Reading is a Learned Skill
Reading is using one’s eyes to listen. And like listening, it is a skill that must be cultivated and which also has many potential distractors (e.g., social media, electronic devices, a bustling household, etc.).
Tools abound that can be profitable for teaching students to read well—Mortimer J. Adler’s time-tested work, How to Read a Book, is a good example of such tools—but nothing quite teaches a student to read better than experiencing the delight of reading a good story.
But if a tool like Adler’s work would be helpful, a very brief summary of his suggested approach might also be beneficial.
Adler strongly suggests there four levels of reading:
- Elementary Reading is simple literacy, the ability to read the words on the page and comprehend their function in the sentence (i.e., subject, object, action, placement, etc.).
- Inspectional Reading is the art of planned or intentional systematic skimming of the material. The goal here is to get the most out of what is in the book in a specified amount of time (i.e., read chapter titles, headings, introductions and conclusions of salient chapters, etc.).
- Analytical Reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding. This is the chewing and digesting of the material Francis Bacon suggested some books deserve. Some have called this deep reading, or the Scholé approach to reading in which there is no specific time limit. There is just slow, careful reading that allows one to grasp or conceptualize the authors meaning.
- Syntopical Reading is the comparative or lateral reading whereby the same ideas are read about in different books to see how those ideas are treated by different authors. In short, this is reading many books about the same thing.
