Associated with the speed of reading, many students with bottom-up strategies tend to adjust the reading rate based on the text’s difficulty.

The primary focus is to establish what each word in that text means. Students also review the text’s most difficult part. It’s safe to say that the speed reading strategy is for flexible readers who can skim and scan. They read based on their purpose and retrieve the information they need very fast without wasting time. Since they don’t need everything, it increases their reading speed. It’s worth mentioning that reading slowly can make your brain wander and it might not remember anything. On the other hand, reading too fast may cause the information to be lost.

In most cases, bottom-up reading strategies lead to students following the lines in that text with a finger or pen to ascertain sentence structure and comprehension of what each pronoun refers to. So the reader attempts to understand the text by depending on the visual information that’s on the page. The human brain has a primary purpose of interpreting the words that come from it, and this makes someone read much quicker. They combine the term meaning to have an understanding of sentences, paragraphs, and phrases until they reach the whole meaning as they follow the lines in the text. Most students claim that these strategies enable them to concentrate when reading text.

Guessing is also commonly used when it comes to reading activities. It’s often used in figuring out vocabulary. Typically, students guess the meaning of vocabulary by taking account of the text and context. Associating the background knowledge to the textual info is also employed while they’re reading. As a result, it assists to identify vocabulary. Contextual guessing, which is linked to the top-down strategies, is the most valuable skill utilized by most readers when it comes to attacking new words.

When it comes to visualization in reading, most readers imagine things they’re reading. When they can build their imagination to be real, the process of understanding messages is continuing. Many specialists claim that mental imagery expects readers to construct images of the text within their minds. That said, there might be a likelihood that learners don’t follow the instruction. As such, instructing participants to form visual images of the text could be a potential strategy to decode and process the message.

Final Thoughts About Bottom-Up Reading Strategy

The bottom-up reading strategy claims that reading is a skill whereby students learn to read in a particular way. This strategy implements a building-block approach beginning with the basis of phonics and phonemic awareness. The approach recognizes that students should first learn the fundamentals to fully comprehend the more complex components, e.g., comprehension and inferences.

In general, the bottom-up strategy is widely used primarily because of its sequential approach. The reading approach acknowledges reading as a development process that’s suitably learned in a way that begins with a foundation and develops with complexity. .