The students' experience of reading

Many studies have focused on student learning through text and have investigated relationshipsbetween approach, conception, outcomes, taskdefinitions and context. However, little research has beenundertaken on trying to understand the meaningthat reading in the academic context has for theindividual student. The aim of the study reportedhere was to reveal this meaning and to show how theway a student approaches reading is bound upwith this. Extracts from four case studies of studentreaders are presented, describing how each studentapproaches the reading of the same text, and how thisapproach seems to be related to the student's generalapproach to academic reading, what reading in generalmeans to them, and the significance that being astudent has for each of them. It is argued that thenormally neutral or pleasurable private activity ofreading is disturbed in the academic context bythe potential for this activity to be made public through the various assessment activitieswhich bound the student's daily reading life. Whenengaging in reading for academic purposes, studentsare no longer engaging in a private activityundertaken for its own sake, but in an activity whoseevaluated outcomes will – crucially – tell themsomething about their worth in the eyes of others. Reading in the academic context cannot thus be viewedas a purely neutral cognitive process undertaken in asocial vacuum, but has to be understood within boththe personal and biographical context of theindividual reader, and within the socio-cultural andpolitical context of the particular reading activity.