Reading as a Social Process

Abstract

The reading process has tended to be characterised primarily as psychological, cognitive and individual. Baynham presents this understanding of literacy as typified by ‘the solitary writer struggling to create meanings … which can be recreated by the solitary reader’ (Baynham 1995: 4). This is a view which I aim to challenge in this book, through examination of the ways in which readers collaborate to derive meaning from text. We see the mediation of social and cultural factors, not just at the micro level of negotiated interpretation of texts but more widely. First, at a macro-societal level there are culturally different understandings of what it means to ‘do schooling’, of which literacy instruction is a major part. Alexander (2000) in his extensive study of schooling in five countries, talks of the ‘web of inherited ideas and values, habits and customs, institutions and world views which make one country, or one region or one group, distinct from another’ (Alexander 2000: 5). There are also, more specifically, differing understandings of what it means to be a reader and writer, as Brice-Heath’s famous (1983) study of two socioeconomically different communities in the United States showed. Brice-Heath describes the different ‘ways with words’ of a black and white working class community, Trackton and Roadville, respectively. In addition she compares the verbal repertoires and styles of these groups with a third group, the ‘mainstreamers’, or middle-class townspeople.