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Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning

1988; National Council of Teachers of English; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/358026

1939-9006

Christina Haas, Linda Flower,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

There is a growing consensus in our field that reading should be thought of as a constructive rather than as a receptive process: that meaning does not exist in a text but in readers and the representations they build. This constructive view of reading is being vigorously put forth, in different ways, by both literary theory and cognitive research. It is complemented by work in rhetoric which argues that reading is also a discourse act. That is, when readers construct meaning, they do so in the context of a discourse situation, which includes the writer of the original text, other readers, the rhetorical context for reading, and the history of the discourse. If reading really is this constructive, rhetorical process, it may both demand that we rethink how we teach college students to read texts and suggest useful parallels between the act of reading and the more intensively studied process of writing. However, our knowledge of how readers actually carry out this interpretive process with college-level expository texts is rather limited. And a process we can't describe may be hard to teach.