A comparison of two models of the reading process--the psycholinguistic model, in which learning to read is seen as a top-down, holistic procedure, and the traditional theory model, in which learning to read is seen as a bottom-up, atomistic procedure--is provided in this paper. The first part of the paper provides brief overviews of the following topics: what linguists and psychologists have been investigating on how children learn language, and how their findings have contributed to the psycholinguistic movement; the version of psycholinguistics that developed in the late 1950s from a union of cognitive psychology and transformational generative linguistics; the early work of Noam Chomsky, a pioneer in transformational generative grammar; and the work of psycholinguists Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman, who believe that the key factors of reading lie in children and their interaction with information. The second part of the paper consists of a chart that outlines differences between the traditional and the psycholinguistic model in ten different areas related to reading, including reading proficiency, the readers' interaction with the text, the way learning takes place, and the goal of instruction. The paper concludes by urging teachers to examine all models in light of what makes the most sense for teaching reading to children in a rapidly changing society. (GT)