Week 4: McCormick's Three Reading Approaches

McCormick begins by criticizing the lack of dialogue between the various disciplines involved in theorizing about reading practice and pedagogy, so that “work in reading remains fragmented and its transformative capacities limited” (5); this is due in part to the “low status” that reading occupies within academic institutions.

1. Cognitive: The cognitive reading approach is an information-processing model that regards reading primarily as a hierarchy of skills, focusing mostly on reading “comprehension” (16) and the reader’s mental capacities, as opposed to the social context that influences both readers and texts. This model is based upon a view of the text as the sole source of meaning and privileges an objective, “correct” interpretation that in turn ignores both the reader’s personal response and the social and cultural conditions that shape the process of interpretation. The cognitive, objectivist model posits a “universal” meaning of the text in all situations and contexts. Even so, McCormick notes that there is potential to be found in the cognitive model’s emphasis on drawing on students’ prior knowledge/schema, but that this schema does not get applied to social or cultural contexts, and therefore fails to “locate the reader as a subject-in-history” (18). Also, schema theory as it has often been practiced assumes that students must passively accept from teachers the “appropriate” background knowledge that will lead to a “correct” understanding of a text, rather than seeing that prior knowledge can reconstruct a text, depending on a student’s particular social and cultural conditioning.

2. Expressivist: The expressivist model privileges the reader’s life experience in the reading process. While expressivist approaches challenge the cognitive model’s location of all meaning within a “universal” text, they ultimately fail to present a viable alternative to the cognitive model because they lack a theory about what the text actually is. The focus on the individual reader (most notably in reader-response approaches to texts) provides an important counterpoint to the cognitive model, but ignores the reality of social and cultural conditions in the production and interpretation of texts. This approach is individualistic and student-centered, focusing primarily on the role of the reader and allowing for multiple interpretations as opposed to a universal, “correct” meaning. Nonetheless, McCormick finds that expressivist approaches would be more effective if they drew connections between personal engagement and the social world that informs both texts and readers. It is often difficult not to fall into the trap of “relativism” (viewing all readings as equally valid) when assessing the worth of various readings according to an expressivist model, and this approach may not prepare students for critical reading in other contexts (47). This model also often focuses on reading (more privileged) literary texts and not other kinds of texts, such as expository writings. McCormick sees potential for expressivist models to break free of their individualistic focus through connections with cultural studies. Unfortunately, many teachers in the United States continue to think of reader-response/expressivist pedagogy as the only alternative to cognitive/objectivist pedagogy.

3. Socio-cultural: The socio-cultural model comes closest to realizing McCormick’s goal of getting students “to inquire into and understand the interconnectedness of social conditions and the reading and writing practices of a culture” (7). This model conceives of literacy as a social process that takes place within a web of social relationships and assumptions. This approach breaks with the lack of social context in both the cognitive and expressivist models, focusing instead on getting students to “analyse [social] conditions and practices, and to possess the critical and political awareness to take action within and against them” (49). McCormick warns against developing pedagogies based on this model that fall into the trap of making students feel that their responses are utterly powerless or worthless in the face of larger social forces, and instead advocates finding a balance between personal response and social critique, “balanced between determinism and autonomy” (60). McCormick examines notions of “the reader” in cultural studies as a viable solution, noting that “the reader/viewer has come to be regarded as an active, potentially resistant agent” (52). This model also echoes aspects of an integrated reading-writing approach in its ability to break down distinctions between production and reception and see “reception as a form of production” (57), drawing upon a notion of the “active reader.”

*A question: Which particular strategies and activities would enable students to “learn to analyse how texts are likewise culturally constructed, how they are produced in particular sets of social circumstances and reproduced differently in different circumstances . . . [and] use such cultural and historical analysis to develop and defend critical positions of their own" (9)?