Michael Morland,

(The Guardian)

Text 2

The way a reader understands a text depends to a great extent on that reader's purpose in reading the text, and also on that reader's knowledge and beliefs about the world. Therefore, the process of reading is interactive, in that comprehension of a text depends not only on the writer's input but also on the reader's; the writer makes certain assumptions about the prior knowledge of the reader, and this is apparent in the text.

The process of reading is a combination of bottom-up and top-down procedures which interact with each other. At least some of the lower level processes, such as the decoding of letters and words, are mostly automatic for skilled readers. The reader brings a set of higher level skills or 'schemata' to bear on the reading process. These relate to the lexical system, the syntactic system and the semantic system, and are affected by attitude and culture. They enable the reader to make the many inferences required by the writer. Generally schemata can be adjusted to accommodate new information, but if the reader's schemata are inadequate because of a lack of the appropriate background knowledge, then comprehension breaks down.

Finally, it must not be assumed that all readers read in the same way. There are differences in the ways they process the text, and some of these differences may account for the fact that there are 'good' and 'bad' readers. However, little is yet known about how, why and when these differences occur.