Excerpted from Teaching Argument in the Composition Course
Editor: Timothy Barnet
Epigraph: "The art of dialectic is not the art of being able to win every argument...Dialectic, as the art of asking questions, proves itself only because the person who knows how to ask questions is able to persist in his questioning...The art of questioning...i.e., the art of thinking...is called 'dialectic,' for it is the art of conducting a real conversation...To conduct a conversation means to allow oneself to be conducted by the object to which the partners in the conversation are directed. It requires that one does not try to out-argue the other person, but that one really considers the weight of the other's position...
--Hans-Georg Gadamer Truth and Method
The hermeneutic idea of reading--a conversation with the text between the reader/interlocutor and the text--"can only begin and be sustained if and when the reader/interlocutor reconstruct and critically engages the 'question' or the argument that the text itself might have been occasioned by or be an answer to" (347).
"This view of reading enables us to imagine a text's argument...as a 'topic' about which interlocutor at generate critical questions that put them in a position to think what it means to know, to understand, and to reflect on difference processes of knowledge formation" (347).
"What follows is an argument on behalf of the theoretical and practical appropriateness of using reading as a means of teaching writing. Throughout this essay, I will be using the phrase the argument of reading to refer to the debate about the presence of reading in the composition classroom. But I will also be using the phrase the argument of reading as a descriptor of the particular understanding of reading and the teaching of reading that I am proposing here" (347).
Salvatori responds to an older composition handbook that argued for abandoning formalized readers because of their "canned" and stiflingly "themed" nature.
"But I wish to argue, to set the two arguments side by side [teaching composition and reading concurrently/ teaching writing sans reading] is to realize what either position unwittingly ended up obscuring and deflecting attention from: that 'the argument of reading in the teaching of composition' is not merely an argument about whether reading should or should not be used in the composition classroom. The argument is about which kind of reading gets to be theorized and practiced. To be more precise, that argument cannot be critically and reflexively engaged apart from the following interconnected questions: (1) Which theories of reading are better suited to teaching reading and writing as interconnected activities? (2) What is the theoretical justification for privileging that interconnectedness? (3) How can one teach that interconnectedness?" (349).
Question #1
"not all theories of reading are suited to uncovering and enacting the interconnectedness of reading and writing" (349).
"In classrooms where these theories of reading are unreflexively performed for students, where reading materials are used as mere pretexts for writing exercises, a student's reading of those materials may become secondary in at least two ways": there's a gap between the value of what's read and what's written; it over simplifies and promotes over simplification reading practices.
teaching reading "makes it possible not only to claim that reading can be taught but also that it can be taught as an opportunity to reflect on, investigate, and intervene in at least some of the processes that produce knowledge that shapes and is shaped by one's understanding of a text" (350).
"Teaching the reading/writing interconnectedness becomes another king of hermetic performance, one that covers over, one that hides rather than reveals, the process of cognition that ought to be the subject of investigation and reflection" (350).
Question #2
"although the processes that constitute our reading and writing are essentially invisible, those processes are, in principle, accessible to analysis, scrutiny, and reflection" (351).
"Part of the challenge confronting us as teachers is to learn how to make is possible--within the time and institutional constraints that bind us--for students to learn to perform this kind of introspective reading. To think about reading and the teaching of reading in these terms--to think of reading, that is, as an analogue for thinking about one's own and others' thinking, about how one's thinking ignites and is ignited by the thoughts of others, justifies the presence of reading in composition classrooms not as a pretext but as a context for writing" (351).
Question #3
"To forefround and to exploit the interconnectedness of reading and writing, I make a point of framing reading and writing activities...that ask students to write their response to a text, to construct a reflective commentary on the moves they made as readers and the possible reasons for them, and to formulate an assessment of the particular writing their reading produced" (352).
"I try to teach readers to become conscious of their mental moves, to see what such moves produce, and to learn to revise or to complicate those moves as they return to them in light of their newly constructed awareness of what those moves did or did not make possible" (353).
Salvatori provides an example of how students highlight certain things in a text and how what they choose to highlight exemplifies what they privilege in a text and how they make meaning from what they read, or did not read.
The "Difficulty Paper"
The students write a one-page response after reading a text about what was particularly difficult in reading the text "not as a means to expose my students' inadequacies but as a reflexive strategy that eventually allows them to recognize that what they perceive as 'difficult' is a feature of the text demanding to be critically engaged rather than ignored...students descriptions of difficulties almost inevitably identify a very crucial feature of the text they are reading and contain in nuce the the interpretive move necessary to handle them" (354).
"To ask those students to account for the steps they took to compose that reading, to ask them to actually mark which places in the text they 'hooked up with' and which they merely skimmed, can serve as a dramatic visualization of how much of a text's argument can be ignored...because of preestablished conclusions or inattentiveness to that argument's construction" (355).
--
"What should be noticed about these strategies is that they function simultaneously as heuristic devices (through them I teach my students how to perform certain reflexive moves) and as constant reminder to me that as a teacher I must demonstrate in my reading of my students' comments, questions, interventions, and arguments the responsiveness and the responsibility with which I expect them to engage texts" (355).
"What should also be noticed is that they deliberately go to 'moments of reading' to foreground how those moments determine the writing they produce and that they tend to privilege...places or occasions in a student's text that can serve as points of critical reflection on the connection between reading and writing" (355).
Our own views and experiences of learning to read can be "potentially elitist and exclusionary" (356).
Showing posts with label Rhetorical reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rhetorical reading. Show all posts
Monday, October 12, 2015
Friday, October 9, 2015
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).
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).
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