8 Readers reading: The intertextual links of able readers using multiple passages

This study chronicled the intertextual links generated by 8 able readers as they read a five-passage tableau. Each reader silently read the passages and reported aloud their thoughts during a $2{1\over2}$ to 3 hour session. Three scholarly paths--cognitive psychology, semiotics, and literary theory--were used as guide posts for constructing a framework to analyze the intertextual links (i.e., the connections made among textual resources) evidenced in the students' think-aloud episodes. The analyses revealed two general types of intertextual links. The first were those links between ideas, events, and people. Readers referenced and maneuvered among a wide array of textual resources, yet availed themselves to these resources in different patterns of distribution depending upon passage and reader characteristics. The second type were those links between readers and the passages. The political dimensions of students' linking were revealed by the three reader/tableau discourse stances they adopted: logocentric, intertextual, and resistant.The findings suggest that our models of expert readers have been too simplistic. Able readers employ a plurality of ways to read; even when given the same passages and task they make meaning in remarkably different ways. Their meaning making follows a "zig-zag" path where the product bears little resemblance to the process. Understandings of one passage "influence" and "spill over" into understandings of other passages--both past and future--such that a reading is always open to further interpretations. Reading in this sense is an intertextual enterprise where readers transpose, absorb, and intersect texts as they "zig-zag" their way through passages.Furthermore, this study suggests that we have operated from an unnecessarily narrow view of reading in this field by looking at comprehension in terms of single, individual passages. Most of reading instruction, assessment, and research have operated within this single passage paradigm which conceives of "good" comprehension as a slavish fidelity to recounting the story line or the main ideas of a passage. Based on the findings from these 8 readers, a new set of catechisms for reading theory and practice are needed.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio