How to Read for Pleasure

Readers Workshop http://www.readersworkshop.org/ is a site dedicated to helping people, teachers and students to love to read. Their techniques are recognized by educators all over the world. Here are the seven steps as presented by the Reading Workshop: 

Use All of Your Background Knowledge  Use what you know to learn something new. Good readers activate their schema by predicting.  The word schema means all of our relevant previous knowledge (everything we ever knew about the topic) which helps us relate to the story.

   

"Predicting involves combining the reader’s prior knowledge, new knowledge from the text, and the text’s structure to create hypotheses related to the direction of the text and the author’s intent in writing. Predicting provides an overall rationale for reading – to confirm or dis-confirm self-generated hypotheses  (Doolittle et. al., 2006)."  

In other words, my words, predicting is a strong strategy to activate our relevant previous vocabulary and get us thinking about the theme.  So, we look at the title of the book,  the name of the author (not a Spanish or English name?) and we look at the short description of the book and formulate an idea as to what the book is going to be about. If we know what to expect, reading is easier.

If the book is about "fish", think about everything you know about fish: have you gone fishing? have you been to an aquarium? do you know the names of different kinds of fish? have you been to a fish market? You are activating all of the vocabulary you have about fish.

Create Visual Images  Good readers make movies in their mind as they read.  They can create a wide range of sensory images while they read.  An author uses verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs to stimulate the five senses. The use of language allows us to see the people involved, what they are thinking and feeling, the places where the story is happening, and the action. The better the author is, the better he/she uses language and so the better the book is and the more we can see, feel and relate to the book. A person that creates pictures in their mind while they read is emotionally involved with the story - he or she may even laugh or cry out loud while reading!  

Ask Questions  Proficient readers are always wondering while they read.  They wonder what will happen next or why a character acted the way they did.  Questioning helps us to focus in on what's important in the text; we ask questions about the text, the author's intentions and look for information to clarify and extend our thinking before, during and after reading.   

Dr. Neil Postman has said, "All our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that question-asking is our most important intellectual tool" 

Make Inferences   Inferring is how readers go beyond what is on the written page.  Readers who infer are able to personalize what they read to build deeper meaning. They think about and search the text to construct a meaning beyond what is literally written. If the author writes that it was warm and sunny and the sky was blue, we infer that it was a nice day even though the author never exactly says that it was a nice day. Readers also relate what they have read to their own personal experience (text to self), to information from other texts (text to text) and to information about the world (text to world) in order to understand what they are reading. 

Determine Importance Good readers can distinguish between important and unimportant information in the text. Evaluation is about making judgments on what you read and then explaining why you made those judgments. The reader judges, justifies and/or defends their understanding of the material. Some activities to help with evaluating can be as easy as having a small group book talk or rating a book or posting an opinion on this site.

Synthesize  Good readers make sense of what they read with synthesis - summarizing important information and adding their own unique thinking and experiences. They combine the pieces and then put them together in a new way. The reader creates original perspectives and understandings by joining the text with their own personal knowledge. Summarizing is a comprehension strategy but it is NOT is not telling what is important about the text. In this case, a summary might include the answers to the key elements such as who, what, where, when, why, and how and then putting the information into our own words which helps to solidify the meaning.

Put It All Together  Good readers know when they don't get it.  Proficient readers have a variety of tools to help understand their reading when they are struggling. One such tool is making a connection which is when we can relate a passage to an experience we have had, another book we have read, or other facts about the world we have seen on television or in a movie. Making connections will help us to understand what the author's purpose is and what the story is about. You can use connections with any fiction or non-fiction text that you read. Questioning (above) is another strategy that can help us in our understanding the material. Strategies are usually combined to come to a better understanding of the text. Some strategies are better for fiction while others are more useful while reading a non-fiction book. However, the strategies should interact with each other as needed. 

The plot of a book is a series of incidents linked together according to a definite plan or scheme. In any plot, the author must create a problem for his characters to solve. Whatever the problem, it must be real and the outcome must be uncertain. If you know in advance how the problem will be solved, why read the book? The problem becomes part of the plot only when it presents obstacles that a character must struggle against. The struggle may be physical, mental, emotional, moral or a combination of several factors and the character may or may not solve the problem. The circumstance that sets the struggle in motion is called the "inciting moment". The period of struggle is called the "rising action". The point where the character solves or fails to solve the problem is the "climax".