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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.

Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning

SUMMARY:

In this article Christina Haas and Linda Flower write about an observation they did with on ten readers some were student readers and the others were experienced readers. They wanted to know how each of them did construction of meaning when reading something new. In order to do this they gave them a piece of text for them to read and say what they thought. Every few lines they had to stop and ask themselves the question “how do you interpret the text now?”. After the observation they were able to rank the answer into three categories which are content, function/feature, and rhetorical reading strategies. The first strategy is content which means that the response of the reader was about what the text was mainly about. The other strategy is function/feature which is when the reader tries to point out certain part of the text as the main points. The last strategy is rhetorical reading in which the reader finds the purpose and the message the writer is trying to get across. One thing that both of these type of readers were doing was finding claims in the reading but the experienced readers would find them faster because they did rhetorical reading. The authors with these observations were able to conclude that in order for the student to be used the “complex rhetorical model” they have to stop viewing reading as an “information exchange”.

Question:

Christina Haas and Linda Flower describe reading as a constructive process, rather than a receptive one. What do they mean by “constructive process” and “receptive process”?

Response:

What the authors mean when they say constructive process is that it does not exist in the text because we will build our own understanding of the reading. And we do this by connecting what we as readers think what the text is trying to say. Constructive process is also used in a way that we as readers are able to add our own opinion and show our point of view of what we have just read from the articles. We as readers use constructive process when we read something that really interest us. Because when we read something interesting we get mental representation in which it makes it easier for us to understand the text. Receptive process is what we receive form the text, which means we don’t add any opinions of our own or our point of view but what is said straight from the text.  We as readers use receptive process when we read something that does not interest us, for example an article that is being enforced to us to read. So when we read this article we just read it to get it over with. We don’t take the time to actually understand what is really trying to say. We agree with Haas and Flower that in order to fully understand an article we need to use constructive process rather than receptive process.