Importance of reading

While the ability to read is important for

its own sake, it provides the foundation
for all other learning, particularly during
school years. Consider how much
difficulty a struggling reader will have
with both textbooks and computer-based
lessons. Writing skills also benefit thanks
to a powerful vocabulary and familiarity
with classic writing styles that come with
frequent reading.
3. Reading is important because it
develops the mind. The mind is a muscle.
It needs exercise. Understanding the
written word is one way the mind grows
in its ability. Teaching young children to
read helps them develop their language
skills. It also helps them learn to listen.
Everybody wants to talk, but few can
really listen. Lack of listening skills can
result in major misunderstandings which
can lead to job loss, marriage breakup,
and other disasters - small and great.
Reading helps children [and adults] focus
on what someone else is communicating.

4. Why is reading important? It is how we

discover new things. Books, magazines
and even the Internet are great learning
tools which require the ability to read and
understand what is read. A person who
knows how to read can educate
themselves in any area of life they are
interested in. We live in an age where we
overflow with information, but reading is
the main way to take advantage of it.

5. Reading develops the imagination. TV

and computer games have their place,
but they are more like amusement.
Amusement comes from two words "a"
[non] and "muse" [think]. Amusement is
non-thinking activities. With reading, a
person can go anywhere in the world...or

even out of it! They can be a king, or an

adventurer, or a princess, or... The
possibilities are endless. Non-readers
never experience these joys to the same
extent.

Good readers can understand the

individual sentences and the
organizational structure of a piece of
writing. They can comprehend ideas,
follow arguments, and detect
implications. They know most of the
words in the text already, but they can
also determine the meaning of many of
the unfamiliar words from the context failing this, they can use their dictionary
effectively to do so. In summary, good
readers can extract from the writing what
is important for the particular task they
are employed in. And they can do it
quickly!

Educational researchers have also found

a strong correlation between reading and
vocabulary knowledge. In other words,
students who have a large vocabulary
are usually good readers. This is not very
surprising, since the best way to acquire
a large vocabulary is to read extensively,
and if you read extensively you are likely
to be or become a good reader!

Major types of reading

Academic reading
Academic reading often requires you to
actively engage
with, and critically think about the
information you take
in. There is a purpose behind what youre
reading, and
understanding this purpose frames how
you interpret

and use the information.

Rather than passively read information,
reading academic
sources and information encourages you
to ask questions
about what youre reading, and invites
you to draw
connections to existing knowledge.
As a university student you will be
exposed to
lengthy texts, some of which will contain
unfamiliar
terminology or complex concepts.
However, as you
develop your academic skills, reading
academic material
will become easier.

websites, newspapers, comic books, and

graphic novels.
Leisure reading is generally intrinsically
or socially
motivated and a pleasurable activity for
the reader.

TYPES OF TEXT
Narrative texts
Narrative texts have to do with real-world
events and time.
They may be fictional (fairy tales,
novels) or nonfictional (newspaper
report).
They are characterised by a sequencing
of events expressed by dynamic verbs
and by adverbials such as and then,
first, second, third
Example: First we packed our bags and
then we called a taxi. After that we etc.

Recreational reading
Leisure reading, also known as
recreational reading,
pleasure reading, free voluntary reading,
and independent
reading, is independent, self-selected
reading of a
continuous text for a wide range of
personal and social
purposes. It can take place in and out of
school, at any
time. Readers select from a wide range of
extended texts,
including but not exclusive to narrative
fiction, nonfiction,
picture books, e-books, magazines, social
media, blogs,

Expository texts
Expository texts identify and
characterize phenomena.
They include text forms such as
definitions, explications, summaries and
many types of essay. 10 Expository texts
may be subjective (essay) or objective
(summary, explication, definition)
may be analytical (starting from a
concept and then characterizing its parts;
e.g. definitions) or synthetic (recounting
characteristics and ending with an
appropriate concept or conclusion; e.g.
summaries)

are characterized by state verbs and

epistemic modals (Pop music has a
strong rhythmic beat; Texts may consist
of one or more sentences) or by verbs
indicating typical activities or qualities
(fruitflies feed on yeast) Text Types 6 11
Argumentative texts
It aims at explanation, i.e. the cognitive
analysis and subsequent syntheses of
complex facts. Example: An essay on
"Rhetoric: What is it and why do we study
it?"
expository text, which exists to provide
facts in a way that is educational and
purposeful. The text is fact-based with
the purpose of exposing the truth
through a reliable source. True and
deliberate expository text will focus on
educating its reader. Other descriptors of
exposition are clear, concise, and
organized writing. Expository text gets to
the point quickly and efficiently.

Reading process
Bottom-up view
Bottom-up theories hypothesize that
learning to read progresses from children
learning the parts of language (letters) to
understanding whole text (meaning).
Much like solving a jigsaw puzzle,
bottom-up models of the reading process
say that the reading puzzle is solved by
beginning with an examination of each
piece of the puzzle and then putting
pieces together to make a picture.
Bottom-up processing happens when
someone tries to understand language by
looking at individual meanings or
grammatical characteristics of the most
basic units of the text, (e.g. sounds for a
listening or words for a reading), and
moves from these to trying to understand
the whole text. Bottom-up processing is
not thought to be a very efficient way to
approach a text initially, and is often

contrasted with top-down processing,

which is thought to be more efficient.
Decoding letters words phrases
sentences

Top-down view
The top-down model of reading does just
that, focusing on what the readers bring
to the process (Goodman, 1967; Smith,
1971,1982). The readers sample the text
for information and contrast it with their
world knowledge, helping to make sense
of what is written.
Goodman (1967; cited in Paran, 1996)
presented reading as a psycholinguistic
guessing game, a process in which
readers sample the text, make
hypotheses, confirm or reject them, make
new hypotheses, and so forth. Here, the
reader rather than the text is at the heart
of the reading process.

Interactive/transactive
Reading is an interactive process, where
there is a transactive give and take of
information from the writer to the reader.
For this transaction to occur, students
must understand why they are reading
the text. Establishing a purpose for
reading is an essential but often
overlooked component of the reading
process.
This theory also postulates that the
reader eventually settles upon an
interpretation of a text using a
combination of lower-level
comprehension skills and a variety of
higher-level comprehension skills. In
other words, the interactive theory of
reading claims that readers have an
automatic recognition of words and ideas
that tap into their lower-level
comprehension processing but eventually
bring in the logic and knowledge of the
topic and the world that tap into their

higher-level comprehension processing.

This means readers must have the ability
to use context clues to understand
unfamiliar words as well as background
knowledge on a topic in order to get the
full effect of the text. The interactive
theory of reading assumes that these
processes work parallel with each other,
and failure to use both processes results
in the reader not having the ability to
understand the written work fully.
Interactive theories depict reading as
the interaction of two types of
processing: top-down and bottom-up.
Both types of processing are used to
recognize and comprehend words.
According to the bottom-up view, reading
is initiated by the printed symbols
(letters and words) and proceeds to
larger linguistic units until the reader
discovers meaning. According to the topdown view, reading begins with the
readers generation of hypotheses or
predictions about the material, with the
reader using the visual cues in the
material to test these hypotheses as
necessary. Therefore, according to
interactive theories, both the print and
the readers background are important in
the reading process. Transactive theories
depict every reading act as a transaction
involving a reader and a text at a
particular time in a specific context.
Readers generate and test hypotheses
about the reading material and get
feedback from the material.

Compensatory

the interaction between the top-down

and bottom-up processing. The
compensatory mode enables the reader
to, at any level compensate for his or
her deficiencies at any other level
(Samuels and Kamil, 1988: 32) . This
model has enabled researchers to
theorize how good and poor readers
approach a text.
1If there is a deficiency at an early printanalysis stage (BU), higher order
knowledge structures (TD) will attempt to
compensate. For the poor reader, who
may be both inaccurate and slow at word
recognition but who has knowledge of
the text-topic, TD processing may allow
for this compensation E.g. A beginning
reader who is weak at decoding reads
this and do not know the word emerald.
The jeweler put the green emerald in the
ring He will still understand the meaning
of the sentence because he may use
context and knowledge of gems to decide
what the word is
States that if one of the processors (i.e,
orthographic, lexical, syntactic and
semantic) fails, other processors will
facilitate comprehension
For example in a cloze vocabulary
exercises:
Beagles, Retriever, Spaniels, as well as
other ____ of dogs are favorite canines for
hunting enthusiast.
The lexical information is absent, but
students would guess the word breeds or
types, since syntactic and semantic cues
compensate for the absent processors