Christina Haas and Linda Flower--"Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning"

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

The authors use the constructivist view of reading and adapt it to rhetoric and composition. Meaning isn't inherent in a text; it is a discursive act that requires the reader to make meaning out of what they read. 

"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...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" (167).

The authors pose two questions: How does the constructivist approach play out cognitively and can it be controlled?

Methodologies: read aloud; students try to make sense of a college-level text by using "rhetorical reading," a way to create meaning by creating a context for the reading in order to make sense of it.

The means by which students were able to make meaning varied based on their reading level. Novice readers relied primarily on text-based strategies.

"In short, readers construct meaning by building multifaceted, interwoven representations of knowledge. The current text, prior texts, and the reading context can exert varying degrees of influence on this process, but it is the reader who must integrate information into meaning" (168).

Through the process of reading, readers construct analogues/nodes that connect the text to meaning. They could consist of author, publication, thesis, purpose, etc. 

"multiple representation thesis": "suggests that readers' and writers' mental representations are not limited to verbally well-formed ideas and plans, but may include information coded as visual images, or as emotions, or as linguistic propositions that exist just above the level of specific words. These representations may also reflect more abstract schema, such as the schema most people have for narrative or for establishing credibility in a conversation" (169).

"If reading, then, is a process of responding to cues in the text in the reader's context to build a complex, multi-faceted representation of meaning, it should be no surprise that different readers might construct radically different strategies to do so...what strategies, other than those based on knowing the topic, do readers bring to the process of understanding difficult texts--an how does this translate into pedagogy? (169).

What is good reading?

"To interpret any sophisticated text seems to require not only careful reading and prior knowledge, but the ability to read the text on several levels, to build multi-faceted representations. A text is understood not only as content and information, but also as the result of someone's intentions, as part of a larger discourse world, and as having real effects on real readers" (170).

"What many of our students can do is to construct representations of content, of structure, and of conventional features. What they often fail to do is move beyond content and convention and construct representations of texts as purposeful actions, arising from contexts, and with intended efforts" (170).

Methodologies: Looked at ten readers--four graduate students and six college freshmen.

"We were interested in how the readers go about 'constructing' meaning and the constructive strategies they used to do so."

Haas and Flower controlled the variables by selecting a reading that all students would be unfamiliar with. It is erased the advantage of prior knowledge.

The students read the text and  were asked how their interpretations of the text changed as they read, which reveals "gist-making strategies used at a sequence of points during reading, and it offers a cumulative picture of a text-under-construction" (172).

"The 'texts' or representations of meaning that the readers created as they were wrestling with the text and thinking aloud were dramatically different in both quantity--the amount of information they contained--and quality--the kinds of information they contained and the amount of the original text they accounted for. However, with no direct access to the internal representations that readers were building, we looked instead at the overt strategies they seemed to be using" (174).

The researchers developed three types of reading strategies:

content: "are concerned with content or topic information, 'what the text is about'"
feature: "used to refer to conventional, generic functions of texts, or conventional features of discourse...pointing to specific words, sentences, or larger sections of the text" (175).
rhetorical: take a step beyond the text itself. They are concerned with constructing a rhetorical situation for the text, trying to account for author's purpose, context, and effect on the audience...readers use cues in the text, and their own knowledge of discourse situations, to recreate or infer the rhetorical situation of the text they are reading...Readers seem to be constructing a rhetorical situation for the text and relating this text to a larger world of discourse " (176).

Content strategies: Students (77%)               Experienced Readers (58%)
Feature strategies: Students (22%)               Experienced Readers (20%)
Rhetorical strategies:  Students (1%)            Experienced Readers (13%)

The rhetorical strategies are the most important because of the "richness and wealth of information contained in" (176-177) the strategy.

"While the student reader is mainly creating a gist and paraphrasing content, the experienced reader does this and more--he then tries to infer the author's purpose and even creates a sort of strident persona for the writer" (177).

"It is useful to see rhetorical reading not as a separate and different strategy but as a progressive enlargement of the constructed meaning of a text. These student readers seldom 'progressed' to that enlarged view" (177).

"Rhetorical strategies include not only a representation of discourse as discourse but as unique discourse with a real author, a specific purpose, and actual efforts...rhetorical reading is not merely 'frosting on the cake' for several reasons...they used the rhetorical strategies to help construct content, and vice versa. They did not 'figure our' the content, and then do rhetorical reading as an 'embellishment.' Rhetorical reading strategies were interwoven with other strategies as the readers constructed their reading of the texts...rhetorical readers seemed to recognize and assimilate more facts and claims into their reading of the text" (178).

"Readers who used the rhetorical strategies, first, recognized more claims and second, identified claims sooner than other readers" (179).

The Role of Rhetorical Reading

"Speaking more generally, this act of building a rich representation of text--larger than the words on the page and including both propositional content and the larger discourse context within which a text functions--is the kind of constructive reading we desire our students to do" (181).

"We believe that teaching students to read rhetorically is genuinely difficult...Similarly, these student readers seem to concentrate on knowledge, content, what the text is about--not taking into account that the text is the product of a writer's intentions and is designed to produce an effect on a specific audience...many students may see reading and writing as merely an information exchange: knowledge-telling when they write, and 'knowledge-getting' when they read. Helping students move beyond this simple, information-exchange view to a more complex rhetorical model--in both their reading and their writing--is one of the very real tasks which faces us as teachers" (182).