Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do

Middle School Journal, 2011

The Reading Teacher, 2017

The Reading Teacher, 2019

Scientific Studies of Reading, 2007

Despite nearly 40 years of scientific theorizing about reading, the field remains fragmented with little progress toward unification. In this article, we (a) emphasize the privileged position of unified theories in all science, (b) compare the growth of theory in cognitive science and reading, (c) identify the phenomenal domain of a unified scientific theory of cognition in reading, (d) propose five general principles for evaluating such theories, and (e) discuss selected influential theories and their potential for contributing to a unified theory of cognition in reading. Our purpose is to extol reading theory and encourage increased attention to developing powerful, unified theories. This article examines the current disunified state of reading theory and offers a rationale for its possible unification and future development. We define the term theory as a scientific theory in contrast to other uses of the term such as literary theory, critical theory, postmodern theory, and so on. These schools of thought are primarily ideological, not scientific. The definition implied here is consistent with the one widely cited in Kerlinger (1986): "A theory is a set of interrelated constructs (concepts), definitions, and propositions that present a systematic view of phenomena by specifying relations among variables, with the purpose of explaining and predicting the phenomena" (p. 10). To this we would add that a meaningful scientific theory typically includes (a) abstract terms that generalize about a domain of phenomena; (b) concrete, observational terms that represent or refer to those phenomena; and (c) some picture, image, or process that serves as a model. Historical examples include Darwin's theory of natural selection with its tree diagrams of

Remedial and Special Education

This study leverages advances in multivariate cross-classified random effects models to extend the Simple View of Reading to account for variation within readers and across texts, allowing for both the personalization of the reading function and the integration of the component skills and text and discourse frameworks for reading research. We illustrate the Complete View of Reading (CVR i) using data from an intensive longitudinal design study with a large sample of typical ( N = 648) and struggling readers ( N = 865) in middle school and using oral reading fluency as a proxy for comprehension. To illustrate the utility of the CVR i, we present a model with cross-classified random intercepts for students and passages and random slopes for growth, Lexile difficulty, and expository text type at the student level. We highlight differences between typical and struggling readers and differences across students in different grades. The model illustrates that readers develop differently an...

This paper reports a parser that can read English texts and output reading reports that contain all NPs, all clauses of Who Did What to Whom and other findings as a result of automatic annotation. The reports present a meaning representation that computational linguists have long been looking for. They offer a set of criteria that can help evaluate where a reader is correct or where the reading goes wrong, and can be used to build a knowledge base for a given domain that can support reading instruction, selfpaced writing, and expert knowledge discovery.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica

The growing digitalization of our world is not only changing the way we process information but also raises new questions regarding the manner in which we read and comprehend digital texts. The way the digital text structures information is different from how traditional printed texts do it. Therefore, the receiver needs new strategies of text acquisition. It is not the well-known generalities related to the subject that my proposed study intends to regurgitate. Rather, it aims to focus on and attempts to explore some so far mostly ignored or only tangentially (if at all) mentioned aspects of the matter such as: 1) the literary (e.g. fictional) versus non-fiction nature of the digital text; 2) how digital reading culture affects analogue (print) reading culture; 3) a comparative generational view, i.e. similar or diverging features of the above factors, depending on whether the receiver of the text is a Generation X or a Generation Z reader, the former raised on printed books being ...

Journal of Modern Literature, 2022

Modernism and Close Reading, a book of collected essays edited by David James, provides a much-needed reassessment of close reading's history and a projection for its potential future. While close reading has suffered many attacks in the recent reading method debates, the first part of this book shows that close reading had a more complex history than is often portrayed, including multiple manifestations and possible points of origin. The second part of the book then looks at how close reading can be rethought to remain productive in literary studies today.

ADE and the Association of Departments of En glish are trademarks owned by the Modern Language Association. In many En glish departments, and I daresay foreign language departments as well, the practice of close reading, of examining closely the language of a literary work or a section of it, has been something we take for granted, as a sine qua non of literary study, a skill that we expect our students to master and that we certainly expect of job candidates, whatever other sorts of critical activities they may flamboyantly display. But perhaps precisely because we do generally agree to value it, we have not given it much thought recently, at least not in broad public critical discussion. as a good Saus surian, I believe that meaning is the product of differences—any term is defined by what it is opposed to—so to think about close reading one should begin with what it is contrasted with. We don't really seem to have an antonym for close reading , which may be part of the problem. The most obvious might be Franco moretti's " distant reading, " but this is scarcely reading at all: moretti's fascinating analyses of large-scale trends, whether in the spread of genres across Europe, the publication of translations, the length of titles of novels, or marriage patterns in Jane austen's novels , provide extremely valuable perspectives in literary studies but are too divergent from regular modes of literary analysis to serve in a defining contrast.1 This distant reading would turn any sort of attention to an individual text into close reading. Perhaps what contrasts with close reading is not distant reading but something like sloppy reading, or casual reading, an assessment of " life and works, " or even thematic interpretation or literary history. The fact that we have difficulty saying what close reading is opposed to suggests that it has served as a slogan more than as a name for a particular definable practice. In a book that does propose an alternative practice, Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry, Peter middleton calls close reading " our contemporary term for a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions " (5).2 There are indeed different traditions of close reading: practices inherited from anglo-american new Criticism and those that derive from the French tradition of explication de texte, as well as more recent versions of deconstructive, rhetorical, and psychoanalytic reading. a recent volume collecting distinguished examples of close reading emphasizes that while the practice is associated with the formalism of the new Criticism, critics of historicist and other persuasions have also practiced close attention to the language, tone, and figures of a text (Lentricchia and Dubois). In the En glish department at Cornell, people do very different things with literature, but we all seem to subscribe or at least pay lip service to the idea that close reading is important to what we do, and it is always pertinent criticism of a job candidate to say that in the end his or her writing samples do not include much close reading or that he or she does not really do close reading. Close reading, like motherhood and apple pie, is something we are all in favor of, even if what we do when we think we are doing close reading is very different.

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 2013