Reading is a pre-condition to achieving more advanced literacy levels in the society.

It also helps individuals to access different information. Frequent use of deeper analysis results in the reader finding meaningful information that can help him to apply it in the daily social life. Such encounters allow the reader to discover something unknown in a different way.

It is through such encounters that the reader learns about the pleasure of knowledge and it is from this, new ideas and dreams are born. Information literacy is therefore a strategic skill for mankind because self discovery is a pre-requisite to social and economic development.

The ability to understand what has been read constitutes an important measure of the skill of a country to develop a competent labour force with which it can acquire competitive advantage in the global economy. The benefit of information awareness is not only linked to the economic factor, but also involves far reaching political and social aspects.

Additionally, reading can improve the mind of an individual in particularly skills necessary to solve real challenges. This is because reading has the capacity to evaluate information, build hypotheses, and take practical advantage of knowledge. But the ultimate purpose of all this is to find out to what extent individuals are capable of building, developing and interpreting the meaning of the material they read. It should however, be reading for the sake of it.

Today, students tend to read more and more but not in technical way. There are many students today who read to pass exams but not to understand. In many cases such students limit themselves because they do not acquire the capacity to ascribe the full and deeper meaning to what they read and as a consequence they are confronted with additional difficulties in trying to widen their knowledge base.

Many of our students today avoid having more advanced reading skills that allow them to acquire a detailed understanding of the contents in the text. They also miss the identification of the key components of the text, and their relevance to what is already known. This makes them fail to acquire analytical skills to evaluate the content of the text itself and its source.

Failure to develop a proper reading environment can either be caused by the family and the institution in which individual works. The family is to blame for not encouraging children to read.

Presently, mass media offers an increasing easy entertainment, which is accessible more and more through images rather than reading texts. It also presents content impoverished messages and often makes the audience dull and bored. In this way, reading can be regarded as a complex and difficult activity rather than a simple and pleasurable one as compared to the offerings of the popular media.

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