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This article presents the results of a qualitative study into how adult literacy learners perceive reading. Individual interviews and focus groups were used to ask 37 adult literacy learners at a London further education college what reading is. It follows a grounded theory approach to build a model, or narrative, of reading in the form of six interrelating aspects and seven findings for discussion. These findings include insights on metalanguage and phonic decoding, the distinction between how we read and how we learn to read, motivation and learning to read, the place of reading aloud, the manifold relationship between reading and time, reading as a social practice and reading as a distinctly asocial practice. Implications for the learning and teaching of adult emergent reading are presented for each finding.