READING:

AN INTRODUCTION
TSL 591
LECTURE 1

DEFINITION OF READING
WHAT DO WE READ?
VARIOUS FORMS OF PRINTED & ELECTRONIC
MATERIALS SEEN OR SENSED
LETTERS, SYMBOLS, PICTURES

CODE

 WHAT DOES READING LEAD TO?

RESPONSES
KNOWLEDGE, NEW UNDERSTANDING,
PERFORM REQUIRED ACTION

DECODE

READING IS
A complex conscious and unconscious mental
process in which the reader uses a variety of
strategies to reconstruct the meaning that the author
is assumed to have intended, based on data from the
text and from the readers prior knowledge
(Mikulecky, 2011)

 Reading is understood as a complex

combination processes.
These processes are:
1. A rapid and efficient process
2. A comprehending process
3. An interactive process
4. A strategic process

Cont.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

A flexible process
A purposeful process
An evaluative process
A learning process
A linguistic process

 There are some reasons for reading :

1) Reading for survival
2) Reading for learning
3) Reading for pleasure

 Why do people read and what motivates them

to read?
Survival in the real world (e.g. notices, train
schedules, manuals etc.)
Intellectual profit (useful content, understand
the world better)
Pleasure (gives pleasure e.g. reading
literature)

TYPES OF READER
Experienced readers make judgments during
activity about the degree of care and
attention which the material warrants.
Effective reading means a flexible and
appropriate response to the material in hand,
and this is always guided by the readers
purpose.

TYPES OF READER (cont.)

The strategies fluent readers use:
1. Notice the distinctive features in letters,
words, and meanings.
2. Read to get the meaning rather than to
identify individual letters or words.
3. Guess and take risks to predict meaning.
4. Take an active role and apply their knowledge
of the world and the topic in attempting to
understand.

Cont.
5. Make use of redundancies orthographic, syntactic,
and/or semantic repetitions of information to reduce
uncertainty about meaning.
6. Maintain enough speed to overcome the limitations of
visual processing and memory systems.
7. Constantly switch their thoughts back and forth
between the text and what they already know in an
effort to understand.

Implications for instruction

L2 students who are learning to read in
different settings, at different institutions, and
with varying levels of instructional training
and resource support, will have different
learning goals generally, and varying
comprehension goals with each task they
carry out - there is no single one size fits all
set of recommendations for reading
instructions

Cont.
When L2 students read specific texts in
classroom contexts, they will engage in
varying types of reading that reflect differing
tasks, texts, and instructional objectives the
problems may not be an inability to
comprehend but a lack of awareness of the
real goals for that reading task.

Cont.
The various components of a complex
definition for skilled reading suggest that longterm curricular goals for L2 need to address
relevant language-knowledge resources.