Q&R 2

What is the purpose Hass & Flower present different reading strategies to students and educators?

Upper level reading requires students to comprehend complex forms of writings, but when a student doesn’t apply the strategies in the article, a poses a challenge in understanding the author’s piece. In the articles we are given three different strategies that can be used to better understand the reading. Rhetorical strategies are used for a reader to find important cues in a text to help them clarify any misunderstanding they thought they could encounter. Content strategies are used to help obtain what the text is saying. Functional/ feature strategies are usually used to name what the text is actually doing not saying. These three strategies can easily be tied together if a student has already been introduced and taught the correct methods of these useful tools in reading. Prior knowledge of the subject or idea is also a factor in understanding complex reading material. It is most likely that reader with previous knowledge on a topic will have a better understanding and will be more engaged with the text and terminology. On the other hand educators are provided with studies throughout this article to better understand how the students can grasp the most information from the text. In conclusion Haas and Flower’s main purpose of strategies are to exploit how people obtain information through reading which then gives them a general idea of how to go about understanding and interpreting what they read.