Q&R2 Priscilla Perez

What makes a person a good reader?

Many students assume that they are good readers depending on how fast they read and because of the type of vocabulary they can read and understand, but according to H&F those are the students that they are frustrated by because they seem to think that, that is all there is to it to be a good reader when really they are missing the big picture.

There is a lot more to reading than just reading. Many students think that if they understood the words and can summarize the reading that they have read it, and they are content with knowing that they have read it. Even though this is good enough for a pre college student, and enough to pass a test, they fail to actually read because there was no analyzing or criticizing involved while reading.

Critical reading is the key to becoming a good reader, not how fast u can read. There is a lot more to critical reading than just reading carefully. The student must make a representation of meaning itself. What is meaning? Everyone has their own way of understanding things and have their own strategies to do so, but the only way that H&F could see how readers made build their meanings and representations was by watching the way readers go about building their representations, and by observing their use of reading strategies to help build their representations about the reading. In order to learn something about the construction of meaning of readers, they observed and analyzed the strategies of ten different readers.

At the end of the study H&F concluded that rhetorical reading plays a huge part in critical thinking and that the constructive process that they observed was exactly what they were looking for in a good reader which is to build a representation of the meaning of what the reader has read rather than just go by trying to understand what the words mean on the reading.

According to H&F, this is what identifies a good reader.