De Betekenis Van Recente Theorieen Van Het Leesproces Voor Voorbereidend en Aanvankelijk Leesonderwijs

In order to understand how children learn to read, it is useful to consider reading as a language process. Each word has its own characte-ristics. Words are fundamental constituents of the linguistic system. They are conceptualized as abstract units having several different identities: Orthographic, phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic. One of the most important tasks facing the beginning reader is to amalgamate these different identities.During the last decades various models of reading have been developed: top-down, bottom-up and interactive models. Interactive models provide the best account of the existing data on the use of orthographic structure and sentence context.In the Netherlands the teaching of initial reading has been influenced by different theories of reading. The new edition (1980) of the reading curriculum which is most widely disseminated (in the Netherlands), "de structuurmethode", largely corresponds to an interactive model of the reading process.