Reading Skills: Why are you Boring?

Reading: Why are you Boring?

By- Deepa Singh

Reading skills 

Reading is very boring!

This is the most crucial concern of students, teachers, and parents. 

Be it sweet or sour, a person without good reading skills, cannot achieve fulfillment in personal or professional life. 

Reading here, does not mean to read only books, but any written material either in books or on phone, laptop, or computer screen, because with the advancement of technology, the sources of reading content has also advanced. 

Why reading is boring? 

 Anything, where you do not find interest is boring. 

Let's understand what happens at the case of Reading.

• Unfamiliarity with Reading Material: Reader’s mind does not know the linguistic material, which is written in form of letters, words, and sentences. 
• Unawareness of one's level of reading skills: Selection of reading material without knowing your level of reading leads to difficulty in reading & understanding.  
• Ability to remember linguistic material: Reader encounters strangeness with reading, due to difference in language, culture, subject or area. It is the realm where the ordinary meets the extraordinary, and where curiosity thrives. Reader becomes deficient in the ability to remember linguistic material. 
• Vast difference between the mother tongue and written script. For example, most people do not read the Ramayan, the Mahabharat and the Gita in their lives (there is a lot of knowledge which they search at other places) because the linguistics written there is far beyond the understanding of common people. 
• No self-motivation due to absence of value of reading skills.
• A person’s knowledge, intelligence and environment contribute to acquisition, storage, and retrieval of information, which are some steps in the process of reading.

How to make Reading interesting?

The answer is as simple as guiding a child in learning how to eat.

It can be made enjoyable by a mother while reading bedtime stories to her child, by a teacher while reading a book so engagingly that it inspires the students to read in the same enthusiasm, or by an individual oneself by recognizing the value of good reading habits.

 

When someone takes you on the interesting journey of reading, opening a vast world of different new experiences every day, the experiences become profound, enlightening, and metacognitive with the time you spend in reading. 

Tip # In the beginning, read the material of your choice and interest.

Think, what do you want to read in your native language?

Find that book in English language. It will give you interest, and it will be of your level.

A task which is easy, comfortable, sense thrilling, and new is interesting for an individual.

When you engage with a familiar reading content, the ease of familiarity comforts your mind, and your mind absorbs new information effortlessly. This ease and comfort enhance the overall interest of Reading Activity. 

 The studies show that the good readers excel at recall of spoken strings of letters (Shankweiler et al., 1979), spoken strings of words (Bauer, 1977; Byrne & Shea, 1979; Katz & Deutsch, 1964; Mann, Liberman, & Shankweiler, 1980; Mann & Liberman, in press), and even spoken sentences. 

There is a positive correlation between vocabulary knowledge and reading success.

In other words, the richness of the reader's vocabulary has a positive effect on shortening the time spent on word recognition or focusing while reading a text.

Answer the following genuinely.

• Is there a need to read?                                    Yes..., what to read!
• Is the reading content interesting for you?      Yes..., how to read!

Tip # Persistently keep telling the need; reminds the reader to read. 

Then, you need to know the level of your reading skills, start from that very level.

Tip # Ensure the availability of the factors: time, mood, environment, need, and content, to make reading an interesting activity.

Five principles of reading

Always remember, the five principles of reading (Akyol, 2015) i.e. fluency, Sense Making, Strategic Approach, Motivation, and Lifelong Process. 

Development of self-motivation is the key to happy reading. Initially, keep oneself motivated, which gradually becomes a lifelong habit; this is the point from where the journey of happy reading starts.

Click to know more :Strategies of Reading

Knowledge of reading strategies is the best technique to propel a person to realize the goal. These strategies are purposeful in comprehending the written message.

Skimming, scanning, making predictions and questioning are some important strategies. 

Readers, who have learned different reading strategies, know what, when, why, and how to use them in their reading comprehension processes, and it makes them a successful reader. 

Process of Reading

There are categories of readers like good readers, poor readers, average readers, and pretend readers. It will be very helpful for all types of readers, to know the functioning of mind while reading. 

“We can define reading as a process of making sense in the mind by exposing the text and symbols to cognitive processes.” (Osman Gediki Niğde Ömer Halisdemir University Hayati Akyolii Gazi University). 

Reading includes two aspects, concrete (words) and abstract (the hidden message behind the lines) aspects. A reader must synthesize and unified these two aspects for his fulfillment of understanding of written material. 

In general terms we can say when you read you understand someone else’s mind through the process of reading and understanding the text, which someone else has written. The idea here is, when we read something, the purpose is to try to understand what the intention of the writer is. 

A reader first recognizes the written words than understands the similar words and question the strange words and then draws a conclusion from the text. If the variation between understanding and questioning is more, reading will be boring, or if its less, reading will be interesting.

Without understanding the reading process, readers lose their confidence upon realizing their goal of effective reading. 

They give up on reading, saying it’s boring. 

So, no more saying, ‘Reading is boring'. 

Have a happy reading.

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