Top Down Critique

Critique the “Top-Down and Bottom-Up” Models of Reading and Outline Their Relevance To Reading Instructions
Sherry Ann Osborne

The ability to read is thought to be fundamentally important for functionality in our modern world. Nations measure the success of educational institutions by the ability to produce highly literate citizens and funding for many educational institutions in the United States and elsewhere hinges on the literacy attainment of student populations. The international demand for reading success has over the years resulted in periodic shifts in reading instruction with fervent emphasis at one point on the Top Down model of reading with an equally fervent shift to the Bottom Up model of reading instruction. Historically,
One major criticism of this approach is that it erroneously assumes that reading is an automatic transaction similar to that of innate human speech. Neuroscientist Steven Pinker (cited in The Reading Wars by Anderson 2000) states that spoken language is a human instinct while written language is not, thus indicating that children do not have the same innate predisposition for reading and writing as they do for speaking. Therefore the provision of a rich literacy environment for print immersion will not trigger an automatic reading response. Another criticism of this model is that it relies too heavily on one's memory and on the use of context for making meaning out of print. In the actual reading of a paragraph the majority of words are unpredictable and those that are predictable are few in comparison to the unpredictable words. Trieman (2001) suggests that "beginning readers who rely too heavily on contextual clues, such as pictures or the connection of other words in the passage, are distracted from looking at the letters in a word and connecting those letter patterns to words in their minds," hence their ability to decode larger words is