ABSTRACT
This chapter examines several views of the normal reading process in order to help understand what it is that the hearing-impaired child has to do to become a reader. Good readers succeed because their understanding of 'bottom-up' rules is very much more explicit. Poor readers may be poor at using visual features to recover a word from the inner dictionary; or the lexicon may have a limited quality of information stored, which prevents the reader from recognizing what the word means. Reading strategies are sometimes described as being 'bottom-up', 'top-down', or a mixture of the two. The interactive view differs from the 'top-down' view in its pure form, in emphasizing that low-level, data-driven strategies are very important for good readers. Some teachers feel strongly that when they wish to appraise children's reading they are not concerned to see whether children pass or fail a test, but to observe how the task is approached.
