Haas and Flower Q&R 2

After reading the Haas and Flower article, do you consider yourself to be among the “student readers”?

As a matter of fact, I did realize that I read like the students readers who were mentioned. I tend to paraphrase everything I read and I hardly analyze anything or think outside the box. I think that my previous reading skills have a lot to do with this. I would only use the “content strategies” which are basically just reading on the surface and knowing what the story is about but not really looking more into it. Due to this shallow way of reading the material, I had a hard time in one of my classes this spring. I was taking Intro to Philosophy and in that class we had to read every day. We would then discuss what we read in class with our professor and she would ask us various questions. It was in these questions in which I saw that we really had to understand what we were reading and try to interpret what the author was trying to say and what he meant by this or that. I found it very difficult to do because I would only end up paraphrasing or summarizing what I had read. I didn’t do very well on my first test or essay because I lacked the skills necessary to be able to fully grasp the context of the book. In the Haas and Flower article it talks about the rhetorical strategies that students can use to help them improve in their reading skills. After reading it, I realized that I have a lot more to learn in order for me to be an effective and be able to look beyond the surface of the text and make my own assumptions and opinions regarding what I read. This article encourages students to use the rhetorical strategies to help them become “experienced readers” and not be “student readers”, which rely on “text-based strategies to construct their meanings”(Haas and Flower 168).

Denise

Q&R 2

Question: Why is teaching students to read rhetorically as difficult as trying to teach students how to write rhetorically?
Unlike expert writers who have studied work within a rhetorical framework, student writers concentrate the most on the content and information that is presented to them. The expert writers on the other hand imagin an audience response, acknowledge context and setting in the work. The students concentrate on knowledge, content, and what the text is talking about, and do not take into account the effect that that writer had the intentions of placing upon a specific audience. Many students see reading and writing as just an informative exchange of knowledge and information. Trying to help students move beyond that point is the difficult task that teachers face. The difficult part is trying to change students mindsets about reading and writing; they need to learn how to think differently and understand where the writer is coming from.

After reading this article, did it make a difference in your writing or the way you see writing?

Yes, it did because I found out that there is alot of strategies we can use to write, which makes it easier for me as well as other writers. I liked the rethorical strategy the most because it helps you understand the authors purpose in writing whatever it is he wrote. Writing is not the easiest thing to do considering the face that in college it's way much different, it's not like in high school where you would get a topic and just write about it, now you have to write totallly different and with the different strategies there is it really helps alot.

_ashley nicole.

Q and R 1

Why should students be expected to feel comfortable with writing pieces that are “not perfect” when learning this method of learning writing skills?

It didn’t make sense to me that this type of teaching would be a good idea because of its one major shortcoming. To ask students to completely reevaluate the way they approach writing in school is a good idea but why do it in such a manner that is so drastic and fast that they have adjust quickly? Why should they accept the idea that flawed work is an acceptable outcome from them? I do believe that we as students should learn how to write the way competent journalists, scholars and researchers write. Even though the class supports imperfection in writing in exchange for depth and understanding, I do not believe that we can accomplish these tasks without learning how expert writers compose their pieces. The approach of “writing about writing” cannot be complete in its purpose without first showing students how to read about writing. How can we learn to express ourselves correctly when we are writing if we as students were not taught to do so or even learn to realize what the purpose of writing is? How do we know how to write a competent research paper if we have not been taught what makes them valid? Should teachers be accepting of the sort of writing this method produces because we have not been taught correctly? Should students learn to accept their work as sufficient when it is flawed? I do not think we invest so much effort in our education to learn how to settle with our work because we do not know how to do certain things. I do no think students should be allowed to turn in imperfect work, not because I think students should be perfect but because we are trying to learn how to do things to the best of our abilities. I think this method of teaching should not just ask students to “figure out” on their own how they should be writing , but be taught through respected authors and pieces how to analyze a topic and how to make their writing multidimensional. If we can understand what kind of thought process we must initiate to become a competent writer, we can learn what our own style is and what our purpose is for what we decide to write about. This method should teach us to figure out what authors are trying to do with their writings, what reactions they are trying to invoke, and what authors do to make their pieces respectable. The new method we are learning should then teach us how to do those same things with our writings, so they too can become valid and competent pieces that do not have to be considered flawed.
If students learn to ask and answer certain questions that invoke the kind of thinking this method or learning to write is asking of us, through example, there would be no need for us to accept our work when it is flawed. We should be equipped to write complete pieces that do not lack in depth and understanding.

Q:Is rhetorical reading a strategy that could easily be used by students if told to do so?

R:In the article it stated that when introducing the students to rhetorical reading and encouraging them to use it, they found that students could identify it in the reading of others but were unsuccessfull in using it. I personally can relate to that thought because I can identify with the reading of others and can identify the rhetorical reading, but I have trouble using rhetorical reading. If i were told to use rhetorical reading and be reminded of it before I read i would definetly use that strategy because it makes the selection a lot more easier to understand. Rhetorical reading is not something that comes natural to me but it does make reading a lot more easier. Now i know that we must first be able to construct representations of what the author is trying to convey to his audience and now that I know what the strategies are is will be a lot easier to reach the meaning of what the author is trying to tell his audience. I can not read a selection and expect to have the meaning of what the author is trying to tell me right away. Now I know that I must ask myself questions and take notes as well and it will make the understanding more clear for me. This article really opened my eyes to see that there is a lot more to just reading any selection whether it be something that intrest me or not.

Q&R2 Priscilla Perez

What makes a person a good reader?

Many students assume that they are good readers depending on how fast they read and because of the type of vocabulary they can read and understand, but according to H&F those are the students that they are frustrated by because they seem to think that, that is all there is to it to be a good reader when really they are missing the big picture.

There is a lot more to reading than just reading. Many students think that if they understood the words and can summarize the reading that they have read it, and they are content with knowing that they have read it. Even though this is good enough for a pre college student, and enough to pass a test, they fail to actually read because there was no analyzing or criticizing involved while reading.

Critical reading is the key to becoming a good reader, not how fast u can read. There is a lot more to critical reading than just reading carefully. The student must make a representation of meaning itself. What is meaning? Everyone has their own way of understanding things and have their own strategies to do so, but the only way that H&F could see how readers made build their meanings and representations was by watching the way readers go about building their representations, and by observing their use of reading strategies to help build their representations about the reading. In order to learn something about the construction of meaning of readers, they observed and analyzed the strategies of ten different readers.

At the end of the study H&F concluded that rhetorical reading plays a huge part in critical thinking and that the constructive process that they observed was exactly what they were looking for in a good reader which is to build a representation of the meaning of what the reader has read rather than just go by trying to understand what the words mean on the reading.

According to H&F, this is what identifies a good reader.

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.