SQR4 Mayra Hernandez y Rocio Rendon

Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning
Authors: Christina Haas and Linda Flower
Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 39, No. 2 (May,1988), pp. 167-183

The article is about those two women: Christina Haas and Linda Flower statement that reading should be constructive rather than as a reciptive process that the readers build it. This constructuve view of reading is being proposed by literary theory and cognitive research and is supplemented by work in rhetoric and discourse act. When readers construct this meaning, they do in context of a discourse situation and they must include the writer od the original text, other readers , the rhetorical contexts and other stuffs. For all these situations they proposed that the teachers have to anañyze how they teach college students to read texts and suggests useful parallels between the act of reading and the process of writing. Then they analize and suggested two questions to help extend this constructive, rhetorical view of reading, the question were: How does this constructive process play in the actual, thinking process or reading? And are alla readers really aware the discourse act which current theories describe? In this study they find that the readers trying to understand a complex text and they used not only the text, they also used their own knowledge of the word, of the topic, and question in order to construct meaning for texts. They observed a strong difference between the rhetorical process of experienced readers and the freshman readers, who relied primarily on text based strategies to construct their meanings. Some of the recent work on reading and cognition helps describe what makes the reading process and helps to understand how people can make different interpretations of the same text.

Question:
How can it be posisible that some recent work on reading and cognition give a good starting point foy any discussion or describe what makes the reading process so complex?


Response:
The reading and cognition can always give a and excellent good starting in a discussion or any article since it describes and gives good detail about what the writer is trying to give to the reader this kind or writing gives a construct vastrly different interpretations of the same text making it complex and easy to manage the information. It can vastly construct different interpretations of the same text. And although a thinking protocol can always show us a great deal, we must always keep in mind that it could only show us only part of goes on as a reader is building a representation of a cognitive writing.