Cognitive strategies enable the reader to understand written text. In practice, the two levels of strategy work together. Studies have demonstrated that better readers and learners go about the task more strategically than others do, which means they have greater conscious control over what and how they read. Readers engage nearly every kind of thought process during reading. The strategic activities of readers are not only highly active and interpretive, they are recursive and non-linear .
Readers make ready use of nonverbal cues with they read.
And because every reader translates the written message into such a world, we can never know information as information alone, but only as as it is reflected in a particular, lived system of meaning. In cognitive theory, then, readers are selective, active, and strategic. Readers activate strategies for managing their approach to a text, along with schemas for interpreting it. Readers may modify the strategy of reading and shift the context of interpretation as they go. They approach reading in the context of the entire world of their experience, and they turn away with that world confirmed, modified, extended, or challenged.