The social nature of reading

pp. 161-179

in: Wolff-Michael Roth, Alfredo Jornet, Understanding educational psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

Reading is a practice. Competence in this practice means that reading does the work that the text describes. This work is social through and through, because by observing someone doing this work, we are able to judge the level of competence the individual has achieved. When children engage with books at their early ages, they are on their way to becoming competent readers. By the time they read their first texts for comprehension, they have been part of many social relations that are the first instances of reading. In this chapter, we provide analyses of reading relations 1+ and 3-year-old children and among mature scientists pondering how to read a particular screen display. In all situations, we observe the same kind of processes. This chapter therefore shows the social genesis of reading that lead to the social nature of the work of reading (even when we read for ourselves). The upshot of this is that in social classes where parents do not read with their children at an early age, considerable differences with respect to learning and development in reading should be observed to the point that special school programs may not be able to make up for