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The Reading Process

Reading, like thinking, is a complex process. The reader has to produce responses to the words the author wrote. In some way the reader has to match his thinking to the authors.
You will be familiar with the old game 'Twenty Questions' or 'Animal, Vegetable or Mineral'. Reading is something like that game. The smarter readers ask themselves the most effective questions for reducing uncertainty; the poorer readers try lots of trivial questions and waste their opportunities to reduce their uncertainty. They do not put the information-seeking processes into effective sequences.
Many instructional programmes direct their students to the trivial questions. All readers, from five-year-old beginners on their first books to the effective adult reader, need to use:

before they resort to left to right sounding out of chunks or letter clusters or, in the last resort, single letters. Such an analysis suggests that the terms 'look and say' or 'sight words' or 'phonics' are grossly simplified explanations of what we need to know or do in order to be able to read.
Reading for meaning involves the reader in working with information from all these resources. Even after. only one year of instruction, the high progress reader operates on print in an integrated way in search of meaning, and reads with high accuracy and high self-correction rates. He reads with attention focused on meaning. What he thinks, the text will say can be checked by looking for sound-to-letter associations. He also has several ways of functioning according to the type of reading material (genre) or the difficulty level of the material. Where he cannot grasp the meaning with higher level strategies he can engage a lower gear and use another strategy drawing on knowledge of letter clusters or letter-sound associations, but all the while the competent reader manages to maintain a focus on the messages of the text.
On the other hand, the low progress reader or reader at risk tends to operate on a narrow range of strategies. He may rely on what he can invent from his memory for the language of the text but pay no attention at all to visual details. He may disregard obvious discrepancies between his response and the words on the page. He may be looking so hard for words he knows and guessing words from first letters that he forgets what the message is about. Unbalanced ways of operating on print can become habituated when they are practised day after day. They become very resistant to change. This can begin to happen in the first year of formal instruction.
That is why systematic observation of what the child can do and where his new learning takes him is so important in the first year of school. Close and individual attention from a teacher at this stage can help children to operate on print in more appropriate ways, so they can learn to work effectively under normal classroom conditions and make progress at average rates.
In recent years there have been shifts in our understanding of some psychological processes and yet old theories remain encapsulated in our teaching methods and assumptions. Some of these concepts need to be reviewed here.
By far the most important challenge for the teacher of reading is to change the ways in which the child operates on print to get the messages. We must look briefly at the model of the reading process that is implied here. (A more extensive discussion related to the early years of formal schooling is available in Clay, 1991.)

These are four different areas of learning which facilitate reading. Language was discussed first because the meanings embodied in print are of high utility, especially if one already knows something about the topic of the text. Language has two powerful bases for prediction in reading. The first is the meanings and the second is the sentence structures. A third, less reliable and sometimes confusing and distorting, source of cues exists in the letter-sound relationships. Theoretical analyses tell us that it is the consistencies in the spelling patterns or clusters of letters, rather than the letter-sound relationships, that assist the mature reader's reading. If that is where the consistencies lie that is where the human brain will find and use them.
The conventions that printers use to print language also need to be learned because we need to attend to the visual information in ways that follow the rules of the printer's code, more or less.
Visual information is essential for fluent correct responding and skilled readers tend to use visual knowledge in a highly efficient way, scanning for enough detail to check on the messages of the text. The beginning reader must discover for himself how to do this scanning and how to visually analyse print to locate cues and features that distinguish between letters and words.
The sound sequences in words (which linguists call the sequence of phonemes) are also used in rapid reading to anticipate a word from a few cues or to check a word one is uncertain about. This requires two kinds of detailed analysis in strict coordination: the analysis of the sounds in sequence and the visual analysis in left to right sequence.
Most children can become literate. They can learn literacy behaviours if the conditions for learning are right for them as individual learners. Three shifts in knowledge about learning have raised our expectations for greater success for more children in literacy learning today. Firstly, it is accepted today that experience counts in cognitive functioning, and some of what we thought of as 'given' in intelligence is learned during the process of cognitive development. Secondly, there has been a shift away from the belief that 'in some rough and ready way' achievement matches to general measured intelligence. We have known for nearly 30 years that when you look at the children who are over-achieving, for example when a child is reading well and several years above his mental age level, then the supposed match between achievement and intelligence must be questioned.
If we put the last two concepts together - that some part of the cognitive process is learned or realised through experience and that achievement ages do not necessarily match mental ages - there is plenty of scope for teaching and learning experience to bring about a change in children's attainments.
The third revision of an older position is in the area of brain functioning. When psychologists wrote about the brain as similar to a telephone exchange, association theories of learning were popular and people were thought of as having better or poorer telephone exchanges, pre-wired to do poorer or better jobs. Without discarding the idea that people may differ in the brain structures they have to work with, it is now known that for complex functions the brain probably constructs circuits which link several quite different parts of the brain and that such circuits only become functional for those persons who learn to do those things. We create many of the necessary links in the brain as we learn to engage in literate activities. If we do not engage in literate activities we do not create those linked pathways.