The act of reading plays a crucial role in everyone’s life. Research tells us that being a confident, competent, and committed reader has wide-ranging positive effects on the personal, social and intellectual wellbeing of people from early childhood to the senior years. In thinking about the value and importance of reading, I am reminded of an interview with the English writer, Jeanette Winterson, where she spoke passionately about the wonderful gift books were to her as she was growing up. She called them her ‘magic carpets’ and spoke about their power to ‘take you places’ and to ‘be your friends.’ During her childhood – growing up in the city of Manchester – the local library was the hub of the community, and no child was deprived of access to books. It was a world rich in possibility, wonder and awe. 

Winterson went on to speak about literacy in our contemporary world and the fact that many children are now deprived of the rich experience of reading in a world full of distractions, fragmentation, and immediate gratification. She asserted that ‘we have an inside’ – a mind and heart – that needs to be nourished by reading and that this, in turn, will provide us all with ‘a complex language to deal with our complex world.’ 

Reading can be ‘difficult’. Winterson attests to this. From decades of research, we understand that reading is an active process of making meaning from signs and systems of signs. Reading is also a transaction between the reader and the text: the text acts upon and shapes the reader and the reader acts upon and shapes the meaning of the words on the page. Skills in reading for meaning are dependent on the reader’s knowledge of the world and the complexity and accessibility of the text. As readers, what we bring to the text is critical:

1. Our experiences of the process of reading (decoding symbols; knowledge of the structures and features of language; and our understanding of the codes and conventions of types of text). 
2. Our experiences of the world: we use our existing knowledge of the world to connect new ideas, synthesise these and make meaning. 

Reading is therefore not merely a mechanical process of decoding print, but rather, a thinking process where we make meaning from letters, words, word order, and the meaning cues and context of the text, the author and the reader. Reading is about making sense out of the written word, not simply sound. We can decode the words without really understanding the meaning of what we are reading. Prediction is a central feature of the reading process: we predict and then have these predictions confirmed or denied by the text as we read on. The experience a reader brings to the text is critical in this meaning-making process. The bank of words a reader has stored away also has a huge part to play in their understanding of texts. When a reader’s language or vocabulary resource is limited, their ability to comprehend texts is limited also. 

So, the two very important capacities a student needs to read for meaning and understanding are a rich background knowledge of the world and an extensive repertoire of words which are familiar to them. Both knowledge of the world and knowledge of words are therefore critical for the act of reading.