Remembering That Reading is "A Way of Happening.".

Abstract

When I was just beginning graduate studies, I became enthralled by what for me was a new way of thinking about the transition that children make when they go to school to learn to read. At the time, I was reading articles that said that the move from the familiar and essentially oral world of the home to the literate world of the school was one that required a shift from interpretive strategies of daily discourse in favor of new "logical" and "literal" approaches to interpretation (e.g., Olson 1977; Olson and Hildyard 1983). In this view, learning to read and write required formal education in which children learned to decode and interpret what were then called "autonomous" texts-texts that were self-contained systems of words that supposedly carried meaning independently of the social contexts in which they existed-by learning about the conventions of written language, semantics, the forms of texts, and the regularities of alphabetic writing. They learned, that is, by focusing on the forms and structures of language. Although I didn't have any personal memories of learning to read (it seemed to have happened naturally before I went to school), I was enamored with what I was learning, in part because it seemed to explain to me why learning to read seemed to be so hard for some children. After all, studying abstract things like language demanded extraordinary powers. (I believed this, I now think, because at the time I was having troubles of my own struggling with language "in the abstract" in several courses on linguistics.) I was also immersed in reading about models of the reading process. At the time, only a few models included much of anything about emotions or feelings. One exception was a model proposed by Robert Ruddell (1976), who wrote about "affective mobilizers"-in other words, a reader's beliefs, values, and attitudes-and the way these "mobilizers"