What is reading?

This article was taken out from the book Reading in a Foreign Language - Alderson & Urquhart.
The purpose of the whole book is to answer the question What is reading?, and this first part of the introduction talks about one of the three necessary elements of Reading which is The reader.
It says that, in order to understand the process of reading, teachers and researchers have tried to approach readers giving them a series of passages to understand and then asking them questions about it afterwards. As a result, they came up with levels of understanding that could be only related to the product of reading but not to the process of reading. They came to the conclusion that “a description of what a student has understood of a text is not the same as a description of how he arrives at such an understanding”.
When researchers actually started to investigate and gather information about the nature of the reading process, they realized that since reading is essentially, in most cultures, a silent, and private activity, it would be a difficult task to describe the process itself. So, they came up with a method in which they recorded the eye’s movement while people were reading.
By analyzing the eye’s movement on the reading process, researchers have established that good readers make fewer fixations, with less duration, than do weak readers. So, they started to themselves questions like “What causes regression?”, “What information are the eyes processing when fixating?” and “What is going on in the head when the eyes are not fixating?”. Carpenter (1980) suggests that almost all content words in text are fixated, and that longer fixations occur on infrequent words, and at sentences ends when inferences are being made.
Some authors have developed a process model of several stages:
1. Moving the eye to the site of next input;
2. Encoding the visual features of the word;
3. Accessing the lexicon ( in what is called the working memory, for conceptual information; assigning case roles of the word in question ─ i. e. determining the relation among words in a structure; integrating clauses to each other; sentences wrap-up);
It is now almost universally accepted that frequent fixations and regressions are symptoms of poor comprehension, rather than causes of it.
Researchers also developed another technique called miscue analysis which consists of analyzing oral reading errors and seeing how similar or how different they are from the words in the text. Such work has shown that readers use graphic, syntactic, semantic and discourse information in text during their processing.
The basic reading strategies that miscue analysis appears to reveal are:
- Prediction: what the next chunk of language will be.
- Sampling: selecting the minimal information from text consistent with the prediction;
- Confirming: testing the prediction against the sample;
- Correction: if the prediction is not confirmed, another prediction is generated.

Goodman (in Smith 1978) asserts that “only in special circumstances is oral reading free of miscues, and silent reading is never miscue-free”. However, the connection between reading aloud and silent reading is somewhat difficult to prove, since there is a lack of information about the nature of the silent reading process, the process after all in which most reading researchers are interested.