Teaching analytical reading

The role of reading in our education.What happens when we read well ? The structure of this part of the site crystalised itself out of following the process of reading. Any reader follows the thread of printed words through a half-seen maze of associations, evocations, references, background knowledge ... and the more informed and skilful the reader, the more he or she is actively aware of what is going on.

All reading involves something of that 'half-seen maze' because even the most straightforward, matter-of-fact expression uses words which have associations, references, etc - but it is surely part of the definition of 'literature' that such connotations are consciously a significant part of the message of the text. We expect to read between the lines in order to discover levels of meaning and develop more complex interpretations.

If this is true in general, then the Literary Skills proposed below are what we need to be teaching our students, over and above the Basic Reading Skills (q.v. - grasping outline meaning) and the Key Reading Skills (q.v. - grasping the detail of th e outline meaning). In other words, Literary Reading Skills are the most sophisticated level of reading, involving grasping complex texts in all their complexity.

Note that the Literary Skills employ the same basic procedures as the Basic and Key skills (e.g. summary, scanning) - but in different order, for deliberately different purposes (e.g. scanning not just for the basic overall message, but in order to study and define the imaginative world of the text).In order to teach and develop the skills of a sophisticated approach to literature, have a look at the page The tasks took it , which proposes a range of specific tasks to encourage students to read methodically.

Reading well. I propose below a way of envisaging the process of reading closely and methodically. This involves four stages, in the sense that these stages follow the sequence in time of grasping a text ... but they can also be seen as levels, in that they represent a movement from surface understanding to deep understanding.