Reading

A. The Definition Reading and Readers

A simple and provisional definition of reading is a process whereby one looks at and understands what has been written. The key word here is 'understands' - merely reading aloud without understanding does not count as reading. Asking language learners to read aloud, if a teacher already knows that they can read, is an activity of very limited value. There are far better ways of practicing pronunciation. This definition of reading does not mean that a foreign learner (or indeed any reader) needs to understand everything in a text.
The reader is not simply a passive object, fed with letters, words and sentences, but is actively working on the text, and is able to arrive at understanding without looking at every letter and word. Reading research supports the view that the efficient reader generally reads in groups of words, not word by word, far less letter by letter.
Written texts, then, often contain more than we need to understand them. The efficient reader makes use of this to take what he needs, and no more, to obtain meaning. This is what prompted Kenneth Goodman (1967:126) to refer to reading as a 'psycholinguistic guessing game'. The 'guessing' however, is far from random. It is principled guessing, which draws upon two sources to guide it. First, the text itself and, second, what the reader brings to the text.