The complexities of reading

I found the evolution of how we teach people to read very interesting in this article. It seems that the we have a general idea of what are the individual important part involved. The include, but are not limited to; learning the alphabet and connecting the sounds to individual letter, piecing together these letter to for phonemes, recognizing words and their meanings, and interpreting when all of this comes together into a sentence. I thought that this quote really explained just how complex reading really is,

"Instead, all of the processes within are simultaneously active and interactive, with every awakened cluster of knowledge and understanding at once both issuing and accommodating information, both passing and receiving guidance, to and from every other."

As I was reading I began to think about how I don't really even look at the individual letter, I only see the words themselves, internally saying them "out loud" to myself. While some may speak of reading as if it is a simple mechanical skill, they don't take into account just how many things the human brain is doing all at once to understand the visual representation of language.

Importance of Reading

"I used the word readings(plural) advisedly because I read Animal Farm at least four times"

I think this quote symbolizes the importance of reading in becoming a fully literate. Akinnaso writes about his journey of becoming literate can be represented in his reading of Animal Farm and how each time, his consciousness was enhanced, broadened, and intellectually increased. Each time he read the book, the story became "substantially richer" as he puts it. His way of thinking differently about the book, recognizing it as a satire, changed his perspective of the story every time.

I can relate to him because I myself read the book twice, once in 7th grade and again in 9th grade. I had the same experience of coming to new realization about the story, and more fully appreciating the story as a satire.

This new understanding of the book, could not have been achieved had we both not read other books in-between. Reading is supremely important in developing literacy. Each time you sit down to read, your view of the world in which you live can changed and be enhanced. Akinnaso goes on to speak of the importance of being able to read because it is necessary to acquire other discourses. His story is remarkable, becoming literate in a non literate world makes me wonder why literacy is such a problem in our society today. I guess there just needs to be more people like his father who push the idea of the importance of literacy upon his son.