Transcript Rhetorical Reading Strategies and Construction of Meaning”

“Rhetorical Reading
Strategies and Construction
of Meaning”
Christina Haas and Linda Flower
Who are you as a reader?
 What are you good at, as a reader?
 What do you think you’re not good at
when it comes to reading?
 Is there anything you wish you had
been taught better or differently?
What are Haas and Flower
adding to the conversation?
 Niche: “our knowledge of how readers
actually carry out this interpretive process
with college-level expository texts is rather
limited” (122).
 Occupying the niche: “we observed a sharp
distinction between the rhetorical process
these experienced readers demonstrated and
the processes of freshman readers” (123).
What is the central
difference between
experienced and
inexperienced readers?
Methodology
 “think-aloud procedure” (122)
 Ten readers: four experienced, three
average inexperienced, three above
average inexperienced
 Coding: content strategies, feature
strategies, rhetorical strategies
Findings
Students
Content
strategies
Feature
strategies
Rhetorical
strategies
77%
Experienced
Readers
67%
22%
20%
1%
13%
WOW!
Do you read rhetorically?
 How do you compare?
 How can you change your reading
strategies to be more successful?
Using what you know
 One claim this article makes is that when
readers try to understand texts, they bring
their own knowledge to them. What kinds of
knowledge did you bring to this article that
helped you make sense of it?
Developing a reading strategy
 Kantz and Haas and Flower agree that
students should have strategies to read
rhetorically (75, 136). Kantz suggests
teaching students “a set of heuristics”
based on rhetorical situation (75).
 Let’s do it.
Creating a heuristic for
rhetorical reading
 What kinds of questions should you ask
yourself as you’re reading to make
sense of difficult material?
Testing our heuristic
 Let’s read the following passages to
see if our heuristic works.
 The series exists to show gigantic and hideous
robots hammering one another. So it does. The last
hour involves a battle for the universe which for
some reason is held at the corner of Michigan
Avenue and Wacker Drive in Chicago. This battle is
protracted mercilessly beyond all reason, at an earshattering sound level, with incomprehensible
Autobots and Decepticons sliced up into spurts of
action with no sense of the space they occupy.
 Of course, solving sexism isn't just a matter of a handful of
women making it to the top. New Zealand still has issues with
domestic violence and there is a 12% wage gap. (No,
Thompson, there really, really is.) But the U.N. still ranks New
Zealand as the fifth most gender-equal society in the world,
behind only Iceland, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. (For
comparison: The U.K. was ranked 15th, Australia was 20th, and
the U.S., where the wage gap is a whopping 23%, came in at
31st.) So to hear the head of the Employers and Manufacturers'
Association — a fairly mainstream pro-business lobbying group
— say that women are bad employees because they're, like,
always getting their periods and stuff is just bizarre.
 This shows that the deficit and debt is a spending problem, not a
revenue problem. President Bush, with both Democrat and Republican
Congresses, did lose control of spending during his presidency, as
federal spending as a percent of GDP rose by one-seventh during his
two terms. But President Obama, once he got behind the steering
wheel, accelerated madly in precisely the wrong direction, increasing
federal spending by nearly one-third in his first three years, and
proposing in his 2012 budget to increase it by nearly two-thirds more
by 2021. Adding that on top of our exploding entitlements, which
ObamaCare made worse by adopting or expanding three new
entitlements, is how America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb was lit, as I
explain in my new book with the same title.
 O.K., the obvious question: If Medicare is so much better than
private insurance, why didn’t the Affordable Care Act simply
extend Medicare to cover everyone? The answer, of course,
was interest-group politics: realistically, given the insurance
industry’s power, Medicare for all wasn’t going to pass, so
advocates of universal coverage, myself included, were willing
to settle for half a loaf. But the fact that it seemed politically
necessary to accept a second-best solution for younger
Americans is no reason to start dismantling the superior system
we already have for those 65 and over.
 To date no examination of composing processes has
dealt primarily with unskilled writers. As long as
“average” or skilled writers are the focus, it
remains unclear as to how process research will
provide teachers with a firmer understanding of the
needs of students with writing problems.