The importance of reading skills is grossly underestimated, or simply ignored in computer science education. The explicit goal is to have the students producing programs written in a high-level language a quickly as possible. The justification for such behavior is fairly straightforward, student must demonstrate their competence in language constructs, and progam writing provides the opportunity. Hence the focus is language acquisition, and the use of language in solving a variety of problems. Skill at code reading is, at best, an incidental outcome learned during the course of these activities.
Students read code fragments to understand the behavior of a construct.
The focus, and hence the student's attention, is on the language construct, not on understanding how such an assembly of statements solves a particular piece of the problem. This instructional regime in combination with the contructive approach mentioned in the previous paragraph leaves program comprehension an accidental outcome of computer science education. Systematic or thoughtful approaches to reading technical material such as this is not explicit in the educational program. Any claim that students learn to read these products is probably exaggerated. The lack of attention to program comprehension is somewhat puzzling.