Professor of Journalism
Florida A&M University
copyright © 1994, 1996
The "information transmission model" that underlies so many discussions
of journalism describes readers as receiving and decoding information that
arrives through a medium after begin encoded into a message by a sender.
Information is moved around like canned goods, packaged by the sender, opened
by the receiver. Writers and editors are accustomed to thinking that they
way the write something determines its meaning. The new theory emphasizes
how readers construct meaning. Notes
36 - 37
In the new view, readers are far more active and unpredictable. They make
decisions about what to read, how to read it, how to think about what they
read, what to remember, what other information to remember it with. They
bring context, approach, bias, and personal experiences to what they read.
They interpret, they skip, they misread, they misunderstand, they understand
in their own way. Their reading is not reactive but strategic; they read
with purpose, meaning, and goals. When the society column mentions that
a prominent local family will be going abroad for the summer, that information
is read very differently by their friends, by the owner of a lawn maintenance
company, and by a burglar.
Readers are said to use two levels of strategies.
It is under the heading of "metacognition"
that researchers discuss motivation, focusing attention, managing time,
deciding what to read, along with methods for reading (such as reading the
conclusion first, looking for key words and summaries, reading for main
ideas, identifying the structure of text, self-questioning, and reading
to remember ). Note 38
In practice, the two levels of strategy work together. Studies have demonstrated
that better readers and learners go about the task more strategically than
others do, which means they have greater conscious control over what and
how they read.
Note that "literacy," in this view, is defined to include more
than the ability to decode the alphabet and recognize vocabulary words.
Literacy includes:
In cognitive theory, there is nothing passive about reading, and the activity of reading goes far beyond the "decoding" step of the information-transmission model. Vaughn epitomized this view with his statement: "Reading is thinking stimulated by print." Readers engage nearly every kind of thought process during reading. Researchers describing reading have included: Notes 39 - 40
The strategic activities of readers are not only highly active and interpretive,
they are recursive and non-linear. Although there are surely
times when readers start with the first word of a piece and read through
sequentially, researchers have emphasized the extent to which readers (especially
of non-fiction) scan, select, skip, pause, loop back, and do a considerable
amount of rooting around the page. Indeed, readers not only adopt strategies
toward what they read ("I'll just skim this."), they test and
modify those strategies as they go ("Oops, this is too important to
skim.")
Readers make ready use of nonverbal cues
with they read. They interpret
Paivio Note 41 and many others
have argued that readers carry on different modes of thinking simultaneously
("multitasking," to use the current computer term), at least including
visual and linguistic modes of thought. A person's knowledge structure--though
described by many researchers in terms of linguistic propositions--is sure
to contain spatial modes of organization.
What looks from one perspective like words on a page becomes (when it enters
the life of a reader) an integral part of a rich, multimodal, imaginatively
elaborated inner world. And because every reader translates the written
message into such a world, we can never know information as information
alone, but only as as it is reflected in a particular, lived system of meaning.
In cognitive theory, then, readers are selective, active, and strategic.
They understand what they read in terms of what they already know -- though
what they read may modify what they know.
Readers activate strategies for managing their approach to a text, along
with schemas for interpreting it. Readers may modify the strategy of reading
and shift the context of interpretation as they go.
New information becomes meaningful only as it is interconnected with ("elaborated"
with or "instantiated" into) meaningful patterns that the reader
already knows.
When new information is interconnected with the old in meaningful patterns,
it becomes knowledge--and it can then be recalled, reasoned with, extended
by inference, and used to filter new perceptions.
Readers do not "receive" information. They approach reading in
the context of the entire world of their experience, and they turn away
with that world confirmed, modified, extended, or challenged.
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