Heal.html1. Frank
Smith, Reading (2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1985. Back
2. See Frank Smith's essay against "information"
in Essays Into Literacy, London: Heinemann, 1983, Chapter 13; and the deconstruction
of the idea of information in John D. Peters, "Information: Notes Toward
a Critical History," Journal of Communication Inquiry, 12, (2), 1989,
pp. 9-23. A moratorium on the word "information" would force all
of us to rethink what we mean. Back
3. For the view that no paradigm shift has yet
taken place, see Michael L. Kamil, "Current Traditions of Reading Research,"
in P. D. Pearson (Ed.), Handbook of Reading Research, New York, Longman,
1984, pp. 39-62. Back
4. George H. Mead, The individual and the social
self (Ed. David L. Miller). University of Chicago Press, 1982.
5. J. Piaget, Six Psychological Studies. (New York, Random House, 1967.)
6. Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Ed. and trans. Eugenia Hanfmann
and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1962; Originally
published in Russian in 1934).
7. F. C. Bartlett, Remembering, London, Cambridge University Press, 1932.
8. Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key. Harvard, 1951.
9. Ernst Cassirer, Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human
Culture. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1944.
10. Those familiar with some of the literature will recognize in this paper
a "top-down" or "inside-out" model of reading that emphasizes
the reader's activity, in contrast to the "bottom-up" or "outside-in"
model which emphasizes the words on the page. Back
11. The terminology is unsettled. "Psycholinguistic,"
which may be a better term, does not seem to be taking the world by storm,
and many who practice "cognitive" research imply the information-transmission
model of communication, overly use computer models of mind, and neglect
the existential, emotional, bodily, and social frameworks that support and
shape cognition.
12. Sharon J. Derry, "Learning Strategies for Acquiring Useful Knowledge.
In Dimensions of thinking and cognitive instruction, ed. Beau Jones &
Lorna Idol (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1990), p. 347 - 379. Back
13. Frank Smith, Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic
Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read (4th ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
1988, p. 22. Back
14. Frank Smith, Understanding Literacy, p.
53. How do readers of journalistic publications learn to ask appropriate
questions and find relevant answers in what journalists write? Back
15. Derry, op. cit., p. 352. Back
16. See, for example, Kathleen T. McWhorter,
Efficient and Flexible Reading (3rd ed.). New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
Back
17. Jean Matter Mandler, Stories, scripts, and
scenes: Aspects of schema theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984.
18. The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan,
1963. Back
19. E.g., Neural Networks and Natural Intelligence,
Ed. Stephen Grossberg, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. This brief summary
omits the distinction between "declarative" knowledge (information)
and "procedural" knowledge (how to do something) that is important
to the network model. See Ellen D. Gagné, The Cognitive Psychology
of School Learning (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985) or Derry, op. cit.
20. E. Gagné, op. cit., p. 79. Back
21. For relevant introductions to schema theory,
see Richard C. Anderson, "Role of the Reader's Schema in Comprehension,
Learning, and Memory," in Richard C. Anderson et al. eds., Learning
to Read in American Schools (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984). Also R. C. Anderson
and P. D. Pearson's "A Schema-Theroetic View of basic Processes in
Reading Comprehension," in P. D. Pearson (Ed.), Handbook of Reading
Research, New York, Longman, 1984, pp. 255-291 Back
22. Understanding Reading, p. 28ff. Smith also
summarizes the importance of narrative in the way we organize experience
(p. 226ff), also a theme in Jean Mandler's Stories, scripts, and scenes:
Aspects of schema theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1984. Back
23. James M. Barrie, Peter Pan, New York: Grossett
and Dunlap, 1965 (first pub. 1911). At the moment quoted, Wendy is telling
her own story to the Lost Boys, in chapter 11. Back
24. Many jokes depend on knowledge of underlying
schemas. Here is one I adapted from a lawyer joke: "Near the end of
the Gulf War, a planeload of journalists was hijacked by Iraqi terrorists.
The terrorists threatened that, if their demands were not met, they would
release one journalist every hour." The joke depends on your knowledge
of the usual schema for a hijacking and of an unrelated schema which maps
a common antagonism between journalists and authorities. The joke gains
its humor by unexpectedly switching the definition of the authorities' role
from the first schema to the second. Back
25. David E. Rumelhart and Donald A. Norman,
"Accretion, Tuning, and Restructuring: Three modes of Learning,"
in J. W. Cotton & R. L. Klatzky (Eds.), Semantic Factors in Cognition.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1978) pp. 37-54. Back
26. The Image, p. 10. Back
27. See Nancy Cantor, "From Thought to Behavior: 'Having' and 'Doing'
in the Study of Personality and Cognition," American Psychologist,
1990, 45 (6), pp. 735-750.
28. No account of reading can ignore poignant stories of how the acquisition
of literacy has cost some people their native culture and identity. See,
for example, Richard Rodriguez, The hunger of memory: The education of Richard
Rodriguez. Boston: Godine, 1981. Back
29. R. C. Anderson, "Role of the Reader's
Schema," p. 243. Back
30. J. D. Bransford and M. K. Johnson, "Contextual Prerequisites for
Understanding. Some Investigations of Comprehension and Recall," Journal
of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1972, 61, 717-726.
31. For about a year, whenever I read him The Flopsy Bunnies, my son heard
the phrase "Mr. McGregor's rubbish heap" as "Mr. McGregor's
rubber sheep." By the time we discovered this mis-hearing, he had developed
some interesting thoughts about the "rubber sheep" in this Peter
Rabbit story. Imagine the perplexity of the cartoon
dog who thought his master was saying, "Heal!" Back
32. R. C. Anderson and P. D. Pearson, "A
Schema-Theroetic View of Basic Processes in Reading Comprehension,"
in P. D. Pearson (Ed.), Handbook of Reading Research, New York, Longman,
1984, p. 272. Back
33. This is a basic theme of schema theory--e.g., J. Bransford, "Schema
Activation--Schema Acquisition," in R.C. Anderson, J. Osborn, &
R.C. Tierney (Eds.), Learning to Readin American Schools. Erlbaum, 1983.
Back
34. Reading, p. 72.
35. Understanding Reading, p. 30. While I was trying out this idea on a
faculty group, one man interrupted by gleefully spelling, "C-A-T"
and demanding that I explain what schema was necessary to understand such
a simple, unambiguous word.
Peter Pan came to my rescue: To terrorize the captured Lost Boys, Captain
Hook threatens, "Do you want a touch of the cat before you walk the
plank?" The boys fall to their knees and beg to be spared, but Hook
grimly orders, "Fetch the cat, Jukes."
I wonder how many wide-eyed children have visualized Jukes emerging from
the cabin carrying, not the cat-o'-nine-tails whip, but some imaginary and
terrifying feline. Back
36. The information-transmission model is vividly
critiqued by James W. Carey in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media
and Society, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989.
37. See Frank Smith, Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis
of Reading and Learning to Read (4th ed.). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1988.
Also Reading, Cambridge University Press, 1985, and Essays Into Literacy,
London: Heinemann, 1988). Back
38. For a good summary, see"Metacognitive
Skills and Reading" by Linda Baker and Ann L. Brown, in P. D. Pearson
(Ed.), Handbook of Reading Research, New York, Longman, 1984, pp. 353-394.
Back
39. Joseph L. Vaughn, "Concept Structuring:
The Technique and Empirical Evidence," in Charles D. Holly and Donald
F. Dansereau, eds., Spatial Learning Strategies: Techniques, Aplications,
and Related Issues (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1984) p. 127.
40. Jones et al., 1987 Back
41. Allan Paivio, Mental Representations: A
Dual Coding Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). Back
42. The social aspect of communication is an
important area not considered in this paper. For a clearly-written account,
see Leeds-Hurwitz (1989). For a more postmodern view, see various works
of M. Foucault, such as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences. New York: Random Hosue, 1970. Back
43. Jones et al., 1987, pp. 33-34. For a more
involved discussion that includes discourse analysis and story grammar,
see "The Structure of Text," by Bonnie J. F. Meyer and G. Elizabeth
Rice, in P. D. Pearson (Ed.), Handbook of Reading Research, New York, Longman,
1984, pp. 319-352. Back
44. The idea is widespread but not widely applied.
See, for example, William J. Vande Kopple, "Some exploratory discourse
on metadiscourse" College Communication and Composition, 1985, 36:
82-93. Many writers leave out transitional words and phrases, because they
believe "good writers" don't need them. In doing do, they fail
to realize that readers need those transitional terms to activate the cognitive
processes of comprehension. Notice also how the traditional inverted pyramid
news report requires that such connective structure-signals be omitted,
presumably to make shortening easier. You can't cut a paragraph that begins,
"On the other hand" or "Finally." Back
45. Jones, et al., p. 25. Recent work by Jones
and others on semantic organizers raises the possibility that certain kinds
of diagrams may be closer to the mind's way of storing knowledge than are
paragraphs and sentences. What we know as reason may be not so much a reflection
of the nature of mind or the nature of reality as it is the kind of analysis
required before you can write in linear, fully-elaborated, fully-connected
prose. See John H. Clarke, Patterns ofTthinking : Integrating Learning Skills
in Content Teaching. Boston : Allyn and Bacon, 1990.
46. Smith, Understanding Reading, p. 46. Back
47. David N. Perkins, "Thinking Frames,"
Educational Leadership, May 1986, p. 7. The concept of frames is usually
credited to Marvin Minsky in "A Framework for Representing Knowledge,"
in P.H. Winston (Ed.), The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1975. Back
48. Richard C. Anderson and B.B. Armbruster,
"Studying," In P.D. Pearson, ed., Handbook of Reading Research
(New York: Longman, 1985) pp. 657-680. Back
49. In presentations I attended in the fall
of 1991 at Florida A&M University, participants in the Knight-Ridder
and Gannett redesign projects spoke often of their own focus groups and
reader surveys but indicated that cognitive research did not play a major
role in the redesign of their newspapers. Indeed, the language I have heard
used by industry innovators is sprinkled with terms from information and
stimulus-response theories and notably lacking in terms from cognitive theory.
For example, Knight-Ridder editors have described certain topics as "hitting
the baby boomer's hot buttons." One morning those boomers, who as strategic
readers want to be treated with respect, may tire of being manipulated by
contrived content and intrusive layout. Back
50. Knight-Ridder 25/43 Project: The Transformation
of an American Newspaper (Author, 1989).
51. C. Argyris & D. A. Schoen, Theory In Practice: Increasing Professional
Effectiveness (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1976). Back
Please use a form of citation that contains the following elements:
Grow, Gerald O. (1996). "Serving the Strategic Reader: Reader Response
Theory and Its Implications for the Teaching of Writing," an expanded
version of a paper presented to the Qualitative Division of the Association
for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication. Atlanta, August, 1994.
Available on-line at: <http://www.longleaf.net/ggrow>. Original
paper available as Eric Documentation Reproduction Service No. ED 406 644.
Contents
