What is reading?

Reading is one of the four language skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. It is a receptive skill, like listening. This means it involves responding to text, rather than producing it. Very simply we can say that reading involves making sense of written text. To do this we need to understand the language of the text at word level, sentence level or whole-text level. We also need to connect the message of the text to our knowledge of the world. Look at this sentence, for example:

The boy was surprised because the girl was much faster at running than he was.

To understand this sentence, we need to understand what the letters are, how the letters join together to make words, what the words mean and the grammar of the words and the sentence. But we also make sense of this sentence by knowing that, generally speaking, girls do not run as fast as boys. Our knowledge of the world helps us understand why the boy was surprised.