The Reading Act: 05

Components of the Reading Act

The Reading Process, continued

The nine aspects of the reading process involve the following:

• Sensory aspect: auditory and visual discriminaton
  
  
• Perceptual aspect: interpretation of the sensory impressions that reach the brain. Clusters of the information that people develop about things is called schemata.
  
  Reading comprehension has been described as the act of relating textual information to existing schemata.
  
  
• Sequential aspect: understanding that in the English language, printed material generally appears on the page in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequence. Learning to follow this sequential pattern can be a new challenge for children who have not been exposed to many printed materials or who have experience with different sequences used in other languages.
  
  
• Experiential aspect: meaning derived from reading is based on the reader's experiential background. Children with rich background experiences have had more chances to develop understanding of the vocabulary and concepts they encounter in reading than have children with limited experiences.
  
  -- Many direct experiences result in increased understanding of reading material.
  
  -- Vicarious experiences can also enhance conceptual development, but are likely less effective than concrete experiences.
  
  -- NOTE: Poor readers can sometimes rely too much on their prior knowledge of the topic. They need to be able to connect what they read to their experiences while also demanding sense from the reading.
  
  
• Thinking aspect: reading is a thinking process. The act of recognizing words requires interpretation of the graphic symbols. Comprehension requires a reader to use the information to make inferences and read critically and creatively — to understand the figurative language, determine the author's purpose, evaluate the ideas presented, and apply the ideas to actual situations.
  
  -- Teachers can guide students' thinking by asking appropriate questions.
  
  
• Learning aspect: Reading is a complex act that must be learned. It is also a means by which further learning takes place. In other words, a person learns to read and reads to learn.
  
  
• Associational aspect: First, children learn to associate objects and ideas with spoken words. Next they are asked to build up associations between spoken words and written words. The more meaningful an association is to a child, the more rapidly he or she will learn it.
  
  
• Affective aspect: interests, attitudes, and self-concepts are three affective aspects of the reading process. These aspects influence how hard children will work at the reading task. Children with positive attitudes toward reading will expend more effort on the reading process than will children with negative attitudes. Children with poor opinions of themselves may be afraid to attempt a reading task because they are sure they will fail.
  
  
• Constructive aspect: The reader puts together input from sensory and perceptual channels with experiential background and affective responses and constructs a personal meaning for the text. The meaning is based on the written word, but does not reside completely in it; it is transformed by the information the reader brings to the text, the reader's feelings about the material, the purposes for the reading, and the context in which the reading takes place.