Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning

TLDR

Reading is increasingly viewed as a constructive process where meaning is built by readers within a discourse context that includes the writer, other readers, rhetorical setting, and discourse history, a view supported by literary theory, cognitive research, and rhetoric. The study argues that treating reading as a constructive rhetorical act necessitates rethinking college reading instruction and highlights parallels between reading and the more studied process of writing.

Abstract

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.