Reader's Representation Research Articles

온라인 읽기 쓰기 수업에 RESOLV(Reader’s Representation of Reading Contexts and Tasks)모형의 적용 가능성 탐색 연구

In this study, we sought to find implications from the RESOLV model (Reader's Representation of Reading Contexts and Tasks) for designing online multi-text literacy lessons that engage students and improve their literacy skills. To understand the RESOLV model, we first examined its components, the Context Model and the Task Model, together. Based on our understanding of the RESOLV model, we proposed three things to consider when organizing online multidisciplinary literacy classes. First, we proposed how to organize tasks in online literacy classes based on the Context Model. Second, we proposed how to organize educational content in online literacy classes based on the Task Model. Third, we proposed a teaching and learning method that can promote collaborative interaction through team discussions with fellow learners as a teaching method for online reading and writing classes based on the integration of the situation model and the task model.

필자의 텍스트 반성에 대한 화용론적 접근

Objectives The purpose of this study is to suggest a way to overcome the limitations of process-centered writing education by identifying the cognitive action in which the writer reflects on his/her text during the writing process.
 Methods According to pragmatic semiotics, the interpreter of signs constitutes an immediate, dynamic and final interpretive body. In the writing situation, the writer is both a producer and an interpreter of signs, so he must be able to actively construct such interpretations. Each interpretive body can be specified as a text representation, a reader representation, and a discourse community representation. The cognitive strategies constituting each representation can be explained by the suitability theory, which is a model of pragmatic reasoning.
 Results The composition of text representation is related to bottom-up reading, while reader representation and linguistic community representation are related to connotation and contextual meaning, respectively, both of which involve top-down reading. When the author reads the text he is writing for the purpose of text reflection, a conscious effort is required to exclude the meaning and background knowledge he is trying to convey. Therefore, when reflecting on text, it is necessary to distinguish between bottom-up reading and top-down reading, and to divide top-down reading into reader representation and linguistic community representation, and select and perform one reading method at a time.
 Conclusions In the process of text reflection, the representations that can be constructed are related to the subject, purpose, reader, and language community, so it is necessary to teach them in sequence by rhetorical element. Just as the layers of reading are divided into factual, inferential, and critical understanding, it is possible to sequence the layers of my text reflection into three representations. Cognitive actions that form an inference model centered on each rhetorical element can be strategically made into educational content.

The Gist of Reading by Andrew Elfenbein

Reviewed by: The Gist of Reading by Andrew Elfenbein Joey Frantz (bio) The Gist of Reading, by Andrew Elfenbein (Stanford University Press, 2018), 272 pp. Andrew Elfenbein's The Gist of Reading isn't about meticulous, erudite, critical reading. It's about what literary reading is like for most readers most of the time. What exactly goes on in someone's head when they read, say, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? The gist of The Gist of Reading is that readers forget most of what they read but construct a "gist representation" that boils a text down to its essentials. This, alone, is obvious, but the questions Elfenbein is interested in are: (1) what is remembered, and what is forgotten? and (2) how can we know? He takes both psychological and historical approaches. The psychological [End Page 150] approaches are ambitious and promising but lack explanatory power, while the historical angle is merely illuminating. A Victorian literary scholar and professor of English, Elfenbein sought training in experimental psychology so he could ask basic questions about reading. For example, how can we know what word association really is? One way is to ask experimental test subjects to make what's called a lexical decision, that is, to present them with words and see how quickly they can decide whether a word is real or made up. It turns out that people identify a word as being real more quickly if it is preceded by a related word, i.e., they are more likely to identify bird as a real word if it was preceded by sparrow than if it was preceded by an unrelated word. What makes this finding interesting is that this effect holds true even if the first word (such as sparrow before bird) was presented so briefly that test subjects had no conscious awareness of having seen it. Elfenbein glosses over many studies related to sound (such as alliteration and rhyme); other studies deal with how test subjects make sense of what they read. Though provocative, such research is hard to use in a more specific, literary context. One reason is that whatever unconscious work goes into the reading process cannot, by definition, be verified by readers; unconscious means unconscious. When I read "The Hollow Men," the unconscious work that goes into understanding "A penny for the old guy" isn't something I can report on. Alas, Elfenbein falls into the familiar trap of making banal claims imbued with an aura of technical precision. For example, Elfenbein works with the distinction between online reading experiences (how we experience a text as we read it) versus offline experiences (how our brain processes a text once we're done with it). He uses the concept of a situation model to describe a reader's representation of what's going on in a text. These terms are useful in and of themselves. But consider how Elfenbein uses them in this sentence: The offline retrievability of long-term situation models may depend on online "depth of processing." Since "offline" means "after we're done reading the text" and "situation models" means "mental models of what happened in a text," this sentence simply means that how well you remember what happens in a text may depend on how deeply you read it. Another term, activation, is used in research on memory, but in this specific sentence, activation just dresses up a mundane idea: Depending on the reader, emotional sympathy with certain concepts or the ability to connect concepts to personal experience may increase activation. [End Page 151] The problem isn't that Elfenbein wants to interweave psychology and criticism; the problem is that the psychology doesn't always provide new insights. In a particularly egregious moment, Elfenbein actually offers an equation to describe how entertaining a text is: entertainment value = A (interest) + B (self-relevance) + C (transportation) This is offered as "a model that has predictive value," but it simply does not. Of course Elfenbein would not claim that the values of the equation could be calculated precisely, but since "interest," "self-relevance," and "transportation" are fuzzy concepts, the equation is woefully imprecise and reeks of Physics Envy. Elfenbein seems to admit...

Textual Fumbles: Reading and Seduction in Elizabeth Jane Howard’sFalling

This essay is concerned with the representation of readers and reading in contemporary women’s writing and directly intervenes in a series of debates about the fictions of romance. It employs Elizabeth Jane Howard’s novel Falling to argue that careful attention to the “metareaderly” features of the text demonstrates how the romance of reading and the reading of romance are being usefully interrogated from within fiction by women. It contends that realist, middlebrow writing can challenge discourses of both reading and romance with more reflexivity than its highbrow counterpart. It concludes that Howard’s novel reveals the dangers of the over-romanticization of reading and of failing to recognize that reading is always embroiled in the operations of power.

Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception.

Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson, eds. Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers, and Reception.

Immediate activation of stereotypical gender information

This article reports six experiments in which we explored whether gender stereotype information is typically invoked when certain role and profession terms are read and the extent to which the use of such information is under the reader's strategic control. All of the experiments used a design in which subjects had to decide whether two terms (one an occupation and one a kinship term) could refer to the same person (e.g., surgeon-brother or surgeon-sister). The presentation conditions and the instructions were varied from experiment to experiment, to try to encourage the subjects to respond strategically and to suppress their use of gender stereotypes when responding. The results support not only the hypothesis that information about the stereotypical gender associated with occupations and roles is typically incorporated into the reader's representation immediately, but also the hypothesis that such information is difficult or impossible to suppress. The implications of these findings for current theories of text processing and text representation are discussed.

Methods and Evidence in Psychonarratology and the Theory of the Narrator: Reply to Diengott

Methods and Evidence in Psychonarratology and the Theory of the Narrator:Reply to Diengott Peter Dixon (bio) and Marisa Bortolussi (bio) We welcome this opportunity to reply to Nilli Diengott's review of our book, Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response. While she has identified a number of regrettable misstatements in the book and has raised a number of interesting arguments concerning our hypotheses about readers' representations, it also appears that there are a number of aspects of our methodology and conceptual analysis that may not have been understood. We hope that the present reply will promote a better understanding of our approach in order to foster productive debate. Although Diengott's review concentrates on our treatment of the narrator, according to our analysis of her comments, there are really three levels of concerns. First and most importantly, there are issues pertaining to methodology, primarily having to do with the distinction between textual features and reader constructions and how these concepts manifest themselves in empirical research. Second, there are objections to our hypotheses concerning the reader's representation and processing of the narrator. These are crucial concerns since our analysis of the narrator is fundamental to the theoretical developments throughout the book. Finally, there are questions concerning the analysis of "transparency" and its relationship to identification. In what follows, we discuss each of these concerns in turn. We then comment on a few other, more miscellaneous points raised in the review. [End Page 317] Methodology Perhaps the single most fundamental element in our approach to the empirical study of literary response is the distinction between that which is in the text (features) and that which is in the reader's head (constructions). Features are characterizations of the text that, at least in principle, could be objectively defined and that would be true of a given text regardless of who analyzes the text and the context in which that analysis occurs. Constructions, on the other hand, are subjective and may vary with the reader, her knowledge and experience, and her current goals and circumstances. This distinction is crucial because it allows one to match method to question. Features are a matter of definition and, as a consequence, are more or less useful, well-defined or not so well-defined, precise or imprecise, and so on. One can take poor features (e.g., those that are imprecise or poorly defined) and hone them via argument, analysis, and elaboration. However, they cannot be dismissed as incorrect; they are merely a matter of definition, after all, and any number of features may be defined even if they are not particularly helpful. In contrast, reader constructions are potentially in the mind of the reader, and it is a matter of empirical evidence as to whether and under what circumstances they occur. Various kinds of evidence might be marshaled for a reader construction, and such evidence might be strong or weak or more or less convincing. However, ultimately the status of a reader construction is likely to rest on the results of carefully designed studies rather than on logical argument. As an example of this distinction, consider the narratological concept of the implied author. As defined by Gerald Prince, paraphrasing Wayne Booth, the implied author is "the author's second self, mask, or persona as reconstructed from the text" (000). The problem with this definition (and, in our view, with many other narratological concepts) is that it is not clear whether the implied author should be thought of as a textual feature or as a reader construction. A word such as "reconstructed" would seem to allow for subjective inference processes on the part of the reader, implying that the term corresponds to a reader construction; however, it is also possible to envision that a logical, externally validated analysis of the text could be used to identify aspects of the implied author. For example, Iser understood the implied author in interactive terms, so that it emerged on the basis of the interaction of the text and the reader. However, Iser was never concerned with the real reader, and his conception was idealized in the sense that it attempted to provide an account for the...

Accessibility in Text and Discourse Processing

Accessibility is one of the most important challenges at the intersection of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies of text and discourse processing. Linguists have shown how linguistic indicators of referential coherence show a systematic pattern: Longer linguistic forms (like full lexical NPs) tend to be used when referents are relatively low accessible, shorter forms (pronouns and zero anaphora) are used when referents are highly accessible. This linguistic theory fits in nicely with a dynamic view of text and discourse processing: When a reader proceeds through a text, the activation of concepts as part of the reader's representation fluctuates constantly. Hypotheses considering activation patterns can be tested with on-line research methods like reading time or eye-movement recording. The articles in this special issue show how accessibility phenomena need to be studied from a linguistic and a psycholinguistic angle, and in the latter case from interpretation as well as production.

That Seductive Thing: Representing the Illiterate as Readers*

In “That Seductive Thing: Representing the Illiterate as Readers”, it is argued that a historical approach to representations of readers and reading may highlight some issues pertaining to books and education. Far from being simple and neutral illustrations of some cultural practices and commodities in the past, both images and texts about books, reading and the illiterate are here considered as forms of perception and normalization of reading through the representation of (socially) contrasting readers. Thus, images and texts are in fact cultural discourses used to promote and to impose certain models of social behaviour. Yet, they are also part of the doxa which legitimate the “natural” supremacy of written forms of cultural transmission and, therefore, the excellence of books and schooling in the making of “the reader”. This guiding perspective in understanding problems of books and education is analysed here with a closer look at questions of age, race and schooling in Portuguese society during the first half of the 20th century. In that period, several institutions (State, School, Church and so forth) participate, not necessarily in the same way, in what we might call “the Portuguese battle for (national) literacy”. Books and school education are important topics within those social politics fighting “illiteracy”, generating images which represent the advantages of education and of a “culture of books” and, though in different and divergent ideological and political circumstances, creating a certain sociology of reading. * The authors would like to thank the support of the Centra de Estudos em Educação e Psicologia and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, as well as our colleague Francesca Rayner, who helped to improve this revised version of the paper, where any possible errors are exclusively due to authors’ responsibility.

The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader

The Oxford W.E.B. Bois Reader. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 680 pages. $26.95 paper. quality of reader or anthology can be determined largely by how teachable it makes subject that it documents and how accurately it outlines parameters of that subject, The Oxford W.E.B. Bois Reader, edited by Eric Sundquist, is exemplary. Despite his almost unchallenged prominence as intellectual patriarch of African American cultural and history and his self-conscious desire to write history of African American culture, Bois has always been somewhat difficult figure to integrate into literature and cultural studies courses. Much of this difficulty has stemmed from sheer range of his accomplishments and interests. As Sundquist points out, Du Bois wrote alternately and equally well as sociologist, an economist, political scientist, an educator, an artist, and civil rights advocate, and more often than not, several of these intellectual roles were combined in any given speech or essay. The generic singularity of Bois's two major literary works, The Souls of Black Folk, often considered ur-text of African American modernity, and brilliant and under-appreciated Darkwater, text that Sundquist accurately sees as anticipating as well as instigating modern Pan-Africanism and culture of anticolonialism that has come to play such prominent role in Western (or anti-Western) literature of late twentieth century, has also contributed to under-reading of Bois's work. Both of these texts are included in their entirety in this reader and their juxtaposition makes clear value of reading them in relation to each other, If The Souls of Black Folk became century's most important statement of African American resistance to segregation, Darkwater joined battle for black civil rights in United States to broader campaign against European colonial rule abroad, especially in Africa. Placed under five broad headings (Concepts of Race, Representative Men, Literature and Art, Politics, Economics, and Education, and Africa and Colonialism), other essays that Sundquist has collected provide an exhaustive documentation of Bois's intellectual and ideological development. They effectively cover practically entire range of his non-literary writings. In its entirety reader's representation of Bois's constant engagement with current events and arguments, offers political history of diasporically self-conscious Blackness as experienced by man whose narrated life begins during presidency of Andrew and ends just short of presidency of Lyndon Johnson and whose roles were, among others, those of a historian, sociologist, teacher, cofounder of National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), magazine editor, novelist, governmental envoy, Pan-Africanist, spokesman for socialism, and an opponent of anticommunism. The one significant problem with Sundquist's choice of texts is that critical selections on Literature and Art are scanty and finally unsatisfying. Sundquist may have felt that because the great bulk of Bois's writing ... is devoted to politics, economics, and education and his critical writings on literature are ones most readily available elsewhere, this de-emphasizing of Bois was necessary. …

A construção sociológica de uma posição regionalista: Reflexões sobre a edição e recepção de Casa-grande & senzala de Gilberto Freyre

Este artigo analisa disputas e momentos de inflexão no processo de autonomização das ciências sociais e das estruturas de produção e circulação de mensagens escritas sobre o Brasil, a partir da análise da edição e recepção de Casa-grande & senzala, de Gilberto Freyre. Entre os sucessivos prefácios do livro, da 1ª à 14ª edições, e a consagração de autores como Florestan Fernandes, desenvolve-se uma prolongada e violenta batalha simbólica para universalizar as formas legítimas (estilos narrativos, projetos institucionais, fórmulas editoriais, invenção e representação de comunidades de leitores) para pensar o Brasil. Seguindo este percurso, o artigo mostra como as representações que pesam sobre Freyre e seu livro de estréia, como regionalista, derivam tanto das posições e concepções que Freyre foi assumindo em sua trajetória, quanto das posições que foram se impondo no campo intelectual a partir dos anos 40 em São Paulo, com o objetivo de consolidar a "Sociologia científica e nacional". Somando à interpretação dos discursos os princípios de sua dispersão, como a edição e a institucionalização dos saberes universitários, o artigo busca compreender como livro e autor chegaram a ser o que são hoje em dia à luz de mudanças nos mecanismos de seleção do panteão dos intérpretes do Brasil.