Top-down compared with Bottom-up approaches to reading

1. Top-down emphasizes the importance of what the reader brings to the text whereas Bottom-up emphasizes the written or printed text itself.
2. Top-down proceeds from whole to part – whereas Bottom-up proceeds from part to whole.
3. Top-down begins in the mind of the reader with an assumption about the meaning of a text.
4. In Bottom-up, readers link spelling patterns to recognize words whereas Top-down is based on the belief that reading is not primarily a matter of decoding written language to spoken language.
5. Bottom-Up is a matter of bringing meaning to print not extracting meaning from print.
6. A completely Bottom-up approach to reading holds that you cannot understand a text if you cannot recognize the words.
7. Bottom-up holds that the first task of reading is to learn the code through which phonemes are represented in print.