"Real reading is reading and thinking at the same time," Ian Carle, fourth grade elementary teacher, Kansas City, Mo.
In a recent letter to the editor in Reading Today, Mr. Carle argued that it is time to invent a new word for reading which engages the reader. "...reading is more than just saying the words correctly. With that in mind, I combined elements of the words reading and thinking and readinking was born…Readinking is the act of specifically thinking while we are reading."
Quoting David Pears, Laura Roehler, Janice Dole, and Gerald Duffy in their chapter "Developing Expertise in Reading Comprehension," which appeared in What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction (2nd edition) in 1992, Carle lists five activities vital to reading comprehension:
- Questioning: What readers are asking before during or while they read.
- Synthesizing: How readers continually change their mind as they read.
- Schema: How a reader uses background knowledge to understand the text.
- Visualizing: The pictures that are formed in a reader's head while reading.
- Determining importance: How the reader is able to identify what is important.
This list compliments the presuppositions and themes of How to Read a Book, a book which I have blogged about and am still working through. (Some books require a lot of readinking!)
I like Carle's thoughts and new word for another reason. Say readinking aloud and another image comes to mind:
READING IS KING!
No comments:
Post a Comment