What is reading? It is certainly not just pronouncing words that come one after the other in a sentence, not just going through sentences in a paragraph or paragraphs in a text. This is just the process.
The essence of reading is a much more complicated issue, depending on factors such as age, personal development, varying degrees of experience, culture, levels of prejudice, education, political beliefs, personal mood at the time of reading and, I guess, several others.
Two examples to illustrate my point: comprehension and attitude towards the messages of a specific text
when one is relaxed is bound to be different from those when one is anxious. Even more serious, experience in its various forms is likely to alter one?s personal comprehension of a text even after years of steadfast convictions produced by reading and re-reading that same text in the first place.
Of course, the powers of empathy can always be recruited when reading despite whatever, and they are really indispensable, especially when reading literature. But empathy is a skill that has to be cultivated and preserved and the older one gets, the less likely it is to possess it.
So much depends on reading? personal development, interpersonal relationships, intercultural and international relationships. The factors mentioned in paragraph 2 can pose serious obstacles to all those.
To make matters worse, humans do not communicate in the same language but in many different languages, some of which have often been known as a lingua franca: but if reading in a specific language is difficult, one can surely imagine the difficulty entailed in reading a text in a language other than one?s own and what effort is required to learn to read in that foreign language.
