I cannot begin to tell you how much I am enjoying this Masters of Education (Literacy) program. Many things are now becoming clear, a key point being that the more I read about the theories and processes of reading and writing, the more I come to the complete realization that I have never truly thought about such until now; hence, I have taken much for granted with respect to the very processes akin to literacy.
While reading and rereading from Beyond Comprehension: Poststructuralist Readings in The English Classroom, I found the first several reading attempts to be frustrating ones in what they were proposing; namely, that “ ... readers do not make meanings out of their personal sense of self in conjunction with what a text says, but rather, the meanings readers assign to texts are already available to them before they begin to read the words on the page (page 64).” They went even further to say that “ ... experience can be read as cultural rather than as personal and that readers fill gaps not with personally created ideas but with meanings that are already available in their cultural at particular points in time or space (page 71)”.
This was a very different argument proposed by many ... that individual readers bring their personal experiences to bear on the texts that they read, which, then, becomes their way of producing meanings for the text in question. I think this may be why I had such difficulty with this particular position. I fully understand that the different ways readers make meaning from texts depend on their access to differing ideas in their culture, and yet I found it reflectively strange to note that, up until this particular reading, I had not really been focusing on culture at all. We are very much a configuration of our culture, but at the same time there exists diversity within cultural unity.
I truly enjoyed reading Readers Recreating Texts, especially with regards to how Evans stated that “ ... a text can be seen as a sort of starting point, which gives every reader an idea of the lines to pursue in reading it. But since every reader will bring to the text a different experience of life and different pictures of the scenes, characters, and activities which are being realized in a particular reading of it, the blueprint will never produce exactly the same experience twice (page 27)”. Such fits wonderfully with Unity in Reading: Becoming Readers in a Complex Society where it is written that the published text is very much a reality that does not change its physical properties as a result of being read. How, then, can the published text change during the reading?
“The answer is that the reader is constructing a text parallel and closely related to the published text. It becomes a different text for each reader. The reader’s text involves inferences, references, and co-references based on schemata that the reader brings to the text. And it is this reader’s text which the reader comprehends and on which any reader’s later account of what was read is based (page 96)”, even to the point that it may well take on a different rendering for the same reader at a completely different time, a result of one’s willingness to rethink and revise.
In reading How Texts Teach What Readers Learn, Meek states that children “... read stories they like over and over again: that is when they pay attention to the words - after they have discovered what happens. Adults, generally, go on to the next book, so that how we read is not part of the consciousness we bring to texts (page 103)” basically because as adults who become experienced in reading “ ... we become less and not more skilled. We read only what we find comfortable, rushing through novels to finish the story and then going on to another one. We may adopt too easily patterns of work which do not encourage us to inspect what we do (page 102).”
What an incredibly powerful statement, but one that I have definitely been able to relate to. Mind you, with regards to personal favorites (specific genre types) that I often reread, I do take the time to savor the flow and dialect of the words.
I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the distinction between what has been called efferent reading and aesthetic reading in What Facts Does This Poem Teach You? In fact, this became the focus of my online Google search.
Louise Rosenblatt states that the “ ... matter of the reader’s focus of attention during the reading transaction is of paramount importance. We must attend to the sound of the words and pulsations of the phrases as we call them up in the inner ear; we must attend to the sensations and feelings and associations triggered by ideas, images, people, and places that we conjure up under the guidance of the text (page 387).” She also believes, as do I, that the “ ... aim is to develop the habit of aesthetic evocation from a text. If the young readers are allowed in the early years to retain and deepen that ability, we can cheerfully leave for later years the more formal methods of literacy analysis and criticism (page 393)”. In fact, “ ... the atmosphere and circumstances of aesthetic reading should make the young reader feel free to pay attention to what is being lived through under the guidance of the text. There should also be the opportunity to talk freely about the experiences with peers and with the teacher (page 393)”.
In keeping, the spontaneous comments of children should be welcomed, encouraged, and, as often as possible, made the starting point for further discussion. If the teacher finds it necessary to spark discussion, questions or comments should lead the reader back, to savor what was seen, heard, felt, thought, during the calling forth of the poem or story from the text. “The current interest in developing children’s ability to compose their own poems and stories offers an important means of strengthening the child’s sense of the aesthetic potentialities of language (page 393).”
I believe, as well, that the “ ... aim is to develop the habit of aesthetic evocation from a text. If the young readers are allowed in the early years to retain and deepen that ability, we can cheerfully leave for later years the more formal methods of literacy analysis and criticism (page 393)”.
In Reading and Reading Strategies, it was written that “the closer the content of reading material is to the life and experiences of the students, and the closer the concepts of reading material are to what students already know, the easier it is for them to understand the meaning relationship in the reading material (page 12)”. At the same time, however, it is important that reading be seen as a means to expand the knowledge of the students. Teachers should, therefore, encourage students to read material that involves some unique experiences and that is to some degree beyond their own knowledge.
I enjoyed coming to the realization that published reading programs have, for decades, placed an emphasis in learning to read on letter-to-sound recoding (phonics) as well as a word emphasis approach (sight word recognition as well as word-shape-word recoding) Such was clearly stated in The Reading Process: A Psycholinguistic View. I work with students who have a severe learning disability (which says nothing about their overall intelligence). Some teachers naively assume that if a child can translate the written symbols from text into oral speech, he/she is capable of dealing with the concepts being presented. The other side of the coin is equally daunting. Some teachers believe that if a student is unable to read the text material being presented, they cannot possibly grasp the material (concept) being taught.
The focus then appears to become ... how does one, as a teacher (or parent), help students (or their children) make their own transactions with the texts that they read? Perhaps this is where we must learn to begin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Evans, Emyrs: Readers Recreating Texts
Goodman, Kenneth: Unity in Reading: Becoming Readers in a Complex Society
Goodman, Yetta and Burke, Carolyn: Reading and Reading Strategies
Meek, Margaret: How Texts Teach What Reader’s Learn
Patterson, Annette; Mellor, Bronwyn and O’Neill, Marnie: Beyond Comprehension:
Poststructuralist Readings in The English Classroom
Rosenblatt, Louise: What Facts Does This Poem Teach You?
Smith, Brooks; Goodman, Kenneth and Meredith, Robert: The Reading Process: A Psycholinguistic View
Smith, Frank: What Happens When You Read?
