Holly's response for "Textual Shift"

In "The 'textual shift': Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, I found I had questions that the article didn't really address. However, that may be because my questions really didn't follow what the article's primary purpose was.  What caught my attention in the article was the mention of decoding.  I think many students decode and think they're reading, but the words never really make it past their eyes.  For instance, when my sister was in high school and working on a history assignment (answering questions about what she read), she just could not remember the answers from her reading.  She literally had no idea what the reading was about.  My mom was trying to help her (and becoming slightly frustrated) when she finally said to my sister, "I thought you said you read this!!" My sister's reply was very telling, "My eyes read it, but it didn't make it to my brain."

I would guess that happens a lot with high school (and college students), especially in subjects they don't like or are unfamiliar with.  My question (that the article didn't really seem to address) is how do we move students past just decoding, and into thinking about what they read and reading critically?  How do we get students to understand that "Reading is not static, it is a constant interaction between reader and text"?  While it's important to understand the benefits from reading different types of texts and how students read those, I would wager that perhaps we have students who don't know how to get past decoding.  And I think that's a question we need to be asking more of: How do we move or help students move towards a more critical  reading strategy?