9.3. Reading as a skill

9.3.1. Reading in real life: Functions

Reading falls into the sphere of a communicatively socialised activity. As a kind of communicative activity, reading is the process of simultaneous reception of a printed text, recognition of lexical-grammatical material in its communicative interrelation, understanding the integral content and meaning of the utterance by way of creating an object-image, i.e. the content of a text.

In real life, reading performs two functions:

1) receiving information contained in a text (= inner/silent reading);

2) transmitting the information extracted from the text to the listeners (= reading aloud). The first function is correlated with listening comprehension; the second function is correlated with speaking.

As a vehicle of cognition and communication, reading allows for enriching human knowledge; deeper understanding the surrounding world; raising humanistic feelings and strong will; serving a source of aesthetic delight; helping to form a human personality. The necessity of reading is obvious for any specialist because the major part of information is received from printed material.

9.3.2. Interest and usefulness

In our daily life, we read and listen to a great deal of language. It seems possible to divide the motives of these activities into two broad categories: interest and usefulness. In other words, what forms our desire to do something is interest and usefulness.

Interest. Very often, we read something because it interests us – or at least we think it will interest us. Magazine readers choose to read an article on a definite page; buyers in a bookstore often select books because they think the books or the article they choose will be of interest to them. This category of interest includes reading for enjoyment, pleasure and intellectual stimulation and so on.

Usefulness. Sometimes it is not the fact that a text might be interesting that causes someone to read it. It is rather the usefulness of the text that prompts this action. E.g.: if you wish to operate a coffee machine for the first time, it’s a good idea to read the instruction first, so that you don’t get cold soup instead of hot coffee. No one would suggest that the instructions you read are intrinsically interesting. But then neither are directories, maintenance manuals or rules and regulations. Nevertheless, we have a desire to read these ‘useful’ texts, because they will tell us something we want to know.

The two categories are not always independent of each other anyway. We may well read something that is useful and find that it is interesting – as students reading for their studies do. Thus, we may say that either separate characteristics of interest and usefulness or the joined ones are revealed with the help of the content of what we read.

9.3.3. Purpose and expectations

In real life, people read something because they want to and have a purpose in doing so. The purpose may be how to operate that coffee machine or to discover the latest trends in language teaching. In real life, therefore, readers have a purpose, which is more fundamental than that involved in some language learning tasks, which seem only to be asking about details of language.

Expectations. Another characteristic of readers outside the classroom is that they will have expectations of what they are going to read before they actually do so. E.g.: the British citizen who picks up a newspaper and sees the headline ‘Storm in the Commons’ expects to read about a heated political debate in the House of Commons. The reader who picks up a book in a store will have expectations about the book because of the title, the front cover or the description of the book on the back cover. This is the so-called field of expectations, which is to be either confirmed or confound by the reader (Abraham Moll).

Thus, people read language because they have a desire to do so and the purpose to achieve. Usually, too, they will have expectations about the content of the text before they start reading.