Rhetorical Reading Strategies And The Construction Of Meaning Summary

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In Christina Haas and Linda Flower’s article, Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning, Haas and Flower explore the way reading should be seen. They believe that reading is a process that is actually constructive, and not receptive. This means that the meaning of a text being read is not the same for every reader, and is constructed by the reader for themselves. Haas and Flower performed a study to understand how college students interpret college-level reading. They had students read while thinking out loud; this was in order to understand the thinking process they went through while attempting to understand a text. They found that one of the strategies being used was the “rhetorical reading” strategy. What this means …show more content…

This intrigued them, because many students are “good” readers in the way that they have extensive vocabularies, can recall content, and can read rapidly. They are able to understand texts well, but only on a surface level. This means they can understand the content, but usually fail to understand the purpose of it. Haas and Flower had found that more experienced readers attempted to connect parts of a text to understand what they couldn’t before, or even to just to form a purpose for the text. Less experienced readers read the text piece by piece, and understood it the same way; they had failed to connect the pieces of text they understood in order to form a purpose. Haas and Flower later found out that less experienced readers spent 77% of their time reading using content strategies, 22% using feature strategies, and only 1% using rhetorical strategies. This differs with more experienced readers in that more experienced readers used 67% using content strategies, 20% using feature strategies, and 13% using rhetorical strategies. Both types of readers used a big chunk of their time using content strategies, and a similar amount of time using feature strategies. However, there was a 12% difference in the time spent using rhetorical strategies. Rhetorical strategies are used to go past the text, like trying to understand the author’s purpose or the effect a text has on its