ABSTRACT
At this point in your reading of this volume, stop and consider the different kinds of skills you are using in drawing meaning from text. You are certainly decoding the letters on the page and recognizing that, in now familiar groupings, they produce segments of sounds that, forming words, represent particular concepts. You are also navigating particular kinds of organizations of those words in larger, sentence-based, units of meaning. Now, aside from the mechanics of the reading act itself, what else have you been doing? You are likely, drawing on your previous experience with academic texts, using some important text-attack strategies. You are looking for the main idea of the chapter in the introductory and concluding paragraphs and, in between, using headings and subheadings to help you create a mental outline of the development of the authors’ arguments. And when the text is not prose, but pictures and presentation of text in alternative forms, such as in tables or student work, you are looking for the relationship between those standard and alternative, supplementary forms of text. Out of all this work, you create your own understanding of what the author is saying. Where and how did you learn to do all this reading work?
