The types of reading

This post is based on a podcast of the school of effective teaching about reading. Dr. Brown illustrates the differences between reading for finding information and reading for constructing meaning. According to him reading means to understand, interpret and use the text. Teaching reading means to help students to construct meaning from the text, which is different from finding knowledge. When students read to find knowledge they search for words or phrases to answer a question, whereas in order to find meaning students must evaluate the text and perform some type of mental manipulation.  In order to help students to construct meaning teachers may ask different questions which will make students think about the text. This is the difference between finding knowledge and constructing meaning.

According to Dr. Brown “words are only words but it is us that gives these words meaning and power”. This was interesting for me as I hadn’t read or thought about these differences before. I think that reading is the key feature of academic success. As Mark Twain said “the man who doesn’t read books has no advantage over a man who cannot read them”. One cannot learn anything without reading a lot and this reading should be for finding meaning for sure. But I think that these two types of reading are related to each other. As when students read and find meaning they already get knowledge. I believe, that knowledge that students find should be meaningful for them in order to remain in their memory and become an unseparated part of their erudition.

Then Dr. Brown explains that when student reads, he reads the author’s concept map. While reading, the student tries to break and reconstruct the concept map in order to understand the author’s purpose. At the beginning they may need teacher’s directions, but later on they should do it themselves. He also mentions that reading and writing are connected, one supports the other. To support this idea he brings an example of a student, who used to read constantly, afterwards he was asked to write and his writing was pretty good. This proves that good reading and good writing support each other. I agree with this idea definitely, as my own experience has showed me the importance of reading for improving my writing skills. Particularly, reading helps people who have visual memory. I can say that for those people it is the best way to memorize the spelling and the structure of the words.