What is Reading, Anyway?

At first glance, I believed this week’s guiding question to be somewhat self-explanatory. “What is reading, anyway?” “Reading is what I am doing right now,” I thought to myself. I sat for a moment and tried to muster up a better response. I was stumped. I wondered how I would explain what reading was in a few hundred words when, to get a response, one would have to read what I wrote. So, there I had it! I would define reading as being the ability to look at words and know what they are. Growing up, I believed reading to be just that. Being the daughter of an English teacher and literacy coach, I began reading at an early age. My parents, especially my mother, made sure that I did my phonics lessons and read daily. Consequently, reading, or what I believed to be reading, quickly became an intricate part of my life. In school, I was always a “good reader” and the teachers would often call on me to read excerpts from the text aloud in the classroom. I would win all the prizes for having read the most books in a semester or school year. One would think that I had mastered this skill, but no. I had simply become what I would like to call a word master. I had mastered the ability to call words, but I was not simultaneously comprehending what I was reading. After recalling an experience when my mother gave me a comprehension quiz on a book that I had finished, my definition of reading changed, and after reading the second chapter of the textbook, Subjects Matter, I understood that I was on the right track. In retrospect, reading is more than phonics. As the text pointed out, “‘Phonics’ just means the sound-symbol correspondence between spoken and printed language” (Daniels et al 29). Reading includes comprehension, interpretation, and thinking. Good readers are actively engaged in the text and build an understanding based on preexisting apprehension. I would now define reading as deciphering and assimilating text so as to get its meaning.






Lainna
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