COMPONENTS OF READING

Components of Reading

Components of Reading

Overview

Effective teaching of reading comes through an understanding of the components that form part of the reading process and of how these are used by skilful readers. Expert teachers provide their students with a range of experiences to build knowledge and skill in all the elements that make up the reading process.

The Components of Reading provided here is an attempt to describe the complex process of reading but being a static model; it cannot fully portray the dynamic and interactive nature of the reading process.

The Context and Purpose of Reading

Different cultural groups and individuals bring different purposes and understandings to print and therefore react in different ways to it.

The text itself is subject to similar influences. The writer's social purpose and cultural background will effect the genre in which the text is written.

The cultural background of he writer would also be reflected in the text.

These differences are often discussed in terms of register, which means the way a particular situation affects the language and meaning of a text. It is reflected in the choice of vocabulary, grammar, and other features.

Different social and cultural contexts will affect the genre in which a text is written and each genre will have a different internal structure in terms of its grammar and its sequential makeup. An information report is significantly different from an instruction; an exposition is significantly different from a narrative. Reading is embedded in the social and cultural contexts, in which we live, work, learn, play, communicate, create, buy and sell goods and services, and are entertained.

“Reading” changes, depending on the context in which it is being used and what we are trying to do with it.

Genre or Text-Type

Genre or text-type refers to the way a text is structured to achieve a particular purpose. There are various categories of text types and their names sometimes vary according to the person who describes them.

Literary Text-types include a recount, information report, explanation, instruction (Procedure), exposition and discussion.

Selecting Texts

Many of the texts we use are already embedded in the social context in which they operate.

Texts are different depending on what purpose we want them to fulfil.

The text differences have evolved because they help the text to achieve its purpose.

The text-types we know and use today evolved to meet the social purposes we wanted these texts to perform. In future there will be new and different types of text to meet new and different purposes of society. An Internet website is a example of a new type of text that has evolved to fulfil particular purposes.

There are two important aspects to consider with “multiliteracies”. The first refers to the differences created by cultural. Social and linguistic influences. The second is that new communication technologies are producing increasingly multimodal types of text.

Literacy Practices

Allan Luke and Peter Freebody (1990, 1999) have described a set of reading practices that effective readers use when they are interacting with texts to achieve particular purposes. These practices describe the kinds of things that effective ...