Module Three: Reading Reflection

While reading the initial short story, “The Boat in the Basement,” it was interesting to me how I automatically corrected one or two errors such as the “he” instead of “she” or the “bastement” misspelling. However, I was surprised to learn that there were six errors total! This proves that a proficient reader does read for meaning and ignores some letter errors or miscues because despite them, we can still achieve an understanding. This small, initial story helped reinforce my disagreement with Adams and my agreement with Weaver. Adams suggests that, “Skillful readers of English thoroughly process the individual letters of words in their texts.” This cannot be true because educated readers eyes do not focus on every, small letter in a sentence. As Weaver (2002) explains, “When we read for comprehension, it seems clear, in fact, that we do not first identify the smallest units of language, letters, and then work upwards” (p. 90). Rather, we group all of those letters together to create one whole word, and then focus on word chunking and making connections.

            While doing activities one and two, I found two to be much easier than activity one. It was nearly impossible to determine the vowels that were missing and the consonants that were missing. This difficulty I had with the activities reminded me of how little readers focus on the individual letters and due to that, causes me to be unable to determine the missing letters. However, if initial and ending letters were provided, and the words were in a sentence, surrounded by supporting evidence, I would be able to identify the words. This is why reading is a whole effort process. Activity two was possible for two reasons. One, the whole word was still in tact mostly and two, the words were placed in sentences. Context and familiarity can be two large factors in reading being successful. However, learning the skills of whole word groupings and making connections between words in a sentence allows the reader to able to read correctly through a text and hopefully, generate a meaning and understanding of the text.