Module 1: Reading Reflection

What are some of the major differences between a skills approach to literacy and a comprehensive or sociopsycholinguistic approach?

  A comprehensive or sociopsycholinguistic approach to reading is just the opposite of the skills approach. This approach is partly a top-down or whole-to-part view of reading. Through this approach, the reader doesn’t  need to know the meaning of individual words or sounds in order to understand the general meaning of a text. This view also suggests most words will have multiple meanings, and will take on different meanings depending on the sentence structure or word order. Readers will find meaning in text by using their schema, which is very different from the skills approach.  

In the skills approach to literacy, one believes in a bottom up approach. The bottom up approach of reading starts with letters and letter-sound relationships, then moving on to the actual word or words.  This type of reading is often referred to as an “outside-in” process. With the skills approach, meaning or understanding of reading is thought more of as property of the text and not something that is mastered by the reader.  The context, meaning, and schema has no important part with helping to identify words in a text with the skills approach to reading. A diagram in the reading on pg. 34 shows the part-to whole “skills” model of reading. The diagram shows the different parts that lead to reading. The skills approach to literacy starts from the bottom and works up toward comprehension or meaning. (phonemic awareness, phonics, automatic, rapid word recognition, and meaning.) This approach looks at reading as decoding words or sounds as opposed to understanding text with context clues and schema.