Reading

Reading is the psychological process by which a text is perceived and adapted by an individual. "Reading" and "text" may be understood in a narrow or in a wide sense. Reading and text in the narrow meaning is about proper written language. Reading and text in the wide sense includes, for example, the "reading" of pictures. The broad concept of reading is about learning signs and meaning systems specific for a culture or a subculture.

Such a broad conception of reading becomes necessary when multimedia and hypermedia are integrating written communication with other forms of communication. It is connected to a similar broad conception of document.

There are different kinds of reading and different purposes for reading. Skimming is reading or glancing through quickly. Close reading is paying especially close attention to what is written, not only reading and understanding the meanings of the individual words in the text, it also involves making oneself sensitive to the nuances and connotations of language. Close reading involves considering the relation of any elements of the text to things outside the text such as other writings by the same author, writings in the tradition, aspects of cultural history or specific kinds of domain knowledge. Students' ability to read properly depend on their former learning, for example, their ability to recognize genres and critically to examine the arguments being raised in a text.

"Traditional theories of literature assumed that meaning was created by an author and conveyed through the author's writings. According to this view, reading is a search for inherent meaning in a document, an attempt to decipher the intention of the author. But modern schools of literary criticism - such as poststructuralism, reader-response theory, and deconstructionism - adopt a very different stance. These movements all focus on the readers (not the authors) as the main constructors of meaning. In this new view, text has little or no inherent meaning. Rather, meanings are constantly reconstructed by communities of readers through their interaction with the text. Meaning itself has become decentralized. " (Resnick, 1994, 17-18).

Berntsen & Folke Larsen (1993) discuss different kinds of reading: "impersonal instrumental reading", "impersonal experience reading", "personal experience reading" and "personal instrumental reading".

Bazerman (1986) reports on the reading processes of seven research physicists. He shows how instrumental and automated much of the reading process is carried out in scientific communication.

"Now, put in this general form, there is no decisive difference between approaching 'reality' and approaching 'text'. There is no reason to believe that the reading of a text should not in the same manner as 'reading' of 'reality' be determined by the reader's theoretical presuppositions, i.e. the reading of a text is as theory-laden as the 'reading' of social/natural reality (cf. Macherey, 1978: 71); as Edward Said puts it:

No reading is neutral or innocent, and by the same token every text and every reader is to some extent the product of a theoretical stand-point, however implicit or unconscious such a stand-point may be (Said, 1984: 241)." (Ekegren, 1999, p. 34).

Berntsen, D. & Folke Larsen, S. (1993). Læsningens former. Ålborg: Forlaget Bilioteksarbejde. (SKRIN-projektet 2).

Chall, J. S. & Stahl, S. A. (1989). Reading. Pp. 429-433 IN: International Encyclopedia of Communications. Vol. 3. Ed. by Erik Barnouw et al. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Deppert, Alex (2001). Verstehen und Verständlichkeit. Wissenschaftstexte und themaspezifische Vorwissen. Mainz: Deutscher Universitätsverlag.

Eagleton, T. (1989). Reading theory. Pp. 433-434 IN: International Encyclopedia of Communications. Vol. 3. Ed. by Erik Barnouw et al. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Folke Larsen, S. (1992). Læsning og erindring: en studie af mindeværdige bøger. [Kbh.]: Dansk psykologisk Forlag.

Macherey, Pierre (1978[1966]). A theory of literary production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Resnick, M. (1994). Turtles, termites, and traffic jams; explorations in massively parallel microworlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Said, Edward D. (1984[1983]). The world, the text, and the critic. London: Faber and Faber.

Wanting, B. (red.). (1993). Børn og læsning. Ålborg: Forlaget Biblioteksarbejde. (Biblioteksarbejdes skriftserie nr. 9).