8 Importance & Steps of Reading Proficiency

Dr.Priti Hingorani

1.  Module 8: Importance and Steps of Reading

2.  Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this module, students will be able to

•       Understand what reading is.

•       Know the importance of reading in our personal and professional life.

•       Learn what are the steps of reading for better understanding of content

3.  Introduction

“A Reader lives a thousand lives before he dies; the man who never reads lives only one”.

–      George R.R.Martin

Reading is a process of acquiring information in a meaningful way. Some view reading as a complex process integrating all aspects of human behaviours and demanding varied and continued instructional guidance to read accurately, to appraise and to relate to others in a significant way.

Reading is a part of learning process through which we get to know many things in the world. You have been reading various materials for various purposes. And whenever purpose varies the attitude varies. To become an effective communicator, it is essential to polish reading skills.

Reading is generally considered as a cornerstone of success throughout the adult life of an individual.

In Islam, reading is crucial and considered as a window to knowledge.

 The seeking of knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim and the first five verses of divine revelation upon Prophet Mohammad (May peace is upon him) started with the word “Read” (Surah al-Alaq: 1-5):

1. Read! In the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, Who created…
2. Created man, out of a (mere) clot of congealed blood.

• Read! And thy Lord is Most Bountiful.

1. He who taught (the use of) the Pen.
2. Taught man that which he knew not.

4. Importance of Reading

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.

-Charles W. Elio-

Reading is a complex cognitive activity that is indispensable for adequate functioning in society. To enter the present literate society, people must know how to learn from reading.

In our digital age, knowledge is constantly updated and upgraded wherein previous information would consider obsolete. With the advent of the internet, information can be transmitted anywhere in the world with the blink of an eye. It is very important to inculcate good reading habits among every individual and especially for youth since they are the future leaders.

Reading along with listening plays a vital role in effective communication and there are many similarities between them. Depending on the activity you are supposed to perform after reading the target text, reading has to adapt different skills. The skills involve the speed, time, accuracy and activity involved (purpose) during reading. If you are reading for pleasure or casual reading everyday newspaper reading) you do not have to apply specialized skills.

Perfection in reading makes people Good readers as they can grasp ideas, follow opinions, and sense connotation. Most of the words are known to them because of strong vocabulary and can also understand the meaning of many of the unknown or may use their dictionary for better clarity.

The importance of reading can be seen in all phases of life, and in all professions. The aspects of importance of reading are discussed below:

4.1 Relating to New Things

Through reading, the person can connect to fresh things, recent information, innovative ways to solve a problem, and novel ways to achieve success in life. It may happen that people might find their new hobbies within it or explore new things which are liked most by the individual and it may end up becoming the career and victory in the future. Thus, exploration begins from reading and understanding.

4.2 Self Improvement

Reading not only helps in understanding the world more but also facilitate in improving one’s own self. Through reading, people begin to have a greater thoughtfulness on a topic that interest them; for example: building self confidence, accomplishing the habit of self control, motivating one’s own self, better planning and decision making, all of these self improvements start from the reading; through reading, one can create a well thought-out path towards a better perspective and better actions to take in the future.

4.3 Improving Social Skills

Reading increases the understanding of the rules of life; it helps to know about the surrounding, the people, the trends, and the ups and downs of life. Reading assists in learning the art of empathizing and also helps in accommodating into the society in a better way. Thus reading is important in everyone lives and life is like a game where to play well in a game; we first need to understand the rules well.

4.4 Preparation to Action

Reading is an initial step of numerous things, which make a more concrete stairs for people to mount up to accomplish incredible success.

Before starting any task it is important to know the background of the place and the people. Also before purchasing a product it is required to recognize all the options available, for the satisfaction that you have purchased the best available thing. Despite this reading the manual before using a new gadget plays an important role to for the better usage. In today’s world, everything is available to read either online or offline, so prior to take any action for any type of work reading is an essential as this can help you become more prepared before you really get into it.

4.5 Experiencing the echo from great People

When you are reading, you are actually gaining the knowledge and experience of someone, which describes the success and failure of someone. It can hasten your success towards a goal, as you don’t need to repeat the same mistake while focusing on the right path for achievement of any. Here the biographies and autobiographies of great persons can help in following the right path as well as provide the great learning for future endeavours.

The art of reading is in great part that of acquiring a better understanding of life

from one’s encounter with it in a book.

– André Maurois

4.6 Tools to converse

Reading is a vital part of Communication activity. Communicating through reading leads to more understanding, and thus to better communication with people. As with a person who does not read, knows nothing, and so doesn’t have much to share in addition to this even do not understand what other people are sharing. Reading facilitates in building a more solid foundation for conversation. It is one of the most important tools we use every day to connect with each other, with the society, with market; with trends, and with the whole world at large.

4.7 Connecting with Brain

Reading connects directly to the brain, this is the reason why people are silent while reading. As silence holds the power, the courage, thus it seeks for more; in silence, the brain is clear and focuses. This is how people learn and grow, and therefore they feel and see from the point of view of the author about everything in life. Hence you shape a better self.

4.8 Boosting reason and intuition

Reading exposes people to a world of wisdom, showcasing that nothing is impossible in this world. Reading, assist in exploring a different outlook to acts, on how different action leads to different results. Rees in both side of the brain one talks about reason and other intuition and if the reading take place by combining both left and right brain it leads to new structuring, new creativity, new solutions for all confusions and conflicts..

5. Reading Skills

Acquisition of well-developed literacy skills is a critically important developmental landmark for children. A substantial body of research highlights the drawbacks associated with delayed or disordered acquisition of reading skills (Al-Otaiba & Fuchs, 2006). It majorly talks about the poor and good reading skills.

5.1 Poor readers:

Tend to continue to struggle with literacy skills.

They read less than their peers who are more skilled in reading.

As a consequence, poor readers tend to receive less practice in reading They receive less exposure to content knowledge.

They have less strong vocabulary, and other language skills in comparison to those people who are more skilled in reading (Lonigan, Alan, & Lerner, 2011)

5.2 Good readers:

On the contrary to poor readers who lack in reading skills, good readers have strong reading skills:

Good readers do not struggle with literacy skills.

They identify the written text soon and read more than their peers who lack in reading skills. As good readers indentify and read the text fast, they tend to receive more practice in reading They properly decode the content and therefore receive a good amount of content knowledge. They have strong vocabulary, and have the ability to analyze & grasp the ideas expressed.

Reading and reading-related skills are likely to remain stable from an early point in school (Wagner et al., 1997). Longitudinal studies indicate that children who are poor readers by the end of the first grade almost never acquire average-level reading skills by the end of elementary school without substantial and sustained remediation efforts (Al-Otaiba & Fuchs, 2006)

The difference between poor and skilled readers is essentially a difference in skill acquisition (Al Otaiba & Fuchs). A number of reading skills contribute to the variation in the performance of poor and skilled readers. These include phonological awareness, decoding abilities, oral reading fluency, reading comprehension and listening comprehension (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony, 2000).

A good reading habit is necessary for a healthy intellectual growth that would in turn inspire creative and innovative minds.

5.3 Reading skills in children:

To test the reading skills in children, studies on the predictive relation between a skill measured in preschool or kindergarten and reading outcomes i.e., word decoding, reading comprehension, spelling etc. for children learning to read in an alphabetic language indicated that children’s skills related to print knowledge such as alphabet knowledge and print concepts and aspects of oral language including vocabulary, syntax/grammar, and word knowledge were done. (Schatschneider & Westberg, 2008).

Results or the outcome of such studies with young children revealed a high degree of continuity between the levels of reading-related skills displayed by preschool children and the levels of reading-related and reading skills displayed by these children when they join elementary school (Storch & Whitehurst, 2002).

This reflects that the developmental antecedents that lie behind the acquisition of reading develop early and prior to the onset of formal schooling (Lonigan, Alan, & Lerner, 2011).

There has been, however, less focus on the comparison of the performance of poor and skilled readers on key reading skills as students grow and progress from early to later grades in the elementary school. The variations in such performance are likely to highlight the most important as well as influential reading skills.

6. Difficulty in acquiring the art of Reading

     Sometimes people face difficulty in reading, not due to illiteracy, or lack of knowledge, or problem in language but they find reading difficult due to disabilities in reading which is known as dyslexia. The diagram given below classifies reading disabilities into three groups. Some people who suffer from reading disability fall somewhere in the three circles depending on their deficits.

Sometimes it happens that children and even adults find difficulties in reading clearly, there may be various reasons behind this problem, and one of the diseases which cause trouble in reading is discussed below:

There are three specific reading deficits:

Phonological discrepancy: Difficulty decoding or collecting words based on their sounds.

Speed/Naming discrepancy: Slow reading; poor use of sight word, it is a word that is instantly recognized by the reader and requires almost no effort to understand.

Comprehension discrepancy: Poor understanding of what was just read.

Dyslexia is a serious problem which leads to the difficulty in reading, people suffering from dyslexia are not able to read and understand things correctly. Dyslexia can be of different kinds, which are shown below:

   6.1Acquired Dyslexia

This type results from shock or injury to that part of the brain that controls reading and writing. Late in life this can be the result of a tumor or stroke.

6.1.1 Deep Dyslexia

Deep dyslexia is an acquired form of dyslexia, i.e. it does not result from genetic or hereditary reasons. It symbolizes a failure of present ability to read, often because of head injury/ shock or stroke that affects the left side of the brain. It is distinguished by two things: semantic errors and difficulty reading non-words.

6.1.2 Surface Dyslexia

According to Nancy Mather and Barbara Wendling in their excellent 2012 book Essentials of Dyslexia Assessment and Intervention, surface dyslexia is:

“A type of dyslexia characterized by difficulty with whole word recognition and spelling, especially when the words have irregular spelling-sound correspondences”. Example: ‘pitch’ for ‘patch’, ‘this for that’.

6.1.3 Visual Dyslexia

Visual dyslexia is defined as reading difficulty resulting from vision related problems. Visual problems will absolutely lead to reading and knowledge trouble.

6.2 Developmental Dyslexia

Developmental dyslexia is an extreme complexity in reading caused due to hereditary or brain based reasons.

6.2.1 Phonological Dyslexia

Phonological dyslexia is intense intricacy in reading, i.e. disability in manipulating the basic sounds of language. The individual sounds of language become ‘sticky’, unable to be broken apart and not easily manipulated.

6.2.2 Auditory Dyslexia

Auditory dyslexia involves problem in dealing with sounds of letters or groups of letters. Multiple sounds may be used as a singular sound. For example the word ‘rack’ will be heard as a single sound rather than something made up of the sounds ‘r’ – ‘aa’ -‘ck’. Single Syllable words are especially prone to this problem.

6.3 Some Other kinds of Dyslexia are:

Attentional Dyslexia

Attentional Dyslexia is in which children identify letters correctly, but the letters jump between words on the page. ‘kind wing’ would be read as ‘wind king.’ The replacements are not caused by an inability to identify letters or convert them to sounds, but instead result from the movement of letters between words—the first letter of one word switches place with the first letter of another word.

Directional Dyslexia

Directional dyslexia is distinguished by left-right confusion and mixing up of similar looking words. It also means confusion with letters such as p and b or d and b, where there is confusion over the ‘direction’ of the letter. Thus, the problems with directions are a symptom of this kind of dyslexia. Not all dyslexics have this problem.

Dyslexia can be cured with practice and even sometimes with time the understanding starts developing and a person can start reading normally.

7. Steps of Reading

  Reading is an everyday activity, but reading carefully for better understanding involves some steps in reading.

Reading is not only to read out a written passage in any manner, there are particular steps for perfect reading. These steps are discussed below:

7.1 Recognition:

This first helps you to recognize the need of reading, what to read, from where to read etc. For recognizing the need to read we must go for doing survey of content and to analyze the requirement of reading. This step includes doing survey and asking questions.

7.1.1 Survey

Survey is about reading the foreword and after word, content page, heading & subheadings, time lines, non verbal items used in the text and summary of the book or chapter. It is noteworthy not to presume that surveying will substitute reading; survey is something which only provides an outline, it gives only a bird’s eye view of the chapter or the book you propose to read. For example survey is to know:

About how many chapters does the book consist of? Or How many parts are there of the book? Etc.

7.1.2 Questions

After you have had a glimpse of the material you should begin to ask questions and the common questions you ought to ask your self are: Who? When? What? Where? And Why? You will be ready to answer these questions if you surveyed properly. You can start posing questions about this chapter like this.

Why should we read this chapter?

What are the major purposes of reading?

How many kinds of reading are identified?

What are the important aspects of reading?

7.2 Assimilation

It includes absorption and integration of content which will take place by reading the material carefully and making the notes for future reference.

   7.2.1 Read

This is the most essential step, if this step of reading will not be properly completed the first and last step of reading will not be of any value. The reader will be able to answer the questions posed above in the first step, completely only when they read the proposed material with full understanding. Depending on the familiarity of the material and your purpose, you should read it thoroughly. Good and appropriate reading also helps in enhancing the knowledge, for this with reading proper note making is also required.

7.2.2 Note Making

Making notes, writing marginal note and underlining or identifying significant ideas are good practices of reading. If necessary read it repeatedly until you get clarity. The effective note making methods are:

preparing charts preparing outlines

listing the key words preparing mind maps preparing flash cards preparing summaries preparing time lines

Make sure that you understand the text completely, clearly and effectively; only then one should proceed to do any concerned activity. Note making is all about going through the text carefully and identifying the central idea of each paragraph. That idea becomes the subheading of each paragraph. Then you identify the important points of each paragraph and note them in abbreviations.

7.3 Retention

It can be done by reciting the content or by writing it down.

7.3.1 Recite

This is the retention test that you are conducting for yourself. You might ask yourself a lot of questions and try to answer those questions, or another way can be to discuss with someone who has already read the material. Here both the persons can discuss and put their views to have an apparent and thoughtful understanding of the read material.

7.3.2 Write

Another way of retention is to write down all the ideas you could understand to ensure your comprehension and memory power. Conduct reverse engineering of the notes that you have written; this will enable you to analyse where you stand in this exercise.

7.4 Review

After finishing reading, reviewing it will reveal whether you could pay attention to all necessary information.

7.4.1Recall

Recall all the steps completed till now of the survey you conducted, the notes you prepared, highlighting what you did in the text, and the marginal notes you made will help you retain the matter in long term memory.

  7.4.2 Communicate

The last step of reading says about to communicate or share the knowledge whatever you have earned by reading. Sharing helps in remembering this long. Sharing also helps in increasing your knowledge and motivates for more future reading.

Therefore, if the material you are reading needs serious attention from you and you need to store it in long term memory, then using these steps of reading is most suited method of reading.

8. Summary

Reading is a very important way for people to acquire information and knowledge. It requires many mental and cognitive processes including: attention, pattern recognition, memory, knowledge, reasoning and problem solving. Reading ability can be described as a straightforward amalgamation of word reading and reading comprehension skills.

Since reading is considered a pervasive and vital activity in our lives, a substantial amount of reading from printed pages is the traditional mode of reading, although the rapid development of computer and information technologies has contributed to the increased volume of material that people can read from computer screens.

Reading skills are essentially required to be a good reader, the poor readers lack behind due to the inability to read perfectly. They also lack in decoding and understanding the material. Children face problems in reading at early age but may also recover with this problem as they grow up.

The steps of reading help in reading carefully. It is the step by step procedure, which assist in having the right outlook while reading the content. It starts with recognizing the need of reading and ends with reviewing the material.

To become a competent reader, one must be able to recognise words in order to understand individual sentences as well as to combine their meanings in order to provide an interpretation of the text as a whole.

1.  References

• Al Otaiba, S., & Fuchs, D. (2006) “Who are the young children for whom best practices in reading are ineffective? An experimental and longitudinal study”, Journal of Learning Disabilities, Vol. 39, No.5, p. 414-431.
• Bates, M. (2013) “Dyslexia- Reading Well”, available online at http://www.dyslexia-reading-well.com/types-of-dyslexia.html
• Lonigan, C. J., Allan, N. P., & Lerner, M. D. (2011), “Assessment of preschool early literacy skills: Linking children’s educational needs with empirically supported instructional activities”, Psychology in the Schools, Vol.48, No.5, p. 488-501.
• Lonigan, C. J., Burgess, S. R., &Anthony, J. L. (2000) “Development of emergent literacy and early reading skills in preschool children: Evidence from a latent variable longitudinal study”, Developmental Psychology, Vol. 36, p. 596-613.
• Mohammad, M. , Rehman, R. et.al (2012) “Reading behaviors of students in Kolej Datin Seri
• Endon (KDSE)” International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 26 No. 4, p. 381-390, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
• Source: Broda, S. (2013), “Determining Importance in Non Fiction Text” available online at http://techiescienceteacher.blogspot.in201309determining-importance-in-nonfiction.html
• Storch, S. A., & Whitehurst, G. J. (2002) “Oral language and code-related precursors to reading: Evidence from a longitudinal structural model”, Developmental Psychology, Vol. 38, p. 934-947.
• Wagner, R. K., Torgesen, J. K., Rashotte, C. A., Hecht, S. A., Barker, T. A., Burgess, S. R., et al.  (1997)  “Changing  relations  between  phonological  processing  abilities  and  word-level reading as children develop from beginning to skilled readers: A 5-year longitudinal study”, Developmental Psychology, Vol. 33, 468-479.
• Wong. J.J. (2014) “8 reasons why reading is so important”, available online at http://www.inspirationboost.com/8-reasons-why-reading-is-so-important

2. Points to ponder

• Reading is generally considered as a cornerstone of success.
• Perfection in reading makes people Good readers as they can grasp ideas, follow opinions, and sense connotation.
• Through reading, one can create a well thought-out path towards a better perspective and better actions.
• Communicating through reading leads to more understanding, and thus to better communication with people.
• Good readers identify the written text soon and read more than their co workers. Dyslexia is the disability in reading text properly.
• The first step of reading is to recognize the need of reading.
• Answers of any questions can be given if the text is read carefully.