WHAT IS READING

Your answer probably had something to do with comprehension, meaning, or understanding.

Definition:

Reading is a number of interactive processes between the reader and the text, in which readers
use their knowledge to build, to create, and to construct meaning.

The main core meaning of the world is the activity by which we interpret language messages in
written or printed form.

It turns out from research that good readers, by which I mean good comprehenders, are able to
decode words extremely fast and extremely accurately.

The simple view of reading suggests that reading comprehension is the product of two
components, word decoding and general language comprehension.  So rc = d times lc. 

Reading comprehension equals decoding times listening comprehension. This means that if we

measure the reading comprehension of participants in an experiment, the results of this reading
comprehension test will depend on the results of a decoding test,

interactive. This keyword refers to two different conceptions: (1) the interaction that occurs
between the reader and the text ----- interactivity occurring simultaneously among the many
component skills that results in comprehension.

processes. A number of processes are at work when people read. lower-level processes, including
word recognition, syntactic parsing and meaning encoding as propositions” higher-level processing,
including text-model formation (what the text is about), situation-model building (how we decide to
interpret the text), inferencing, executive-control processing (how we direct our attention), and
strategic processing.

Knowledges: of the language (e.g., the writing system, grammar, vocabulary), knowledge of the topic
of the text, knowledge of the author, knowledge of the genre (e.g., editorial in a newspaper, a
romance novel), and knowledge of the world, including experiences, values, and beliefs.
Other dimensions of reading: cultural – affective –
REFLECTION: Part of the challenge of learning to read in a foreign language is to achieve a rate
of reading that is fast and fluent. And to be able to decode the words in a text automatically, in
order to leave cognitive capacity for comprehension.

Schema theory explains how comprehension is affected by people's existing knowledge (e.g.
Rumelhart, 1980). According to this theory, understanding a text is an interactive
process between the text itself and the reader's acquired background knowledge, which is
organized in abstract structures or "schemata".

Within the schema-theoretic framework, the process of interpretation is guided by the principle that
all new information is sampled against some existing schema. During that process modifications are
made to incorporate information not previously accounted for into the structure of prior knowledge.
This principle results in two modes of processing known as bottom-up (or text-based) and top-down
(or knowledge-based) processing.