Reading and Reflecting on Text

In education, reading is the basic level and reflecting is the higher level of learning. Therefore, to reflect upon a text, to achieve comprehension in reading, a learner must work hard on certain skills. The teacher/educator must devise strategies to impart, instill and facilitate these skills to make learners/children competent. The value of reflection lies in its meaningful exercise which can require as much time and work as traditional essays and reports because it asks students to be purposeful and engaged participants, readers, and thinkers. Too often we have reduced reading in to a phonics and grammar practice. But to be literate, one needs to read things critically. Proper reading is a part of 'instrumental literacy'. Instrumental literacy is made up of all those proficiencies one needs in order to be able to access a text and understand what it is doing to readers. Students need to be invited to become linguistic detectives as well as encouraged to practice writing texts that do different kinds of work. A teacher plays a critical role to facilitate these skills and instill them in the learners for a long-lasting comprehension. In this realm, metacognition features a crucial aspect. It can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and "fixing" any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read. Hence reading and reflecting on text takes the genre of reading as a language skill, acquisition of reading skills, reading for global and local comprehension, critical reading, ways of reading and developing writing skills. Reading the fringe materials which lie between the hard-core theories of one is subject and it is popularly known applications makes the teacher a catalytic agent of social change. The content of this course is greatly aligned to courses under EPC of teacher preparation courses and SEC of some under-graduate programmes of humanities and social science disciplines. This course may provide a plethora of capacity enhancement of professionals like educators, would be teachers, trainee-teachers, educators, practitioners, and professionals engaged in the domain of education sector.