Becoming A Nation of Readers , many people believe that reading is just the process of turning printed words into their spoken equivalents. However, this view of reading represents only part of the picture. Years of research have shown reading to be far more than just knowing how sounds correspond to letters and words.
Skilled readers do much more than just turn printed words into spoken ones.
They use knowledge of the world, of how information is organized on a page, and their awareness of whether something makes sense to guide their efforts to construct meaning. Good readers skillfully integrate information in the text with what they already know. Reading must be fluent. Readers must be able to recognize words quickly and accurately so that this process can coordinate fluidly with the process of constructing the meaning of the text. Reading must be strategic.