MY TINY BOOK on reading: Is reading just about recognizing each word out here? Or is reading about tentatively putting meaning TO this? Can you imagine MAKING SENSE inside your head, using your language and brain to read-to construct meaning on what I left you here? Not so unlike if you are listening to me-we are just chatting about this. Check this out: My adaptation of Yetta and Ken Goodman work. In a Arizona U. Podcast, Yetta Goodman has us transacting with new and interesting print-a fun read for me. Pick your own. Have a friend read the same text. When done, you and your friend would each write down, right away, all you can about what you read. Then read, & listen to the other’s text about the one text. Any observations? During the podcast, I believe each participant read AND LISTENED TO inner texts that we, readers and listeners, made INSIDE our heads, reading and listening. Or is it just by chance that others spoke and wrote something different than me? I observed those who shared their reading transaction-they spoke and put down some their “inner texts” they made. I would have shared mine as well. But isn’t the meaning IN the written language and the sound we used to communicate? Or was it really IN the reader’s, writer’s, speaker’s and listener’s heads, as we each transacted? Now, you and your friend each record yourselves reading aloud. This time, write right away what your remember you heard. Thoughts? To compare, now locate anything familiar-say a Coke can-anything familiar to a child you know who might want to read. Share. Record this too. Listen and watch attentively into a more transparent window for all of us into a child reading: Saying their own preposition for a printed preposition; Constructing “the”-for “a”; putting their own “content word” for the printed one; saying nothing. Children-all of us-can make our own text inside our heads. What are the conditions for when we read? Both READERS AND LISTENERS use what is real. First timers read a cereal box, like I did. Do you remember doing so? Don’t you delight at your own child’s miscues toward a real sounding conversation or print read? Isn’t it in all of us to hear or read something so real, much less learn it? Honestly, what’s wrong with ATTENTIVELY USING “mistakes”? Besides, how else would I be able to make sense of a child’s first reading? Learning by doing, don’t you listen and read TENTATIVELY sometimes too, so you CAN assimilate new information, even accommodate to inform new belief? How about a YouTube DYI video? A TV pill ad? Legal contract? A recipe? Do you absorb, or learn somehow, exact perceptions FROM print/pixels? Might it be that your eyes don”t hold your brain to perfect perceptions of any outside “reality”, including print? Brain scans show that some 90 percent of activity goes FROM the brain cortex TO the eyes during reading! Our brains uses all our senses to MAKE sense of our outside world. Now, try: Watch your eyes move in the mirror. Can you? To perceive something, eyes have to fixate. Read where eyes stop on print-Eye Movement Miscue Analyses (EMMAs). Eyes go right to left to read too. Reading is active! You bring your own reading purpose to this...to any real context. Your brain reading “merry-go-round”: Perceiving, wording, meaning, confirming or disconfirming.... EMMAs show me real readers do NOT fixate on the whole display of print. Making sense of print well may not be “in” the next word. Ken Goodman writes in Reading, The Grand Illusion...: “(Real) Readers...say words that are indeed on the page without ever looking at them, say words that are not on the page and which they therefore could never have looked at, and not say words that they have in fact looked at.”. But it seems a reader reads EVERY word! Would you “read” each word here, would you make sense of me any better? If I did not write this well enough for your own “tiny book” on reading inside of you, I am sorry AND I take suggestions! Let me try again for YOU. Chat maybe?
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