Reading matters

Reading matters: What is reading?

Recognition of the actual word is not enough on its own to constitute reading. Understanding what we are reading is key and is certainly the main point of teaching reading in a class. It’s not much good if our students simply stare at a text and say ‘Well, I don’t understand it, but it looks nice!’ However, understanding a text is quite a complex issue and something that we will try and examine in the rest of this article.

In other words, there might be multiple reasons why someone might read a text. But working out the purpose is a key factor when it comes to teaching reading. Why we are reading something will make a difference to how we read it, and in what depth. So, a mother checking whether the lyrics of a song are suitable for her children to hear will most likely be looking through the text for particular words or phrases she thinks are inappropriate. On the other hand, someone trying to learn the lyrics by heart will probably read the same lines a number of times and may even read them out loud to try and reinforce the words.

The problem is probably not that we are not using the correct techniques, but that we are unable to recognise the words and meaning. This causes us a big problem.

The problem is that we begin to panic. We start to try and use different techniques and strategies to understand the text. We start to read every word in a way that we wouldn’t if the text was in our L1. We start to focus on aspects of the text, such as grammatical construction, something we probably wouldn’t do if it was in our L1.

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