Changing Perspectives on Context

The purpose of this article is to show how older, largely context-free models of reading and its instruction became changed into a multidimensional, context-dependent orientation toward written language and the reading process. This change was influenced by an identical trend in linguistics, which also shifted from an over-reliance upon isolated pieces of language to a stufy of naturalistic, connective texts (Kintsch, 1974). The article concludes with suggestions for using a variety of contextual strategies to increase reading comprehension