So now I’ve checked Ellen’s blog again, and I think I did not precisely do as asked. So now I’m just going to talk about reading. By the way, the quote that titles this post is by C.S Lewis (and the last one was by Britney Spears). That man was a genius. Which serves as a way to show us that religious people are not necessarily stupid as many (ahem ahem me) could think. At least I used to think that way.
So, I may as well start to tell you what reading is for me. I started reading, as must of us, in Kinder Garden 3. We call that “Preprimaria” in Mexico, I think. Well, I loved reading. I read Kipper in the library. I read everything readable in the library, actually. The kids’ section in my school’s library had a particularly fantastic collection. Like Dr. Seuss. Or The Magic School Bus. Or many, many other books that I used to love and which names I have now forgotten.
You can think whatever you want to think, but, since I was really young, reading for me was Magic. I l-o-v-e-d it. I think it’s about how my teachers and my parents loved me for loving reading. I think it’s about being able to live life through other one’s eyes. I think is about empathy (and I’ve been blessedcursed with a lot of empathy. I think it’s about the magic, the adventures, the unreachable treasures, the solititude, the new friends, the unattainable fantasies. I think it’s about the fresh smell in the pages of a new book. I think it’s about the vintage feeling of a the yellowish paper in old books. I think it’s about magic.
As a little girl, I read in the car, and in the bus, and in my house, and in the bathroom, and in the library, in recess, underneath the table during class. I just couldn’t get enough of it! Which is why is it so hard for me to understand why is it that there’s people who — drum roll — don’t like reading. Plain and simple. They don’t like it. They don’t enjoy it like I do.
Have they not crossed ways with an interesting book? Is it against their religion? Are they crazyinsanederangedomnivorouslunaticmadmental? Or are they just plain dumb?
I don’t know. I personally think they have never just sat down and, you know, just done it.
Or maybe — just maybe — their tutors have never known how to ingrain the love for reading in their brains. They haven’t found the way to make reading touch their souls and catch their interest. They haven’t found the way to make the student personalize the experience, to understand it, to — there it goes my cheesiness again — embrace it. And how could they? Must teachers don’t even enjoy it either.
From ToonPool
Admittedly, it can be kind of hard. I mean, I used to read the biggest, fattest, picture-lessest book out of snobishness.
And it’s not easy because the effort it takes get through a book is so much more than the one needed to watch a TV program like, say, Glee. How much effort does it take? Well, for one, you burn at least twice as much calories while reading a book than watching TV. And no wonder! To read a book, according to TKT course book we need to: “understand the sentence, what the letters are, how the letters join to make the words, what the words mean, and the grammar and the words of a sentence.” And even then we need to add our own knowledge of the world to even try to understand what’s written.
No wonder everyone makes whatever they want out of everything they read.
That connection between the text and the real world is coherence. Without it, we would not be able to understand what we read, therefore, it would make no sense whatsoever to us. Take, for example, the dialogue in our little image. To undesrstand it, we need to know what teachers are, what they do, that they’re meant to read. Otherwise, we miss the joke.
Now, imagine that there were no link between those words. Try to erase the prepositions. Or the adjectives. Or the nouns. Or try arrenging them in a different way. It would make no sense. That relation between words, normally dictated by a magical set of rules called grammar, is called cohesion.
Now, like the other functions of language, reading has certain subskills that are developed with practice. Or, you know, if you were naturally born a genius and taught yourself how to read at age three like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. As you may have noted sometime in your many life years, you’re able to scan, read for detail, deduce meaning from context, understand text structure, reading for gist, inferring and predicting upon reading any text.
Ditch that, not even reading. You can scan it and you wouldn’t even be paying attention to what exactly it says, but you would superficially understand the structure of the text and inferre and predict what it is or may happen in the text.
Which leads me right up to extensive and intensive reading. Extensive reading is the sort of reading I’ve done ever since I lay my young eager eyes in a Harry Potter book. While reading, sometimes I wondered exactly when would Ron and Hermione just kiss. I was, based on the evidence presented to me in the book and according to my knowledge of how relation ships work, predicting it. Sometimes I would wonder what there would be for lunch. Or if maybe Mr. Stephen had noticed that I wasn’t paying attention to his class, again, favouring my book instead of his very interesting lectures about how he was only a teacher and couldn’t rent an expensive Valle de Bravo’s house. Your attention may wander while reading this way, and you’re not always reading all of what it’s there. Which is why there’s no wonder I was so surprised when I realized — OMG, serious spoiler here — Sirius was actually good! Serious, Sirius, got it?
Intensive reading according to "How to study"
Then there is intensive reading. English teachers just love to force this kind of reading upon their unsuspecting students. Intensive reading involves the use of our reading subskills, more concentration and more awareness of the way language is used in a text.
So, yes, reading is a complex process. It involves a lor of thinking.
And we know, thinking is the last thing a student wants to do.
