When “Knowing How to Read Texts” Means Understanding and Inferring Meanings
by
Abstract
The essay aims to explore the nature of reading as a multidimensional and dynamic competence and to identify the teaching strategies necessary to put students to read successfully. His main purpose is to focus on relationships between text comprehension, skills and inferential processes and to examine the positive association between understanding reading, morphological awareness and construction of meanings, also in reference the ability to make inferences. The paper proposes a vision of reading comprehension as a dynamic process of decoding and linguistic understanding, which suggests how the relationship between decoding and linguistic understanding should be integrative rather than additional. The interconnection between the multiple linguistic-cognitive processes involved in reading implies the use of interpretative approaches belonging to different disciplinary areas. For this reason, this contribution goes precisely in the direction to look at the phenomenon of reading by combining the tools of linguistics, cognitive psychology and pedagogy, indispensable to reveal its features.