THE NATURE OF READING

Definitions of Reading

Among the many definitions of reading that have arisen in recent decades, three prominent ideas emerge as most critical for understanding what "learning to read" means:

• Reading is a process undertaken to reduce uncertainty about meanings a text conveys.
• The process results from a negotiation of meaning between the text and its reader.
• The knowledge, expectations, and strategies a reader uses to uncover textual meaning all play decisive roles way the reader negotiates with the text's meaning.

Reading does not draw on one kind of cognitive skill, nor does it have a straightforward outcome—most texts are understood in different ways by different readers.

Background Knowledge

For foreign language learners to read, they have to be prepared to use various abilities and strategies they already possess from their reading experiences in their native language. They will need the knowledge they possess to help orient themselves in the many dimensions of language implicated in any text. Researchers have established that the act of reading is a non-linear process that is recursive and context-dependent. Readers tend to jump ahead or go back to different segments of the text, depending on what they are reading to find out.

Goals

Asking a learner to "read" a text requires that teachers specify a reading goal. One minimal goal is to ask the learner to find particular grammatical constructions or to identify words that relate to particular features or topics of the reading.  But such goals are always only partial. For example, a text also reveals a lot about the readers for which it is written and a lot about subject matter that foreign language learners may or may not know or anticipate.

A Holistic Approach to Reading

The curriculum described here is called a holistic curriculum, following Miller (1996). Holistic education is concerned with connections in human experience—connections between mind and body, between linear thinking and intuitive ways of knowing, between academic disciplines, between the individual and the community.
A holistic curriculum emphasizes how the parts of a whole relate to each other to form the whole. From this perspective, reading relates to speaking, writing, listening comprehension, and culture.

Pedagogical Stages of Reading

Ideally, each text used in such a curriculum should be pedagogically staged so that learners approach it by moving from pre-reading, through initial reading, and into rereading. This sequence carefully moves the learner from comprehension tasks to production tasks. In addition, these tasks should build upon each other in terms of increasing cognitive difficulty.

• Pre-Reading: The initial levels of learning, as described in Bloom's Taxonomy, involve recognizing and comprehending features of a text. As proposed here, pre-reading tasks involve speaking, reading, and listening.
• Initial Reading: Initial reading tasks orient the learner to the text and activate the cognitive resources that are associated with the learner's own expectations. For example, discussions of genres and stereotypes may help the learner to identify potential reading difficulties and to strategize ways to overcome these challenges. Simple oral and written reproduction tasks should precede more complex production tasks that call for considering creative thinking about several issues at the same time.
• Rereading: In rereading, the learner is encouraged to engage in active L2 production such as verbal or written analysis and argumentation. These activities require longer and more complex discourse. At this point, the language learners' critical thinking needs to interact with their general knowledge. Ideally, cultural context and the individual foreign language learner's own identity emerge as central to all acts of production. 

• Readability and the Holistic Approach

  Teachers should assess whether the texts they assign are appropriately readable for their students. But how to measure readability? In the holistic approach advocated here, readability is not a static property of a given text. Instead, readability is determined by three characteristics: the suitability of the text for the readers' background, their language, and the instructor's curricular goals.
  In general, a text is more readable when:
  
• it presents concrete issues rather than abstract ones
• it provides the "who," "what," "where," and "when" familiar to the reader
• it is age-appropriate
• it is in a genre familiar to the reader
• it is acceptable to the reader's cultural background
• it is longer, with context clues, or it is a short text on a familiar topic