It seems likely that many children who are being taught to read may not know what they are to look for and focus upon, and may therefore have difficulty in learning to read. "Knowing" what to look for means that the child can formulate some internal goal and method for checking to see when the goal has been reached. For instance, suppose the teacher says, "Look at the word 'CAT' on the blackboard." The child must aud the message, comprehend what a word is (some primary school children apparently do not, Holden and MacGinitie, 1972), understand that the utterance "CAT" is a word in the spoken language, direct the gaze to the blackboard, visually examine the printed configuration and somehow understand that all three letters-not just "c" and "T" or "c" and "A"-are important elements of the graphic display of the spoken word "CAT."

The foregoing is quite different from the child's ordinary looking which is subservient to the child's self-imposed cognitive task. The teacher-imposed task may completely bewilder the child, making looking an almost pointless activity. This may be especially important if the teacher at one time expects the child to focus on whole words (patterns of visual features making up a word-shape) 'and at other times on elements of words such as letters, digraphs, inflectional morphemes, and other word segments. A type of looking "confusion" could result, in that the child would not precisely know where to direct his focal attention.

Different types of looking (achieved through differences in the directing of attention) partially account for distinctions between skimming, scanning, and reading. In skimming, the individual extracts information in a saltatory manner through a sequential series of focal fixations; that is, he focally attends to a unit of information, "skips" another unit, fixates, "skips" again, and so on. Information extracted through scanning is done so primarily by preattentive processing. The individual does not successively fixate his attention; rather, he uses the margin of attention to search the display in a manner more continuous than that of skimming. A combination of focal and marginal attention constitutes the processing of information through reading, which involves (a) in beginning reading, directing focal attention to relevant features of the graphic visual display in response to cognitive goals set by others (instruction) so that graphic word recognition skills may be learned, and (b) in more advanced reading, directing visual focal attention to strings of words as units within a single eye fixation, and using peripheral retinal information in the margin of attention to preattentively guide successive eye movements across the lines of print.