Chapter 4 Chapter 2 Reading Levels

In the previous chapter we addressed some issues of difference, which are important for what follows.The goals a reader pursues—for entertainment, for information, or for better understanding—determine how he reads.As for the effect of reading, it depends on how much effort and skill he spends on reading.Generally speaking, the rule of reading is: the more effort, the better.A little effort can move us from a state of not knowing much to a state of knowing more, at least when reading certain books that are beyond our capacity.Finally, the distinction between guided and self-discovery learning (or assisted and unassisted self-discovery learning) is important because most of us often read unaided.Reading, like unaided self-discovery, is learning with an absent teacher.Only when we know how to read can we truly understand.

While these differences are important, we will not dwell on them in this chapter.The focus of this chapter is on the level of reading.Before you can improve your reading skills, you must first understand the differences in reading levels. There are four levels of reading.The reason we call it a level and not a kind is that, strictly speaking, a kind is not the same in everything, but a level is that even a higher level contains the characteristics of a lower level.In other words, the level of reading is gradual.The reading of the first level is not lost in the reading of the second level, which is contained in the third level, which is in turn contained in the fourth level.In fact, Level 4 is the highest reading level, including all reading levels and exceeding all levels.

The first level of reading is called elementary reading.Other titles, such as elementary reading, basic reading, or preliminary reading, can also be used.No matter what kind of name it is, it points out that as long as a person is proficient in reading at this level, he will get rid of the state of illiteracy, at least he has begun to recognize characters.In the process of proficiency at this level, a person can learn the basic art of reading, receive basic reading training, and acquire rudimentary reading skills.We like the name "elementary reading" because learning at this level of reading is typically done in elementary school.

It is this level of reading that children are first exposed to.His problem (and our problem when we start reading) is how to recognize the words on a page.What the child sees is a bunch of black symbols on white paper (or white symbols on the blackboard if he is learning from the blackboard), and these black symbols represent: "The cat is sitting on the hat." Grade 1 The child doesn't really care if the cat is sitting on the hat or what that statement means about the cat, the hat, or the world in general.All he cared about was the language of the person who wrote it. At this level of reading, the question to ask the reader is: "What is this sentence saying?" Of course, this question also has complex and difficult sides, but what we are talking about here is only the simplest side.

For almost all readers of this book, this level of reading skills should have been learned many years ago.However, no matter how proficient we as readers are at such reading skills, we will always encounter this level of reading problems when we read.For example, when we open a book and want to read it, it is written in a foreign language that we are not familiar with. This kind of problem occurs.At this point our first effort is to figure out the words.Only when we fully understand the meaning of each word can we try to understand, try to understand what the words really mean. In fact, even if a book is written in the native language, many readers still encounter various difficulties at this reading level.Most of the difficulties were technical, and some could be traced back to problems with early reading education.Overcoming these difficulties usually allows us to read faster.Therefore, most speed reading courses focus on reading at this level.We discuss basic reading in detail in the next chapter, and speed reading in Chapter 4.

The second level of reading we call inspectional reading (inspectional reading).The feature is emphasizing time.At this reading level, students must complete a reading assignment within a specified time.For example, it may take him fifteen minutes to read a book, or a book twice as thick in the same amount of time. So another way to describe this level of reading is to get at the point of a book within a certain amount of time—usually very short, and always (by definition) too short to grasp All points in one book. This level of reading can still be called by other names, such as skimming or pre-reading.We do not mean that skimming is casual or casual browsing of a book.Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.

At this level of reading, your goal is to look at the book at its surface and learn all that the book's surface alone can teach you.The deal is usually a good deal. If the question asked at the first level of reading is: "What is this sentence about?" Then the typical question asked at this level is: "What is this book about?" This is a question of appearance.Some similar questions are: "How is this book structured?" or: "What parts does this book contain?" No matter how short it takes you to read a book using inspectional reading, you should be able to answer the question, "What kind of book is this—fiction, history, or scientific treatise?"

We will also discuss this level of reading in detail in Chapter 4, so we will not elaborate further here.What we want to emphasize is that most people, even many good readers, ignore the value of inspectional reading.They open a book and read it from the first page, without even glancing at the table of contents.Therefore, when they only need to read a book briefly, they take the time to read and understand a book carefully.This increases the difficulty of reading. The third level of reading is called analytical reading.This is more complex and systematic than the two readings mentioned above.Depending on the degree of difficulty of the text, readers will find it difficult to use this method of reading.

Analytical reading is comprehensive reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do.If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading in a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading in an infinite time. An analytical reader is bound to ask many systematic questions about what he reads.We don't want to stress this issue here, because this book is mainly about reading at this level: the second part of the book gives you some rules for how to do this.What we want to emphasize here is that analytical reading is always a focused activity.At this level of reading, the reader clings to a book—a fitting metaphor—and reads it until the book becomes himself.Francis Bacon once said: "Some books can be tasted and stopped, some books are to be eaten alive, and only a few books are to be chewed and digested." Analytical reading is to chew and digest a book.

We would also like to stress that there is absolutely no need for analytical reading if your goal is simply information or entertainment.Analytical reading is specifically the search for understanding.On the contrary, unless you have a considerable degree of analytical reading skills, it is difficult for you to progress from not knowing much about a book to understanding more. The fourth and highest level of reading is called syntopical reading.This is the most complex and systematic reading of all.For the reader, there are also many requirements, even if he is reading a very simple and easy-to-understand book.

Another name can also be used to describe such reading, such as comparative reading (comparative reading).When doing topical reading, the reader reads many books, not just one, and lists the connections between these books to come up with a theme that all the books talk about.But a comparison between the lines in a book is not enough.Topic reading involves much more than that.With the help of the books he has read, the topic reader must be able to construct an analysis of a topic that may not be mentioned in any book.Therefore, it is obvious that thematic reading is the most active and labor-intensive kind of reading. We'll read about that topic in Part Four.At the moment we can only briefly say that topical reading is not an easy art of reading, and the rules are not widely known.Even so, topical reading can be the most rewarding of all reading activities.It's definitely worth the effort to learn how to do this kind of reading just because you'll get so much out of it.