A Study of Approaches to Facilitate Bottom-up Processing in the Reading Comprehension Process of Learners of Japanese

Abstract

This paper discusses approaches that promote the ability of Japanese language learners to carry out bottom-up processing when reading texts. Chunking and reading aloud have been suggested to automate bottom-up processing skills and are thought to facilitate bottom-up processing as follows: 1) Chunking or word segmentation is an activity that helps students to recognize word clusters and narrow their visual range through the practice of separating strings of letters into shorter words. This process is expected to prevent any misrecognition of letters and words; 2) Chunk reading involves processing on a multiword unit-by-multiword unit basis rather than a sentence-by-sentence basis, which reduces the cognitive load of processing in longer sentences with complex syntactic structures; 3) Chunk reading is a method of reading using the word order of the target language, which increases reading speed by preventing return reading; 4) Reading aloud is a language activity that links the written word to its pronunciation. Reading aloud speeds up the process of converting written words into phonemes. When phonological encoding is accelerated, word recognition, a lower processing task, becomes automatic; 5) Reading aloud is an activity that makes the word-internal repetitions that take place in the mind and promotes the speeding up of word-internal repetitions. When word-internal repetition is accelerated, the capacity for processing resource allocation is increased and the surplus can be allocated to content comprehension.