Reading process definition

What Is Reading? | Reading Rockets

By: Diane Henry Leipzig

Reading is making meaning from print. It requires that we:

• Identify the words in print – a process called word recognition
• Construct an understanding from them – a process called comprehension
• Coordinate identifying words and making meaning so that reading is automatic and accurate – an achievement called fluency

Sometimes you can make meaning from print without being able to identify all the words. Remember the last time you got a note in messy handwriting? You may have understood it, even though you couldn't decipher all the scribbles.

Sometimes you can identify words without being able to construct much meaning from them. Read the opening lines of Lewis Carroll's poem, "Jabberwocky," and you'll see what I mean.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Finally, sometimes you can identify words and comprehend them, but if the processes don't come together smoothly, reading will still be a labored process. For example, try reading the following sentence:

It          isn't          as         if          the          words
     are        difficult                   to          identify          or
understand,                   but          the          spaces
                   make                   you          pause                   between
    words,                    which                   means        your
                   reading                   is                    less                    fluent.

Reading in its fullest sense involves weaving together word recognition and comprehension in a fluent manner. These three processes are complex, and each is important. How complex? Here goes?

To develop word recognition, children need to learn:

• How to break apart and manipulate the sounds in words – this is phonemic awareness
  example: feet has three sounds: /f/, /e/, and /t/
• Certain letters are used to represent certain sounds – this is the alphabetic principle
  example: s and h make the /sh/ sound
• How to apply their knowledge of letter-sound relationships to sound out words that are new to them – this is decoding
  example: ssssspppoooon – spoon!
• How to analyze words and spelling patterns in order to become more efficient at reading words – this is word study
  example: Bookworm has two words I know: book and worm.
• To expand the number of words they can identify automatically, called their sight vocabulary
  example: Oh, I know that word – the!

To develop comprehension, children need to develop:

• Background knowledge about many topics
  example: This book is about zoos – that's where lots of animals live.
• Extensive oral and print vocabularies
  example: Look at my trucks – I have a tractor, and a fire engine, and a bulldozer.
• Understandings about how the English language works
  example: We say she went home, not she goed home.
• Understandings about how print works
  example: reading goes from left to right
• Knowledge of various kinds of texts
  example: I bet they live happily ever after.
• Various purposes for reading
  example: I want to know what ladybugs eat.
• Strategies for constructing meaning from text, and for problem solving when meaning breaks down
  example: This isn't making sense. Let me go back and reread it.

To develop fluency, children need to:

• Develop a high level of accuracy in word recognition
• Maintain a rate of reading brisk enough to facilitate comprehension
• Use phrasing and expression so that oral reading sounds like speech
• Transform deliberate strategies for word recognition and comprehension into automatic skills

But if reading isn't pleasurable or fulfilling, children won't choose to read, and they won't get the practice they need to become fluent readers.

Therefore, reading also means developing and maintaining the motivation to read. Reading is an active process of constructing meaning. The key word here is active.

To develop and maintain the motivation to read, children need to:

• Appreciate the pleasures of reading
• View reading as a social act, to be shared with others
• See reading as an opportunity to explore their interests
• Read widely for a variety of purposes, from enjoyment to gathering information
• Become comfortable with a variety of different written forms and genres

So…what is reading?

Reading is the motivated and fluent coordination of word recognition and comprehension.

Quite an achievement for a six year old!

What is the Reading Process?

What is the Reading Process?

According to Education.com the reading process is
  "Steps that most children go through as they read are pre-reading, first reading (of fiction), re-reading, and extended reading. Process of constructing meaning from written texts. Complex skill requiring critical and creative thinking processes to pull together a number of interrelated sources of information."

Reading itself is making meaning of print. So an easier way to define the reading process is the five stages that children go through to make meaning of print.

What are the 5 stages to the Reading Process?

The five stages to the reading process are:
    1.  Pre-reading
    2.  Reading
    3.  Responding
    4.  Exploring
    5.  Applying

Stage 1: Pre-reading
        Pre-reading is where students prepare themselves to read. They may decide or be told why they're going to read a piece of text. They may use their background knowledge to make predictions of what the text is going to be about. Teachers may have them use a concept map called a KWL chart where students put down what they know (K), what they want to know (W), and after they have read what they learned (L) from their reading.

Stage 2: Reading
        This is where you get down to the actual reading part. The text can be delivered to students in a variety of ways. Students can engage in individual reading, or they can be read aloud to. Teachers may use big books or print projected somewhere in order to do a group reading session.

Stage 3: Responding
        Responding is where a students reacts to what they have read. Most often this is through discussion.

Stage 4: Exploration
        This is where students explore their new information. They may re-read part or all of the text. They may read more texts to expand their knowledge of the new subject. Students may learn new vocabulary words that they came up against in the text. Exploration is a very broad stage that can take many paths.

Stage 5: Applying
        During the applying stage students take the new knowledge they have learned and do more with it. Often they will have projects that measure how much they have learned. They may read books related to the original text or participate

Understanding the Reading Process

    Good readers understand the processes involved in reading and consciously control them. This awareness and control of the reading processes is called metacognition, which means "knowing about knowing." Some students don't know when they don't know. They continue to read even though they are not comprehending. Poor readers tolerate such confusion because they either don't realize that it exists or don't know what to do about it. Poor readers focus on facts, whereas good readers try to assimilate details into a larger cognitive pattern.

Five Thinking Strategies of Good Readers

1. Predict: Make educated guesses. Good readers make predictions about thoughts, events, outcomes, and conclusions. As you read, your predictions are confirmed or denied. If they prove invalid, you make new predictions. This constant process helps you become involved with the author's thinking and helps you learn.
    
2. Picture: Form images. For good readers, the words and the ideas on the page trigger mental images that relate directly or indirectly to the material. Images are like movies in your head, and they increase your understanding of what you read.
    
3. Relate: Draw comparisons. When you relate your existing knowledge to the new information in the text, you are embellishing the material and making it part of your framework of ideas. A phrase of a situation may remind you of a personal experience or something that you read or saw in a film. Such related experiences help you digest the new material.
    
4. Monitor: Check understanding. Monitor your ongoing comprehension to test your understanding of the material. Keep an internal summary or synthesis of the information as it is presented and how it relates to the overall message. Your summary will build with each new detail, and as long as the message is consistent, you will continue to form ideas. If, however, certain information seems confusing or erroneous, you should stop and seek a solution to the problem. You must monitor and supervise you own comprehension. Good readers seek to resolve difficulties when they occur; they do not keep reading when they are confused.
    
5. Correct gaps in understanding. Do not accept gaps in your reading comprehension. They may signal a failure to understand a word or a sentence. Stop and resolve the problem. Seek solutions, not confusion. This may mean rereading a sentence or looking back at a previous page for clarification. If an unknown word is causing confusion, the definition may emerge through further reading. When good readers experience gaps in comprehension, they do not perceive themselves as failures; instead, they reanalyze the task to achieve better understanding.

 Adapted for

, Brenda Smith, 1999.

Reading process model - How we read

It is not difficult to collect books, it is difficult to be able to look through books. It is not difficult to look through books, it is difficult to be able to read books. Reading books is not difficult, it is difficult to be able to use what you read. It is not difficult to use what you read, it is difficult to be able to remember.

Zhang Chao "Shadows of Peaceful Dreams"

In the study of complex processes in nature and society, modern science widely uses the modeling method . If the mechanism of a phenomenon is complex and cannot be directly studied, its simplified model is built, with the help of which its main parameters are studied. To study the process of reading, we will also create such a model and consider reading as a special case of receiving and processing textual information. Engineering psychology has long and deeply studied reading. In this science, the human body is presented as a complex cybernetic machine that receives information from the external and internal environment, processes it and stores the necessary information in the brain memory system.

This representation makes it possible to build a generalized cybernetic model of one of the most important processes of perception and processing of textual information - the process of reading. The scheme of this model is shown in fig. 1 . As is known, cybernetics studies two types of processes: information processing and management. Considering reading as a kind of "man-text" system, one can see that reading is also a typical cybernetic system. There are five main blocks in the process of reading.

Fig.1. Model of the reading process

The block of the visual analyzer perceives information. The processing of the received information takes place with the participation of the speech-motor, speech-auditory blocks and the block of semantic processing and decision-making. The nature of processing is influenced not only by new information, but also by the internal (basic) information about the subject of reading that comes from the memory system in the form of previously received information and instructions, which are, as it were, programs of mental actions for effective comprehension of what has been read. The result of the work of the semantic processing unit is the understanding of what is read, which, as a result of reading, enters the memory system. The control unit controls the executive organs: the muscles of the eyes, hands, tongue, lips. This stage is the actual control, as a result of which the chain of transformations is closed in the "text-reader-text" circuit. Thus, the chain "perception, processing, development of a solution and its implementation" forms a closed ring-like system between the reader and the author of the text.

As in any control object of this kind. There are feedback channels here. In feedback control systems, they call the corrective effects of the system output on its input. In our case, the feedback channel is implemented by issuing a signal about the corrective decision made (as a result of comprehending the current fragment of the text) to the channel of the visual analyzer: "Stop", "Read further", "Go back" (as opposed to the general command "Read, read, read" ).

So, reading in the "man-text" system is a process of managing several processes, where the text is the object of perception and cognition of the content information embedded in it, the brain is a processing and control device.

In accordance with the described structural model, the reading process itself can be represented as follows. The reader grasps with his eyes a certain fragment of the text, which then begins to be processed in the channel of the visual analyzer. Speech-auditory and speech-motor analysis also takes place. As a result of this traditional three-stage information processing, a certain decision is made in the block of semantic processing: a command to perform a regression or to read the next piece of text, a command to the hand muscles to turn the page, or a command to stop reading.

Being aware of the extreme conventionality and approximation of the considered structure - the functional model of the reading process, we nevertheless consider its awareness useful for readers.

As scientists have established, reading is a simultaneous process of receiving and issuing speech. How these processes are organized, what is the degree of their consistency, and the speed of reading depends. If during reading the so-called external articulation arises - speaking aloud or in a whisper what is being read, and then internal listening, then in these cases all three blocks process information: visual, speech-motor, speech-auditory. In other words, the text is visually perceived, spoken and listened to. Almost all readers read in this traditional way.

However, this multi-step text processing is not always necessary and, moreover, what is read is not absorbed better. With such reading, the perception and comprehension of large fragments of text, the selection of their logical elements is difficult. Figuratively speaking, the reader does not see the forest of meaning behind the trees of words. From the point of view of cybernetics, the slow rate of reading in this case can only be explained by the low bandwidth of the speech-auditory channel as a whole due to its inertia. Indeed, the speed of our speech is low - 150 words / min. This is the limit above which it becomes indistinct.

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So, external articulation in any form (speaking out loud or in a whisper) slows down reading. Skillful suppression of it, as we will see later, will allow us to exclude from participation in the processing of information when reading one functional block - auditory speech and switch to a new, more economical two-stage information processing with the help of only the visual and speech-motor blocks, the work of which also changes. With such reading, entire groups of words are replaced in the brain with one key word-concept that generalizes the meaning of the entire phrase.

Reading process control factors can be divided into two groups: causal (brain) and effect (peripheral). Any psychophysiological analyzer consists of three parts - perceiving - peripheral, transmitting - translating and a higher control center - a group of neurons in the cerebral cortex. The analysis of information coming from outside begins in the peripheral part. But only in the brain ends of the analyzer - in the cerebral cortex - is it possible to make a fine analysis of all the complex elements of the perceived image. It is here that programs and codes are formed, with the help of which a person actively perceives the events of the external world.

Thus, when learning to read quickly, it is necessary to influence both groups of factors: investigative factors that determine the behavior of the peripheral parts of the visual, speech and auditory analyzers, and causal mechanisms of the brain. Through various control educational and methodological influences, it is necessary to achieve the development of the peripheral part of the visual analyzer, blocking the speech-auditory analyzer and, accordingly, rebuild or develop new programs for the brain during text processing. The device that controls the process of reading is the brain, and therefore it is the central causal factor, because it is its activity that determines the investigative behavior of all the peripheral ends of the analyzers. Obviously, in the functions of the cerebral cortex, one must look for those key causal factors that ultimately determine the speed and efficiency of reading. Unfortunately, we still know little about the mechanism of brain processes that govern reading. Until now, it is not known for certain what laws are used to select and process the most important semantic units of a text when reading, and with the help of which code systems this is implemented. The human mind is striking precisely in its flexible ability to extract and use the most significant information. At the same time, modern ideas about the work of the brain suggest that faster reading implements more advanced programs of mental activity , and most importantly, codes of higher levels of interpretation of the meaning of the text. By analogy with progress in the construction of electronic computers, we can assume that fast reading people use the interactive advantages of modern third-generation computers, while people who read slowly "work" at the level of first-generation machines, i.e. in the "big adding machine" mode . The ability to flexibly associate and select, adapt and improve programs of mental actions when communicating with a text is an obvious advantage of the human brain, which, however, in practice people use so far is extremely inefficient. A quick read allows you to use them to great effect.

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