Readers Construct Research Articles

Speed Reading: Tips for understanding reading in an easy way

Reading is the process by which readers construct meaning by combining information from a text with their prior knowledge. It is a valuable ability that is closely tied to others such as speaking, listening, and writing. Reading is a critical component of language skills since it is the most practical skill in everyday life. In the English context, most readers struggle because they lack and are unfamiliar with efficient tools for understanding the meaning of the text. In addition, many EFL students continue to struggle with reading comprehension due to ineffective reading practices. As a result, this article offers suggestions for simple approaches to comprehend reading material.

So much more than news: Revisiting press epochs from an explorative study of non-news genres in Danish newspapers, 1918–2018

Abstract Newspapers are so much more than news content. However, the history of journalism is typically told through studies of news genres or news epochs. In this article, we test the theory of three epochs of Danish press history in an explorative study of non-news genres, as exemplified by letters to the editor, editorials, and “celebratory items” on birthdays and deaths. Through an investigation of newspapers from 1918 to 2018, we demonstrate how these non-news forms were established in the first half of the twentieth century, were institutionalised during the period after World War II, and have been transitioning over the past two decades. This confirms the theory of the partisan press epoch, the omnibus press epoch, and the segment press epoch in Danish press history. At the same time, this study expands our understanding of these three press epochs by showing how the non-news genres provided in printed newspapers are important in the construction of readers as a class in the partisan press period; as a population in the omnibus press period; and, most recently, as elites in the segment press period.

ANALYZING TEACHING HABITS AND PRACTICES: SCHEMA THEORY IN ESL TEACHERS’ READING INSTRUCTION

<p>When reading, many researchers have theorized that readers construct information from a text by combining written information with their abstract knowledge structure called schema. Therefore, the reader’s knowledge is considered an important component in fully understanding a text’s meaning. Considering this, the paper sought to inquire about the everyday use of schema theory by teachers of English as a second language (ESL) in reading instruction. Specifically, this research study aimed to determine how reading teachers view schema theory, analyze their teaching practices based on ESL teachers’ responses to schema theory, and gather opinions and perceptions about the effects of applying schema theory in lesson preparation and delivery. The objectives were achieved through an appreciative inquiry-based questionnaire that was provided to participants chosen through convenience sampling. Afterward, the data were then analyzed through descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. The results showed that activities that promote independent realization schema are preferred among ESL teachers since they believed students learn in their own ways. The researcher also discovered that the participants had overall positive perceptions regarding activating schema in students, noting increased recollection and relation of ideas. Finally, the participants mentioned that they required more improvement to create and apply better techniques for better reading instruction. The researcher thus recommended enhancing teacher education, strengthening their conceptual knowledge about schemata, and giving them opportunities to immerse in diverse classrooms for a better understanding and application of schema theory to fully use schemata that play a major role in the development of their students.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0101/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of Kamila Shamsie’s Short Story the Walk

This research is concerned with the application of two key approaches of cognitive stylistics i.e. Schema theory and Text World Theory approach to Kamila Shamsie‟s short story The Walk (2020). The role of cognitive analysis in interpretation of the text is manifold as it reveals how a creator of the text takes care of the text at discourse level and at text-world. Exposing himself or herself to the audience, the author conveys the message and the reader decode the embedded message conveyed through the specific text. Thus constructing textual meanings not simply requires further elaborations but needs reader‟s „mental space‟ involvement in the process of creating the Text world. Text world theory aims to clear the distance laid between the reader and author. The „reading experience‟ involves the focus of cognitive stylistics as what happens when this action of reading the text happen and also how this action shape the construction of meaning and interpretation of text (cf. e.g., Ibrahim, 2014; Stockwell, 2015).” “Text World Theory (Werth, 1999; Gavins, 2007; Whiteley, 2011) has given us answers to the questions as how and why readers construct meanings while performing the act of reading (Patricia Canning). Where on one hand the Text-World theory tells us how meanings and interpretations are constructed, on the other hand the Schema theory helps us to understand how coherence is achieved by connecting the vacant dots created by the author and solved by the reader.

Multiliteracy in the Millennial Generation: A Case Study of Political Cartoons on Instagram Tempodotco

This article aims to explore how the millennial generation understands multimodal texts. The problem is focused on how readers construct real-world references from cartoons, narrate cartoons, interpret respondents' facial expressions depicted, understand the relationship between text and images, and build metaphorical relationships between fictional cartoon scenes and political arguments. The data were collected through interviews with six people who were selected by year of birth as the millennial generation category and follow tempodotco on Instagram, but came from different backgrounds, and this data was analyzed qualitatively. This study concludes that political cartooning is a fairly complex process and requires one to draw from different literacies. The millennial generation's experience with various related events also affects them in dealing with them and the reader's familiarity with the cartoon genre, knowledge of cultural symbols, and the experience of analytical thinking about events and situations in the real world are also factors that determine readers.

When Learners Read in Two Languages: Understanding Chinese-English Bilingual Readers Through Miscue Analysis

The number of Chinese-speaking students in Canadian schools is increasing dramatically. This article discusses a study in which we explored reading processes in Chinese and English through examining children’s reading in both languages. Based in a socio-psycholinguistic framework (K. Goodman, Wang, Iventosch, & Y. Goodman,2012; Kabuto, 2017) and through using miscue analysis, we examined how children apply their knowledge of language to Mandarin and English reading. This qualitative research included interviews with four Chinese-English bilingual children between grades 3 and 5 in an urban center as well as the analysis of their reading performance in both languages. From a comparative perspective, we discuss some of the similarities and differences between these two different orthographic language systems by offering syntactic comparisons of the two languages through psycholinguistic language cueing systems. We believe that knowing about how Chinese and English readers construct meaning in both languages will help English as an Additional Language (EAL) teachers, in fact all classroom teachers, to teach reading to bilingual and biliterate children.

Articulate Silence: Books and Readers in Jason Chin’s Coral Reefs and Redwoods

This essay explores Jason Chin’s construction of books and readers in two of his informational books, Redwoods and Coral Reefs. An intermodal analysis of the two books reveals that the ‘silent’ pictures speak as loudly as the images with text, articulating an alternate story that features the child reader’s engagement with nonfiction books. In view of Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, the two titles foreground the often silenced but dynamic experience the child reader achieves with nonfiction to broaden the conventional remits of informational picturebooks.

Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches

Narrative Retellings: Stylistic Approaches

The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century

The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century

Levels of textual cohesion and the meaning‐construction process of advanced second language readers

Academic reading in English requires processing of challenging advanced texts for comprehension. Highly proficient second language (L2) readers, such as graduate students, are expected to interpret complex texts fluently and efficiently for academic success, yet the field has little evidence on how these readers process texts. Through two think‐aloud reading sessions and pre‐ and postreading interviews, this study closely examined nine graduate students' interactions with texts that had low and high levels of discourse cohesion. The focus was on the readers' meaning‐construction process in relation to the texts' cohesion. The researchers analyzed these data qualitatively using a grounded theory approach that revealed text‐processing activities of proficient L2 readers grouped at local and global levels. Although all readers experienced these two levels with both texts, some differences were found in their processing between two texts, especially in reading the low‐cohesive text. The findings of the study provide implications for reading instructors and teacher researchers in understanding how advanced L2 readers construct meaning and draw on text discourse as they read texts in English and potentially in conceptualizing what novice L2 readers must do to progress.

A COGNITIVE STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF PERSONAL NARRATIVES ABOUT COVID-19 PANDEMIC

This paper explores how the stylistic framework of Text World Theory can be applied to personal narratives. This approach falls within the scope of the discipline of cognitive stylistics. In order to explore the similarities and differences between readers' experiences, cognitive stylistics draws on cognitive scientific insights into the relationship between the mind, language, and the world, going beyond the traditional method of stylistic accounting for literary interpretation through linguistic models. A qualitative study within an appropriate model is conducted to three narratives collected from Story Center website about COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that context-dependent text world analysis of narratives is an effective method for depicting the participants' senses. It gives an explanation of how readers construct mental models based on the linguistic elements that are offered to them. It provides an explanation of the progression that readers go through as they move from textual information to the profound nature of text worlds. It can be concluded that Text World Theory provides evidence of the cognitive processes that take place during the act of reading, the process that ultimately results in interpretation of the text and the acquisition of meaning.

Reading Between the Institutions, Reading Between the Genres, Reading Between the Lines: Jeffrey Brooks’ The Firebird and the Fox

Abstract Jeffrey Brooks’ new book, The Firebird and the Fox, draws on an unsurpassed knowledge of Russian literature and culture of all levels, from the folk and popular to the canonical and avant-garde. It divides the “age of genius” (1855–1953) into three periods: the emancipation of the arts (1850–1889), politics and the arts (1890–1916), the Bolshevik Revolution and the arts (1917–1950), each with its own configurations of popular and high culture and construction of creative artists, media, and readers. But three core themes overarch the periods and the exceptionally broad range of phenomena the book discusses: freedom and order, boundaries, art and reality. Throughout Brooks analyzes crossovers and intersections between cultural institutions, between genres and media, and – especially for the Soviet period – between the lines. His categories are at times sociological, historical, and literary. The book implies a theory of cultural production that gives unusual weight to the agency of creative artists. In conclusion readings of three works Brooks does not analyze (Dostoevsky’s Demons, Bely’s Petersburg, and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky) illustrate the productivity of Brooks’ broad and humane approach to Russian artistic culture.

A Rhetorical Approach to Critical Reading of Literary Texts

From a rhetorical point of view, reading is not an isolated process of absorbing the meaning of words in a text but a creative activity in which the reader constructs meaning through the symbolic exchange with the text in a particular situation. This study elaborates on the rhetorical features of literary texts through the lens of rhetorical situation, rhetorical purpose, and Aristotle’s three means of persuasion. It then illustrates how to approach a literary text rhetorically through the interpretation of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street, shedding light on the development of critical reading in literary instruction. The study displays the literary text’s rhetoricity and demonstrates that the rhetorical approach enables the readers to explore the persuasive mechanism of a literary text, examine the sources the writer marshals to adapt to the audience and make their judgments based on the ethical, emotional, and logical proofs. Furthermore, the rhetorical approach to literary reading provides theoretical ground for a rhetorical mode of literary instruction, which directs our focus on the readers’ constructive role and creates more space for individual interpretation. In this way, a rhetorical approach to literary reading plays a significant role in developing student readers’ creativity, critical thinking, and rhetorical awareness both in reading and writing.

Building mental models from multiple texts: How readers construct coherence from inconsistent sources

AbstractText comprehension theories propose that readers try to achieve a coherent representation of the situation depicted in a text. When reading multiple texts on the same topic, however, achieving a coherent representation of a situation poses additional challenges. Different sources may offer inconsistent descriptions or interpretations of the situation, or even contradict one another. Thus, additional assumptions are needed to explain how readers build a coherent representation of a situation when reading multiple individual texts on the same subject. This paper reviews research contributions from the psychology of text comprehension on how readers integrate inconsistent information from multiple sources. We concentrate on two key processes: The construction of an interconnected representation of sources and text contents, and the evaluation of the acquired information. We begin by briefly discussing the standard approach of single‐text comprehension theories to representational coherence. Then, we examine the Documents Model Framework and other, associated proposals that claim that readers can achieve coherence of divergent text contents by constructing a representation of the texts which integrates information about the sources of the contents. We also consider the role of source evaluation as a reader strategy for constructing a single, coherent solution. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical implications and we make suggestions for further readings.

The Role of the Establishment of Causal Connections and the Modality of Presentation of Discourse in the Generation of Emotion Inferences by Argentine College Students

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the causal connectivity of the statements (their total number of causal connections) and the modality of presentation of discourse (oral-written) in the generation of emotion inferences by Spanish-speaking students. With this aim, we asked a group of Argentine college students to either listen to or read an excerpt of a radio interview (on the topic ‘Argentine radio presenters’ relationship with the audience’), and to perform an emotions recall task. Results indicated that statements that promoted the generation of emotion inferences and had a high number of causal connections were more often included in the recall protocols than those that promoted the generation of these inferences and had a low number of them. They also indicated that participants who were presented with the spoken version of the materials included a higher number of statements in this task than those that were presented with the written version. These findings suggest that the establishment of meaningful discourse connections has a role in the generation of emotion inferences, and that there appear to be differences in the representation that listeners and readers construct of speakers’ emotions.

The masculine form in grammatically gendered languages and its multiple interpretations: a challenge for our cognitive system

We analyze the semantic ambiguity of the grammatically masculine form in languages where this form has more than one meaning (e.g., French, German, English to some extent) when used to refer to human beings. We discuss this ambiguity in terms of inference processing, meaning activation, and the link between language and the way we perceive reality. Importantly, we attempt to identify and explain the cognitive mechanisms at the very heart of gender biases when readers (and speakers) construct mental representations of gender through language. We ground our argument in memory-based approaches to reading, the meaning activation selection model and the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis. This paper provides a cognitive perspective to understanding why, in grammatical gender languages, gender representations are male biased.

Revisiting Second Language Readers’ Memory for Narrative Texts: The Role of Causal and Semantic Text Relations

Previous studies have investigated how second language (L2) readers construct memory for narrative texts according to causal relations between the events described. This study aims to extend their findings by including semantic text relations (similarity of meaning) as another variable, which are theoretically expected to play an additional role in comprehension. With this aim, 121 Japanese learners of English read a set of 200-word long narratives adapted from previous studies. The causal relationships between the text statements were identified using a causal network analysis, whereas the semantic text relations were evaluated by a computational method (latent semantic analsyis). After reading the narratives, participants performed a written recall task. The results of the recall analysis confirmed that the global causal text relations influence the memory for narrative texts. The results further revealed that local semantic relations between adjacent text statements also have an impact. These findings are discussed in light of theories of discourse comprehension.

Metadiscourse, Writer Identity and Reader Construction among Novice Arabic-Speaking ESL Writers

This study used qualitative analyses to explore novice ESL writers’ concepts of writers, readers and texts. Metadiscourse studies tabulate frequencies of discourse markers in order to characterise the different ways novices and experts, native-speakers and non-native speakers, construct themselves as writers, engage with their readers, and guide readers through their text. But the picture created by these descriptive statistics lacks many content areas voiced by student writers, including their reliance on visual content, and their emotions. Student writers’ experiences in a world saturated by visual media and marketing views are also factors shaping how they construct their identities as writers, the identities of their projected readers, and how they understand what they are doing when writing text. This study used content and transitivity analyses to assess how Arabic native-speaker novices understand themselves as writers, how they project their readers’ identities, and how they try to engage them. Results show that visuals are indistinct from text, and verbs of seeing are used for reader understanding, in novice writers’ sense of their texts, and how they understand engaging the reader. These novices have a demographically granular assessment of audiences, but aim to please readers with expected content rather than challenge them with academic content, and they downplay important elements of teacher talk, syllabus and second-language (L2) composition instruction, particularly data, research, structure and language.

Visual Representations and Comprehension: The Exploration of Image-Word Relations and Types of Design

Visualisation has been used for decades as a strategy to help readers construct meaning from reading passages. Teachers across the globe have introduced visualisation mostly to primary students with native language background. They used the strategy to understand their own language. Little is known how this strategy works for university students who learn foreign language. Visualisation can be done internally (by creating mental imagery) and externally (by drawing visual representation). The product of visualising texts by using both models can be further investigated to find out if the meaning represented is appropriate to the meaning written in the text. This study therefore aims at exploring meaning by analysing the visual representations drawn by 26 English Education Department students of Syiah Kuala University after they read a narrative text. The exploration was conducted by looking at the image-word relations in the drawings. To do so, we consulted Chan and Unsworth (2011), Chan (2010) and Unsworth and Chan (2009) on the image-language interaction in multimodal text. The results of the analysis have found that the equivalence, additive and interdependent relations are mostly involved in their visual representations; and these relations really help in representing meanings. Meanwhile, the other three relations which are word-specific, picture specific and parallel are rarely used by the students. In addition, most students created the representations in a form of a design which is relevant to represent a narrative text. Further discussion of the relation between image-word relations, types of design and students’ comprehension is also presented in this paper.

Calculating History: A Mid-Seventeenth-Century Reader of Robert Persons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594/1595)

Abstract This article examines one of the Bodleian Library’s copies of Robert Persons’ Elizabethan succession tract A Conference about the Next Succession that a 1650s reader has heavily annotated and used to compile a miscellany of poems and extracts from religious, political and historical works. The annotations and miscellany are concerned primarily with recent religious and political history. The reader compiles copies of popular ballads and poems, quotations from religious polemic by Catholic authors and a set of calculations of the dates of recent events in English Catholic history. This marked book serves as a case study through which to explore historical consciousness and the production of particularly Catholic forms of history and memory in the early modern period. This article seeks to query critical narratives concerning apparently combative seventeenth-century political reading practice by extending the remit of the ‘political’ to encompass different generic forms and approaches. It argues that by combining chronological and analogical perspectives this reader constructs a distinctively recusant history. An appendix identifies all of the works used by the annotator and all of the known editions or manuscripts they may have used.