It's the subject without a specific product, the content area that is critical to all others, the skill without which we could not learn from recorded history, take in bible verse, or reproduce recipes from generations ago. It's fundamental to everything we do, yet it is perhaps the most difficult to teach.
Reading happens mostly inside your head. I could ask you to write about your reading, or I could ask you to tell me about your reading, but any determination of your skill as a reader is tainted by your ability to represent that information in written or spoken form. Do I really know if you are drawing pictures in your mind? Or if you were wondering what the author was speaking? Connecting the words to your prior experiences, other texts or the world at large? Are you actively questioning while you read, and making predictions for the coming paragraphs? I can ask you to do any of these things as an exercise, an opportunity to explore some possible strategies to comprehension, but how often do we accomplished readers really do these things while we read?
I love to read, and my relationship with whatever book I'm enjoying is intimate and personal. I wouldn't have wanted to stop reading to represent my visualization or to apply sticky notes when I read Roots in three days flat (when I was 11). I didn't need to do any of those classroom strategies to comprehend the story. I was swept away by the hope and horror in that family's narrative.
So, how best to teach this subject? A question that reaches across the ages. No matter what bill of goods is sold by any textbook publisher, curriculum developer, or know-it-all-but-I've-never-even-taught consultant, this isn't something you really can easily teach once we've gotten past the B goes /b/ level. It can and should be cultivated, nurtured, encouraged, modeled, and observed, but sometimes I worry that all we try to do to teach it may have the exact opposite affect.
