Reading As A Literacy Skill – Reading is the third communicative skill in the order of acquisition. It is a highly misunderstood and confused activity, as many people think of the concept in terms of what it is not than what it actually is. I will begin this treatise by stating what reading is not, before stating what it is.

First, reading is not only the ability to pronounce written words; that is just a step towards it. It is very possible for a person to acquire the skill of recognising and articulating written words in a language without being able to make sense of such articulation. For instance, many second-language learners of Arabic in Nigeria begin the process by being taught the letters of the language and how they combine to form words.

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Many, therefore, become able to articulate written words in a language they do not even speak or understand well, and such knowledge cannot be called genuine reading ability. Hence, reading is the ability to articulate written words and make sense of them through the knowledge of the relationships that bind such words and the contexts in which they are used. A reader must be able to infer the writer’s intended meaning in a piece of writing. As such, the rest of this article will discuss things we need to know about reading skills and the factors that aid reading ability.

There are some requirements anyone who desires to read well must know. First, the reading skill is sharpened through constant reading. A secondary school leaver who reads regularly will find it easier to comprehend written works than a university graduate who does not read. It is a skill that gets better through regular practice.

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Second, readers should note that it is not absurd to find some materials difficult to comprehend when reading them. This happens for two reasons: one, when the subject being discussed is not one that the reader is so familiar with; two when the writer’s language is too sophisticated for the reader. Such difficulty in comprehending a written work should not discourage a reader. The situation can require working tirelessly with a dictionary to get the meanings of strange words. Meanwhile, academic material might require getting simpler material on the subject matter for the basic knowledge on the topic. Certain books might remain unintelligible to learners until they read simpler and more straightforward ones.

Reading As A Literacy Skill

Next, there are factors that aid reading. First, a reader should endeavour to capture a whole thought or a partly complete thought when reading. For instance, a sentence such as, ‘When I got to Lagos this morning, I could not wait to eat before journeying to London’, is a complete thought. Since such a sentence may be too long for its proposition to be captured at once, a good reader has to break the sentence into partly complete thoughts.

The subordinate clause, ‘When I got to Lagos this morning’, is a partly complete thought within that sentence and should be captured at once. Reading that sentence in bits such as, ‘When I got’, ‘to Lagos’, ‘this morning’, et cetera, will not only make it difficult for the reader to comprehend the message, but also make it uneasy for others to follow the message in a situation where the reader is reading aloud for others to follow.

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Also, anyone who desires to read clearly and comprehensibly must possess the ability to recognise words and their sounds. This is because English does not have a one-to-one correspondence of sounds and letters, so the articulation of many words cannot be determined by the individual letters that constitute the words. For instance, one would wonder why the word ‘tyre’ is not just spelt as ‘taya’ and why ‘gaol’ will ever be pronounced as ‘jail’. Such situations, among others, make it important for anyone who hopes to read well to invest a great deal of time in the recognition and articulation of words. One way to do this is to engage in personal reading more regularly and to check up on the transcriptions of words with strange spellings and/or listen to their pronunciations in online dictionaries.

Lastly, good reading ability entails recognising word families. Words do not operate independently of one another in sentences/utterances. Therefore, a reader must understand how words associate to generate meanings. Certain words can be found together, whereas some others cannot. This is called collocation. Some other words such as ‘their’ and ‘there’ sound alike but have different meanings (homophones).

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A good reader should also know that some words which have the same or similar meanings as others are called synonyms. Also, there are words that are spelt and pronounced the same way but with different meanings, such as ‘bank’ as a financial institution and ‘bank’ as the side of a river. Such words are homonyms.

Then, we have homographs which are words that are spelt the same way but are pronounced differently. For instance, ‘row’ is pronounced as /rəʊ/ when it means a number of people or things in a more or less straight line (as defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English) and is vocalised as /rau/ when it means a noisy argument or fight (as defined by the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary). All of these possible relationships of words must be understood by a good reader because they aid comprehension.

Reading is a receptive skill, and receiving information from a person who is not physically present to explain his/her thoughts and intent could be a complex task. This piece is a guide for anyone who desires to be a good reader.

© 2022 Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose (Dr GAB)
Department of English,
Lagos State University