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What are the differences between skilled and less skilled readers? Consider both word-level reading and text comprehension. What pedagogical implications could be drawn? 1. Introduction1.1 Nature of readingReading is an active process including decoding, using background knowledge and prediction. The decoding process means readers should decode the information before they receive it. That is the process of transfer the written symbols, linguistic codes and so on into readers mind. This process is actively used by the readers. Using background knowledge refers to that readers should build a connection between the texts and their own knowledge; this is also an active process. Prediction is the procedure that readers predict the following content based on the date in the texts and their own knowledge. This is a kind of combination of the above two aspects.Reading is also an interactive process. Assumed that there is a careless reader or the reader does not share the same common knowledge with the writer, certainly the information cannot be transferred effectively. For this reason, both writer and reader are the important factors of reading.Reading is actually a complicated skill that consisted of many sub-skills. Harmer divided these sub-skills into two types: predictive skill to extract specific information and understanding the general picture, and the inferring skill to infer the opinion and understanding the general picture, and the inferring skill to infer the opinion or attitude of the writer. To be more specific, the sub-skills are deducing the meaning from the contexts, recognizing the function, discourse patterns and markers (Harmer, 1992).1.2 Importance of readingIn language acquisition, there are four main skills: listening, reading, reading and writing. In fact, without the written words, people cannot transfer the information just by memory. Therefore, reading is an important skill that people should have to understand and gain the information. Most people will read what they desire to read as they can find useful information and pleasure through reading. Nowadays, reading is one of the key approaches to study and more and more people pay attention on it. In fact, reading is an individual activity and every one may have his or her own way and purpose to receive the information (Veit & Gould, 2004). As a result, it is necessary to learn how to be a skilled reader.1.3 Structure of the essayThis essay is divided in to five parts. The first part is the general introduction of the whole essay. The second part is analysis on the difference between skilled and less skilled readers in word-level reading. In this part, the analysis is based on three aspects: reaction time, eye-movement and context. The next part is about the difference between skilled and less skilled readers in text comprehension. Skilled readers and less skilled readers are mainly different in vocabulary, reading aims and ability of reasoning. The forth part is the pedagogical implication drawn based on the above study. The author discussed the three major ways of teaching reading and gave some implications of the practical teaching methods. The last part of this essay is the conclusion part. As the end of the essay, there is a summary of the whole passage. At the same time, there are also some suggestions of reading education.2. Difference between skilled and less skilled readers in word-level readingIn the process of reading, readers have to identify the words and then connect them with their mental lexicon correctly. Harley pointed out that the visual word recognition “involves identifying an item as familiar” (Harley, 2001, p.152). Therefore, not all readers can do the identification and connection rapidly and this causes the difference between skilled and less skilled readers in wore-level reading.2.1 Skilled readers2.1.1 Reaction timeMany people will guess word meaning when they reading; this is a common strategy when learning how to read. That means skilled reader can use less information from the individual written words to get the main idea of the text. That can leave them more space and time to treat the text as a whole passage instead of several words. Then they can get the structure clearly. That can be explained as they have more lexical resources as their basis. Hence, in the reading process, skilled reader can recognize words automatically instead of using their memory to find the words meanings or spending too much time on guessing the words. Finally, they can read all words fast and get the meaning.2.1.2 Eye-movementReading has an especially close relationship with eye-movement. It might be mistakenly believed that eyes move smoothly while reading. For most people, there will be a pause after reading one or two words. It means that if there is a sentence consisted of ten words, people will pause for about eight times. However, a skilled reader can finish reading a sentence with about three to six pauses. This kind of analysis of the eye-movement provided scientific support for measuring and improving reading speed.Actually, it is normal that, in reading, eye-movements may be saccades, fixations and regressions. Eyes fixate to extract information and regress to show there are some difficulties or confusions in reading process (Carroll, 2004). However, for the skilled readers, who are better in word-base, syntax and semantic knowledge, their eye fixation and regression will be less than less skilled readers. At the same time, their regressions are mostly for the purpose of helping themselves to construct meaning and the structure at higher level (Field, 2003). For example, the sentence “I am so hungry that I could eat a horse”. The “horse” in this sentence does not actually mean the animal. Skilled readers do not need to fixate or regress on the word to confirm that if they really understand that word. Oppositely, they can connect the word with the whole sentence and get the extended meaning of “I am so hungry that I can eat a lot of food”.2.1.3 ContextSkilled readers can use the context to help them to recognize words. As Goodman suggested, good readers can make good use of the context extensively to predict the words instead of decoding every segment of a single word (Field, 2003). There is a sample sentence: “She is a vegetarian and please dont buy her any food that contains meat.”The word “vegetarian” may be a new word to some readers. But after reading the whole sentence it can be easily guessed that this word stands for people who do not eat meat. From this case the conclusion can be drawn that skilled readers do not need to know the meaning of every single word but can get the meaning from the context. This is exactly the “top-down” reading mode. In other words, this is what scholars called “a psycholinguistic guessing game”. Skilled readers can avoid wasting too much time on single words.2.2 Less skilled readers2.2.1 Reaction timeLess skilled readers need more time on certain words as they do not have the ability to recognizing words and analyzing meanings quickly and accurately. As a result, this causes their obstacles in understanding the meaning of the text. To some extent, these obstacles can be put the blame on their low lexical resources. They may confuse of two similar words because they try to recognize the words with their mental lexicon and then make mistake on the meaning. And this kind of situation may also slow down their word recognition.2.2.2 Eye-movementLess skilled readers usually move their eyes more frequently. The fixation on a word reveals the time that readers spend on it. Readers will have more regression if they meet more difficulties during reading. This is why less skilled readers spend longer time in word recognition. According to Rayner (2001), less skilled readers fixate on almost every word and some words may be fixated on more than once. At the same time, their fixations are quite long. Moreover, less skilled readers have more regressions while reading. Compared with the skilled readers, less skilled readers regress for just making sure that if every single word can be understood or not and they cannot reach the higher level of the text. The difference of eye-movement frequency does not only exist in reading long words, but also exists in reading shorter words. Less skilled readers spend even more time on every single letter, more fixations and more regressions. Therefore they will meet difficulties in either simple text or complex one.2.2.3 ContextLess skilled readers cannot use context effectively to support their word recognition. The sample sentence“I am so hungry that I could eat a horse”is used again to help understand. The word “horse” here is a metaphor to describe that “I” can eat a lot. Other information in the context except the “horse” is related to “eat”. Less skilled readers will focus on the “horse” first, and they do not use the context to help them understand the word. Then they get the meaning of an animal, but they have already away from the idea of the sentence. However, there is some reverse idea that supports less skilled readers use more top-town method to guess word meaning. In addition, it is also mentioned that skilled readers recognize words quickly but with little help of text while less skilled readers rely more on it (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky & Seidenberg, 2002).3. Differences between skilled and less skilled readers in text comprehensionAccording to Harley (2001), text comprehension is the stage following behind the word recognition and parsing. In other words, after readers recognizing words, they also need to combine different elements into the whole sentence and then decide how to find the meaning of the sentence. Some problems that readers have in word-level reading may also cause difficulties in text comprehension, such as the lexical resources and so on.3.1 Skilled readers3.1.1 Lexical resourcesSkilled readers have more lexical resources in their minds, and then they have high ability to recognize words. This is the first step of reading. The following step is to comprehend the text. With the large word-base, skilled readers are able to build good reading habit of effective skimming and scanning. Those two methods help a lot in reading process. Readers can get the main idea of the text quickly and correctly. This is also the superiority of skilled readers. Another aspect is that with large word-base, skilled readers can save time and mind in reading and then pay more attention to the underlying meanings. 3.1.2 Reading aimsSkilled readers have clear ideas of their aims of reading. And also they know the reason why they read and the information they want to get from their readings. Under this condition, readers can have a clear idea of their reading directions. As a matter of fact, this is good for readers to concentrate themselves on the reading. In most cases, text comprehension is the combination of readers comprehension of words, sentences and paragraphs. Therefore, if a reader is not clear about the purpose and the reason of reading, he or she will still feel confused even finish reading.3.1.3 ReasoningThe ability of reasoning is also an important aspect of the differences between skilled readers and less skilled readers. Skilled readers have the ability to predict the new information with the help of the information that they have already gained. This issue can be divided into two parts: reasoning based on readers background knowledge and reasoning based on the information given in the text.Reading is not only a matter of language but also a matter of background knowledge. For the sake of understanding the text, readers should use their previous knowledge to improve the understanding of the target reading materials.Readers background knowledge mans the knowledge and experience that the reader already has about the target reading materials. Skilled readers with a large amount of background knowledge and this can help them to understand the text rapidly and effectively. Such as the background knowledge of different cultures, skilled readers abundant knowledge can help them to read and understand the material with no difficulty. Even there is some new information that they have never heard of before, they can still use their own experience and relevant knowledge to explain it.On the other hand, skilled readers have systematic logic and do well in extract useful information from context, and then make prediction of the new information in the following text.Reasoning can help readers to reach the meaning of the context at a deeper level.3.2 Less skilled readers3.2.1 Lexical resourcesThe first difference between skilled readers and less skilled readers in text comprehension is that the latter ones do not have enough lexical resources. Consequently, they cannot use their mental lexicon to build a connection to the text. This is easy to influence their reading and lead to more regressions. For this reason, less skilled readers will read much slower than skilled readers even they did not aware that.3.2.2 Reading aimsIn addition, some times the less skilled readers do not know their aims of reading. In most cases, they cannot achieve the main idea of the text because they did not set their goals and purpose before reading. Moreover, this kind of readers is easy to be confused of the large amount of minor information in the text. They will face the difficulty in determining the important and relevant information in the passage.3.2.3 ReasoningReasoning can be described as the core of reading process, and it is one of the important strategies to construct the text comprehension. In contrast with the skilled readers, less skilled readers may be inferior in reasoning. First, they may lack of background knowledge. Without enough background knowledge, readers cannot build effective and complete connection between new information and the information they have already had. Another point is that less skilled readers may feel unconfident and anxious in reading if there is too much new information. Then they may not be able to do their best when reading. Second, some less skilled readers can have enough background knowledge, but they cannot extract information from the text and do not know how to combine those information together in order to reason the new ones. This kind of readers should have more training on their logicality. They probably do not use this ability very often and then cannot do it in high efficiency. As a result, most of the less skilled readers may read the whole passage but just draw a superficial conclusion and that is not the author actually aims to express. 4. Pedagogical implicationsBased on the above study, there are several instructions of teaching reading could be summarized.4.1 Three major waysActually, educators have argued for a long time about which is the best way to teach reading. Unfortunately, no overwhelming conclusion can be drawn. According to Rayners (2002), there are three major methods had been put into use in teaching till now.4.1.1 Phonics methodPhonics method means that there is a connection between the characters and the sounds. Children learn the relationship then speak out words based on their own knowledge of phonics. Trying to speak out words provides a second level of receiving information besides looking, because readers have to pronounce the words and then listen to them. This method is good for learners to remember the words as each word has already been repeated twice at the same time. But the biggest problem of it appears when taking English as an example. There are too many exceptions of pronunciation and spelling in English. Learners especially the children cannot handle those exceptions during their early years of learning.4.1.2 Whole- word methodThe whole-word instruction is also called as “look-say” method (Rayner, 2002). This method can be described as that children learn by just remembering certain amount of words repeatedly appear in a story. In this method, the unit that used is word, but not the sound in the phonics method. This is well reflected in Chinese. Each Chinese character is equivalent to a certain word, in contrast with English, that is a language that several letters consist into one word.The whole-word method is just a visual realize method and it do not contain any connection with other aspects but only the word itself. In other words, learners are just asked to remember the whole word as a picture if adopting this strategy. So this kind of method may be boring for learners and reduce their interest to learning.4.1.3 Whole-language methodThe whole-language method is adopted in order to avoid the exceptions and boring reciting. The main purpose of this method is to “make reading instruction enjoyable” (Rayner, 2002, p.86). In the schools where the whole language method is employed, children are encouraged to guess the word meaning by the context or other given information instead of reading the word out.Learners own experience with the language is more important if compared with the whole-word method. Children may even be given chances to create their own stories and learn new words as well as reading skills at the same time.That can be sum that one of the main rules of the whole-language method is that learners will be taught to make good use of the context rather than directly learning how to read the words.4.2 Practical teaching implications4.2.1 Expanding lexical resourcesFrom the previous study, it can be concluded that the vocabulary learning is very important as it can influence not only the word-level reading but also the text comprehension. Word is the foundation of language, though it is not necessary to recognize every word during reading as the previous paragraphs showed, skilled r