How does your reading proceed? Clearly you try to comprehend, in the sense of identifying meanings for individual wordsand working out relationships between them, drawing on your explicit knowledgeof English grammar (41) [C] If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guessat their meaning, using clues presented in the contest. On the assumption thatthey will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entitiesas well as possible links between them.you begin to infer a context for the text, forinstance, by making decisions about what kind of speech event is involved: whois making the utterance, to whom, when and where.
The ways of reading indicated here are without doubtkinds of comprehension. But they showcomprehension to consist not just passive assimilation but of active engagementinference and problem-solving. You infer information you feel the writer hasinvited you to grasp by presenting you with specific evidence and cues (42)[E]You make further inferences, forinstance, about how the test may be significant to you, or about itsvalidity—inferences that form the basis of a personal response for which theauthor will inevitably be far less responsible.
Conceived in this way, comprehension will not followexactly the same track for each reader. What is in question is not theretrieval of an absolute, fixed or “true” meaning that can be read off andclocked for accuracy, or some timeless relation of the text to the world. (43)[G]Rather, we ascribe meanings to test on the basis ofinteraction between what we might call textual and contextual material: betweenkinds of organization or patterning we perceive in a text’s formal structures(so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, socialknowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text.
Such background material inevitably reflects who we are,(44) [B] Factors such as the place and period in which we arereading, our gender ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certaininterpretation but at the same time obscure or even close off others.This doesn’t, however, make interpretation merely relative or evenpointless. Precisely because readers from different historical periods, placesand social experiences produce different but overlapping readings of the samewords on the page-including for texts that engage with fundamental humanconcerns-debates about texts can play an important role in social discussion ofbeliefs and values.
Howwe read a given text also depends to some extent on our particular interest inreading it. (45)[A] Are we studying that text and trying to respond in away that fulfils the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply forpleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed arelikely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room.such dimensions of read suggest-as others introducedlater in the book will also do-that we bring an implicit (often unacknowledged)agenda to any act of reading. It doesn’t then necessarily follow that one kindof reading is fuller, more advanced or more worthwhile than another. Ideally,different kinds of reading inform each other, and act as useful referencepoints for and counterbalances to one another. Together, they make up the readingcomponent of your overall literacy or relationship to your surrounding textualenvironment.
[A] Are we studying that text and trying to respond in away that fulfils the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply forpleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed arelikely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room.
[B] Factors such as the place and period in which we arereading, our gender ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certaininterpretation but at the same time obscure or even close off others.
[C] If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guessat their meaning, using clues presented in the contest. On the assumption thatthey will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entitiesas well as possible links between them.
[D]In effect, you try to reconstruct the likely meaningsor effects that any given sentence, image or reference might have had: Thesemight be the ones the author intended.
[E]You make further inferences, forinstance, about how the test may be significant to you, or about itsvalidity—inferences that form the basis of a personal response for which theauthor will inevitably be far less responsible.
[F]In plays，novels and narrative poems, characters speak as constructs created by theauthor, not necessarily as mouthpieces for the author’s own thoughts.
[G]Rather, we ascribe meanings to test on the basis ofinteraction between what we might call textual and contextual material: betweenkinds of organization or patterning we perceive in a text’s formal structures(so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, socialknowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text.