Professor Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway University of London)
Reading is a very complex word. In educational discourse, it’s used in three ways which are overlapping but can, irritatingly, work against each other.
The first meaning of ‘reading’ is sometimes called ‘decoding’ (this is where phonics comes in). This is mastering the basic technology of writing, moving from graphemes (i.e. bits of text) to spoken language.
The second is often called ‘functional literacy’ and is crucial in ‘knowledge transmission’ (the example usually given is: reading prescriptions).
The meaning of the third sort of ‘reading’ lies in what we say mean when we say we ‘make’ a reading or offer an interpretation, whether simply drawing inferences from texts or something more formal, as in an essay.
Some of my psychologist colleagues argue this these three senses of reading – decoding, functional literacy, interpretation – make a linear progression: after all, one “cannot have functional literacy without acquiring decoding skill; and one cannot offer a critical analysis of literature without functional literacy”.
I disagree. This is Margaret Meek, from her classic 1991 study, On Being Literate:
Listen to the conversation of a four-year-old and an adult when they have read together Where the wild things are and the nature of children’s speculative thought becomes quite clear.
What she means is that, in reading or being read the book, the child is not just decoding, but interpreting, reasoning, making inferences (‘Max was sad, now he is happy’). The separation of these different meanings of reading is only an “expositors device”, as Empson calls the division of form and content.
Everyone wants to foster reading. One risk is that, in the increasingly scientised discourse which has so effectively helped to teach decoding, the fundamental holism of reading can get lost.
