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
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This is particularly the case in middle- and upper-class families but not so much in working- and underclass families.
- 3.
Similarly, it is also possible to study graphing anthropologically (Roth 2003).
- 4.
We insist on the formulation “doing reading,” the reasons for which are apparent later in this chapter. This may actually be the gloss that the parents provide when showing the video to a member of the extended family: “Here I am reading with «the child»,” where reading is a witnessed and witnessable doing.
- 5.
Scholars concerned with discourse even treat architectural landscapes and (Victorian) gardens as texts that can be read and interpreted. In detective novels, sleuths are reading the environment for clues; and aboriginal hunters read animal tracks.
- 6.
The conventions of the International Phonetics Association are used to represent the sounds.
- 7.
This may make it more difficult for English speakers than for German and French speakers to move from the written to the sounded word. In German, once the letters are known, reading may proceed and develop by means of sounding out the letters found.
- 8.
Transcription conventions are available in the Appendix.
- 9.
The retina of vertebrates includes rods and several kinds of cones.
- 10.
This phenomenon also is apparent in the episode from the science classroom described in Chap. 3.
- 11.
In other East Asian scripts, vertical orientation may occur; texts may be organized from right to left or left to right; and the orientation even may be bottom to top.
- 12.
This world of the text, its internal structure (e.g. plot and character), has been referred to as mimesis 2 to distinguish it from mimesis 3 , the movement from the textual to the inhabited world, a movement also referred to as “application” (Ricœur 1984).
- 13.
The emphasized words exhibit the relational nature of biology and culture.
- 14.
This is the sense in which we read ethnomethodological studies, which focus on social phenomena such as reading that are “staffed” by endogenous population cohorts (e.g. Garfinkel 2002).
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Roth, WM., Jornet, A. (2017). The Social Nature of Reading. In: Understanding Educational Psychology. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39868-6_7
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