Psycholinguist Approach to Teaching

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The psycholinguist approach is concerted with making meaning from print and stresses the role of the reader using prior knowledge to make sense of a text. Goodman (cited in Hall, 2003) stresses that reading is a constructive process and that the reader constructs both the text and the meaning. On the other hand, Wray (cited in Hall, 2003) argues that effective reading is based on a set of skills as the cognitive psychological perspective suggests children should be initiated to certain skills at specific ages. The linguist Noam Chomsky revolutionised the study of language when he demonstrated that comprehended language is not just a matter of linking up the different meanings of adjacent words. Which was the kind of linear processing that had been the basis of behavioural psychologists' accounts of language comprehension that had prevailed some fifty years before. He argued that children did not simply imitate the language they heard, as language was far too complex to be acquired in this way. Many professionals in the field of reading, especially psychologists, then began to wonder if Chomsky's observations about oral language also be applied to written language, this was how are psycho-linguistic position on reading came about. Goodman explores this further, Stating that "reading depends not only on the text but also on what the reader brings to the text in the form of previous knowledge, not just of language, but knowledge of the world itself", implying that children learning to read will have a better chance of reading a word correctly if they are given a clear context in which that word would appear. Learning to read can be analysed as involving two basic processes (Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990). One process involves learning to convert the letters into recognizable words. The other involves comprehending the meaning of the text. When

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