McCormick reading

Here are some thoughts I thought were important. I tried to only include what I thought was a key point. I will most likely revisit the text to see if I missed anything

• Cognitive
• Readers must actively draw on their prior knowledge to be able to process texts
• "The heart of reading is the access of word representations, the central recurring process of reading."
• There is an assumption that comprehension is something that occurs as a result of a reader's purely "mental" capacities, and that it has nothing to do with the reader as a social being
• Schemata affects comprehension: music students reading a passage vs. weight lifting students

• Expressivist
• Privileges the reader and the reader's life experience in the reading process
• Many teachers perceive this as a viable alternative to the cognitive model, but it cannot seriously challenge it since it lacks a theory of the text
• "reading requires children to make sense, explore possible worlds, invent, sort out what is not said."
• Reading is primarily an activity in which readers create their own 'personal' or 'subjective' meanings from the texts they read
• 'close reading' - developed by Leavis and the Scrutineers was a method of reading literary texts that involved detailed analytical interpretation as if the words on the page spoke directly and profoundly to the reader
• There is a difference between 'aesthetic' and 'efferent' reading in which 'the reader's selective attention during the reading is focused mainly on the public referents of the words; the literary text is no less a product of a particular cultural formation than any other kind of text
• The primary danger of treating the literary as a separate kind of reading is that insights about the ways readers construct literary texts will not be seen as potentially relevant to other kinds of texts

• Socio-cultural
• It privileges the cultural context in which reading occurs
• Reading is not seen as a narrow task performed in school to learn, but something done all the time and in all kinds of rich contexts
• The view of the reader or spectator as balanced between autonomy and social determination is one that has gained validity in part due to the difficulties researchers within cultural studies have had predicting the ways audiences would negotiate a text on the basis of their class, gender, or race.
• Re-theorizing discursive positions of audiences could have significant impact on education practices
• It is possible to pursue a pedagogy within which students are treated as recipients of pre-ordained information and ideas, rather than active markers of meaning
• The differences between a student's response story and the original do not indicate 'wrong' readings, but readings from a different cultural perspective.