Introduction. Being a philologist in a wide sense of a word implies academic ability to understand every variety of text in the chosen language through reading and place it

Being a philologist in a wide sense of a word implies academic ability to understand every variety of text in the chosen language through reading and place it within the overall treasury of existing literature [1, p.9]. In terms of literacy, socially mediated and developed, reading is admitted to belong to the group of literacy events taking place within real-life context in a community and therefore seen as an initial step in the direction of literacy development. Being involved in this process, reading is distinguished by its relevance to interpreting some textual thing as created in the course of cross cultural communication and accomplished by the language itself and some kinds of social and cultural presuppositions. Initially considered word-for-word decoding as the only way to read, it has been further on replaced by learning how to read purposefully, selectively, based on the assumption that the reader be seriously justified in its adequate comprehension from the points of view of structure, semantics, socio-cultural value and register.

It makes think about the fact that the text arising in a specific social situation represents a highly combined, coherent and cohesive organization both on its structural and semantic planes. Consequently, the reader is involved in a reconstruction of context through an analysis of its content set up by the variables, such as: genre; register; verbally presented events as topical points; the author’s perspective in terms of gist and theme; view-dependent attitudes, social and cultural evaluative stance; logical links [4].

In this respect, it should be noted that reading entails complex interactions between reader, writer and text, suggesting active engagement with the author’s intentions and ideas. In other words, reading encourages a person to get engaged with what is read, gleaning information and then fitting it into certain environment so as to be able to interpret the content flexibly to suit the purpose of literacy experiences.

Apparently, pure understanding of grammar and lexicon does not fully constitute comprehension of the text: coherence and brought by the author view points based on cultural norms, beliefs, knowledge, values are essential as well. Constructed on this basis, process of reading goes beyond a simple set of strategies and is placed within some socio-cultural domain. Thus, we are coming to understanding necessity of monitoring cognition to make sure that the information presented is critically processed by the reader, being a holder of his own value system.

Consequently, reading appears to be a complex learned skill leading to a certain model of critical extensive reading focused on the ability to extract and research information from multiple sources in a range of subject areas enhancing comprehension development like interactive mental process. The model is evolved around the following strategy-related activities: engagement, comprehension and activate activities, supplied with corresponding study skills and reading strategies - which are intended to develop overall reading proficiency through corresponding reading question tasks: matching, multiple choice, true/false, gapfill, completion, summary, information gap, evaluating statements, reassembling a text [ 3 ].

Follow up tasks:

1. Why is reading claimed to belong to literacy events?

2. In what conditions is a text generated?

3. What factors influence the reader’s comprehension?

4. What is understood by coherent and cohesive organization of the text?

5. How do you understand engagement in the view of reading?

6. What is comprehension of a text is based on?

7. What does critical extensive reading imply?

8. Make difference between strategy-related activities, study skills and reading strategies.

9. Point out reading question tasks.

I. Engagement and comprehension activities:

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