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Increasing Teacher Awareness of the
Mental Processes Involved in Reading -
Rose Katz Ortiz
“One cold day recently, I had a day off, and I decided to go shopping downtown. Even
though it was cold, I stopped at every shop window. One in particular caught my eye. It had
a very elaborate window dressing. In the window I saw a train. I thought it would be great
fun to own it. It was the longest train I’d ever seen on a gown.”
I told the preceding story as the introduction to an exercise I designed for a reading workshop
for teachers. First, the teachers gave their responses to several questions about the story:
“What color was the gown?” “Did you see it?” “Did you see anything else?” “Where were
you?” “Was anyone somewhere else?”
This particular exercise lasted for one hour. During that time the teachers provided a wide
variety of responses:
“I pictured you at Fulton Street [in Brooklyn] looking in an A & S window at a toy train.
When you said, ‘gown,’ I dropped my image of a toy train and substituted a wedding
dress.”
“My attention wandered when you mentioned shopping. I wanted more paragraphs on the
cold...the only train I saw was a subway train with you on it. There was no gown.”
“I saw you in front of F. A. O. Schwarz [in Manhattan]. When you said ‘gown,’ I was
annoyed. I continued to see the model train, refusing to see a gown.”
“Why is it so deliberate? What’s her motive? What’s she going to do afterwards?”
These comments highlighted several aspects of what we do when we listen.
▪ Sometimes we spontaneously produce images, and sometimes we don’t. When we evoke
images quickly, it feels automatic; when we don’t, we become aware of the work it
takes to recall or create appropriate images.
▪ There are important differences between recollection and imagination. In this case, those
who had previous experience with “downtown” and department stores could more
easily evoke an image because they were recalling their past experience instead of
imagining new images.
▪ Sometimes we refuse to let go of inappropriate images. We want or expect a different story
than the one someone else is trying to tell us.
▪ Sometimes knowing or making assumptions about an author influences the images we
make. In this case, a person who knew where I lived, assumed that “downtown” was
Fulton Street in Brooklyn, whereas another person, perhaps thinking I lived in

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Manhattan, identified “downtown” with Fifth Avenue.
▪ Sometimes people can be more concerned with the telling of the tale, as in the case of the
teacher who wondered about my motives.
Until the members of the group heard each other’s comments, they didn’t appreciate the
complexity of comprehension. Obviously, there is more to this activity than just “thinking
about what you hear,” as we often tell students.
In another exercise at the same workshop, I asked participants to illustrate a sentence from
each of four different subject areas:
▪ the Pythagorean Theorem,
▪ the geochemistry of uranium and pitch blend,
▪ Freud,
▪ moonlight as reflected sunlight.
All of the teachers struggled to draw pictures conveying their comprehension of the sentences.
Their attempts made visible their imperfect understanding of the sentences. Like the train
story, the illustrated sentences demonstrated the role of imagery in comprehension.
Obviously, there is more to it than just “trying to picture what you read,” as we often tell
students.
In another workshop, I asked the participants to read an abstruse passage from the philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. They found that they could not be sure of the
phrasing and meaning even though it was written in English. It seemed that one could know
the meaning of individual words and still not arrive at the meaning of the passage as a whole,
or even the phrasing of some parts. It became clear that we need experience with particular
language, syntax and subject matter to understand complex materials. Clearly, there is more to
reading abstract passages than “just concentrating,” as we often tell students.
On another occasion, I asked participants in a workshop to read a backward, mirror image,
unspaced sentence. Everyone had difficulty and some could not complete the task. But the
effort required led members of the group to discover the necessity for several processes we
often take for granted, such as:
▪ reading from left to right (both for words and sentences);
▪ respecting the spaces and marks of punctuation between words;
▪ taking care in simply looking at what is printed on the page;
▪ using questioning to evoke mental images and test hypotheses about appropriate phrasing
and intonation in giving meaning to a text.
Finally, the participants observed certain emotional aspects of their behavior, such as:
a. the fear of facing the unknown and the fear of making mistakes;
b. the roles of resistance and avoidance, anxiety and frustration in both helping and hindering
learning;
c. drifting and day-dreaming;
d. dealing with competition in a classroom setting.
Obviously, there is more to reading with concentration than just “motivation,” as we often tell
students. In order to approach the teaching of reading in a way that respects the complexity of
the reading process, we have to work on ourselves first. Only when we, the teachers, become
aware of our own thought processes as readers can we gain insight into the mental processes
of our students. And only in this way can we learn to teach in a way which allows students to
have access to their thought processes. The workshops outlined above afforded opportunities

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to attend to the invisible activities of reading we may not take the time to observe on our own.
As we worked, we generated the following list, which also includes items added at other
workshops.
Activities a Reader Engages in While Reading
Note: This is not to be regarded as a linear sequence or as all-inclusive.
1) Recognizing conventions of the written language (in this case English) such as:
a. Proceeding from left to right both within words and sentences.
b. Spaces in between words indicate ends and beginnings of words, and sometimes - but not
always - represent spaces in time in speech.
c. Punctuation is used to clarify meaning.
d. Letters or groups of letters represent sounds and/or words. (Context is necessary to identify
the sounds and – sometimes - words represented.)
e. There are both upper-case and lower-case letters.
f. Each letter has a unique structure which distinguishes it from all the others.
g. Certain words begin with upper-case letters.
h. Sentences begin with upper-case letters.
2) Making a decision to do and to continue doing the task
3) Preparing for the task: recognizing what this means for oneself
4) Approaching the task with an open mind
5) Maintaining self-awareness and self-observation
6) Maintaining an active interior dialogue
7) Maintaining attention:
a. recognizing lapses of attention; drifting off, tuning out, worrying, praying, comparing
oneself to others
b. recognizing interferences and distractions (inner and outer) and controlling them
8) Recognizing and dealing with a range of emotional responses:
a. frustration, disappointment, anxiety, fear, anger, insecurity, embarrassment, resistance,
desire to please, discomfort
b. exuberance, joy, happiness, excitement
9) Maintaining confidence:
1. overcoming feelings of fear, frustration and self-doubt
2. using anxiety as a spur to initiate or continue work rather than as something which
paralyzes
3. keeping ego from negatively interfering with task
4. being aware of false sense of confidence
5. keeping over-confidence in check
10) Creating and sustaining interest in task or material
11) Taking responsibility for understanding and learning
12) Approaching the task with care:
• preventing carelessness

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• observing with precision
13) Recognizing purpose(s) for reading and adjusting reading to suit purpose(s)
14) Making sense:
• assessing whether one has sufficient information to construct an interpretation
• evoking, constructing, arriving at, creating meaning
• making and/or recognizing connections or relationships between and among words,
phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, ideas, diagrams, illustrations, details
• looking for patterns
15) Imaging:
a. evoking, refining and creating appropriate images (visual and/or sensory)
b. making material vivid
16) Voicing:
a. using appropriate expression, intonation, melody, phrasing (silently and aloud)
17) Making and using associations:
a. recall of previous experience and prior knowledge, definitions (checking whether one has
prior knowledge to associate with text)
b. remembering, comparing, understanding
c. relating the known to the unknown
18) Respecting the text:
a. not recreating the text to distort the author’s intent
b. understanding one’s egocentricity
c. checking one’s accuracy of approach to material
19) Using context for interpretation and understanding
20) Questioning the material and oneself; finding answers, when possible.
21) Making inferences
22) Recognizing ambiguities in language and thought, inconsistencies, contradictions,
conflicting elements
23) Recognizing figurative language, metaphors, euphemisms
24) Recognizing analogies
25) Recognizing assumptions (one’s own and the author’s):
a. checking for evidence
b. knowing when one has enough information to validate an inference, a hypothesis, an
assumption, a generalization
26) Recognizing bias, point of view and frame of reference (one’s own and author’s)
27) Recognizing and dealing with one’s expectations
28) Picking out main points, themes

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29) Analyzing and synthesizing material
30) Evaluating material and one’s feelings towards it; making judgements about content and
writer
31) Deciding whether to adjust previously held ideas in light of newly presented information
32) Giving the task the time it takes, and dealing with the time one has
© Rose Katz Ortiz The Science of Education in Questions - N° - January 1993
"Increasing Teacher Awareness of the Mental Processes Involved in Reading" by Rose Katz
Ortiz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
Unported License.