MATERIAL DESCRIPTION
Critical reading begins with one simple thing: curiosity. You were curios enough about this book when you picked it up, weren't you? That is the first step. You have just made your first move toward learning how to read with a critical eye. When referring to criticism in terms of literature, we do not mean "to find fault". Literary criticism is the ability to judge the quality and/or meaning of a piece of writing. Critical reading is a way of reading that will allow you to take a deeper look at literature. It is an acquired skill that you will develop with some knowledge and experience.
To read critically means to read analytically which means to question and to think about the written material in front of you. When you question something, it usually leads to finding answers when you read, there are only the author's attentions and your interpretations. Learning to read critically will not only start you on a journey to reading well, it will also help you understand all kinds of literature from newspapers to great works of fiction. What does curiosity have to do with critical reading? Absolutely everything! Learning to read in depth with comprehension and being open to new ways of thinking and understanding can only start with an itch to want to know more whether it is for your own personal knowledge or for a class (Wall, 2005).
According to Wallace (2003) critical reading has five characteristics. First, critical reading represents a challenge to the skills-based orientation of many cognitive psychological models which emphasise the building of discrete kinds of abilities based – albeit often implicitly – on some supposed hierarchy of difficulty. Moreover, its emphasis is different from the strategies view, in that critical reading focuses less on individual responses to texts and more on communally negotiated ones, by which, in classroom contexts, texts are jointly interpreted through talk around text. Also within these reader responses there is less interest in problems as located within readers, say due to supposed weaknesses of skill or strategy, than in readers’ problematising of the text. Secondly, critical reading does not see non-native speaker readers in their reading of authentic, non-pedagogic texts, as necessarily disadvantaged – on the contrary. Because they are not the primary addressees of texts written for an indigenous readership, second and foreign language learners may be more aware of the way in which texts position readers, that is, the manner in which the preferred or model reader is embedded within the text. Not being invited to collude in a text’s ideological positioning, L2 readers are arguably in a stronger position both to perceive and to resist it. Thirdly, critical reading does not privilege an author’s communicative intent but is concerned with effect. The aim is not to converge with the author, but to disrupt or challenge the schemas called up by the text; the author is not the sole or ultimate arbitrator of a text’s meaning. This is not to take, however, a totally open, relativist position, one that assumes that every interpretation is as good as another. Some interpretations will be more credible than others. Fourthly, critical reading involves critiquing not just the logic, argument or sentiments expressed in texts but the ideological assumptions underpinning them. Finally and most importantly, critical readers do not just comment metacognitively, showing awareness of the cognitive strategies they make use of, but also metacritically.
In metacritique we are prepared to offer challenge to our own stance to the text, aiming to gain some overall distance on our interpretations and the likely reasons for them. How do our identities and ideological leanings predispose us to read texts in certain kinds of ways? From another point of view, critical reading as the ability to understand what we read, use language effectively, and give reason clearly that is also one of the tests in SAT I (Scholastic Aptitude Test) to measure the aptitude for college work that tests vocabulary, verbal reasoning, and the ability to understand reading passages. Based upon reading selections ranging from 200 to 850 words critical reading questions may require you to: · Recognize the meaning of a word as used in context. · Interpret specific information presented in the passage. · Analyze information in one part of the passage in terms of information presented in another part of the passage. · Evaluate the author's assumptions or identify the logical structure of the passage. Some reading selections consist of a pair of passages that present different points of view on the same or related subjects. The passages may support each other, oppose each other, or in some way complement each other. Some questions relate to each passage separately and others ask you to compare contrast or evaluate the two passages.