A major feature of top-down processing is the way we make predictions about a text's meaning and form an impression of what the author of the text is ultimately trying to say. The role of bottom-up processing is to complement these (global) hypotheses by providing supportive or contradictory evidence from the phrase or sentence level. As Nuttall says:

[Students] should learn to treat interpretation as making a series of hypotheses, rather as scientists do. If the first hypothesis ('I think this text means so-and-so') is correct, all the evidence in the text will support it. If it is incorrect, it will prove increasingly difficult to justify as you read on and encounter contradictory evidence.
(Nuttall, 1996: 152)

Rather than starting a text-based class on something students find difficult or demotivating (eg 'What words don't you know?'), it is a good idea to encourage them to skim the text and come up with a working hypothesis of what the text is about. For example:

Techniques for helping students to build hypotheses about a text include the following:

• Read the title; what do you think this text will be about?
  
  
• Read the paragraph headings (where relevant); what do you think the author is trying to say?
  
  
• Look at the accompanying pictures, diagrams, tables, etc. What do they suggest about the content of the text?

At this stage it is best not to tell the students whether their guesses and predictions are accurate. Encourage them rather to use their subsequent reading to confirm or correct their original hypothesis. On especially long texts it may be useful to ask students to make interim hypotheses and then to reformulate them in the middle of the text or at the end of each major section.

To promote hypothesis-building, students should be encouraged to make use of their general knowledge and experience of life and, of course, to apply common sense. The emphasis here needs to be on activating learners' in-built schemata (see Module 7, section 7.1.4 and 8.3.1 below).

ACTIVITY 5

This approach to a new text is important as many readers too readily assume they can gain little from an L2 text without painstakingly plodding through it word by word with dictionary in hand. Clearly, there is a need for such intensive 'bottom-up' work, but initial access to the text can be made much easier and students' confidence can be substantially increased through top-down work that shows students they have abilities and knowledge which they can bring to the text and which can greatly aid their L2 reading.

However, it requires a lot of practice before students are able or willing to adopt top-down processing as a first strategy when left to their own devices. Moreover, they need to be careful when applying it to texts on subjects they are unfamiliar with, since inexperienced readers may well assume the text will reflect their own views on the topic.

Encouraging students to build hypotheses about what they are reading and to be more active in the way they approach a text, is one aspect of encouraging critical reading. An important goal of teaching reading in HE is to reduce students' deference to the printed word, to encourage independent and critical responses to what they read. While this is perhaps a more readily achieveable goal in other (L1-medium) areas of the modern languages curriculum, the barriers in language teaching are not insurmountable and, as some of the activities suggested in 8.5 show, language classes too can contribute to the achievement of this goal.