Horning, Where to Put the Manicules

Horning, Alice S. “Where to Put the Manicules: A Theory of Expert Reading.” Across the Disciplines 8.2 (October 2011). Web. 29 October 2014.

Horning argues that expert readers are “meta-readers”: they have a specific set of awarenesses and skills that distinguish them from novice readers. She presents this meta-cognitive theory of expert readers and argues that in order to be successful, students need to acquire the particular abilities and skills of expert readers through direct modeling and scaffolded instruction. Knowing what expert readers do as they read helps faculty develop specific instructional methods and goals for the needs of novice-reader students. Horning draws on research in education, literacy, and writing studies as well as specific examples from her own teaching, when she asked students to complete reading guides and do a book review assignment.

Quotable Quotes

“Part of what makes me a good reader is that I know what to mark and where to put the little hands. It is this ability and related skills in text processing, analysis, evaluation and application that distinguish expert from novice readers. A theory of readers’ awarenesses and skills accounts for experts’ appropriate placement of their manacles; the theory reveals the abilities student novices lack and urgently need to develop in order to be successful in any major in college and in their personal and professional lives” (1).

“The theory proposes that expert readers are meta-readers, drawing on the meta-cognitive view for its base. The prefix ‘meta’ is drawn from the Greek, according to the dictionary (‘meta,’ def. 1, 1966). It means after, along with, beyond, among, behind. Experts are able to do things with texts as they read, among the ideas presented and beyond them, so that behind, after, and beyond the reading, they are abel to get the essential meaning of a text. They can then analyze, synthesize, evaluate and apply, that is, engage with the text as expert readers.”

“Most faculty don’t aim to help students become expert readers, at least not in introductory or general education courses. Instead, to achieve ordinary instructional goals, most faculty want students to DO the reading and get concepts and content that connect with the rest of their learning in the course.”

“Expert readers, then, have both awareness and skill that allows them to read informational prose quickly and efficiently.”

Notable Notes

the awarenesses of meta-readers

1. meta-textual awareness (organization, structure of a text)
2. meta-contextual awareness (how the text is part of a larger conversation in the field, how it fits into a topic, influence of author/time/place)
3. meta-linguistic awareness (the language of a text, including disciplinary jargon, diction, tone, structure)

the skills of meta-readers

1. skills in analysis (reading quickly, selectively, able to pick out important information, depends on strong vocabulary knowledge in that discipline)
2. skills in synthesis (can see the relationships between the text being read and other texts, these readers read widely and often, draw inferences, see larger concepts)
3. skills in evaluation (can critically evaluate the texts they read – authority, currency, bias, relevancy, accuracy)
4. skills in application (know when and how to use the information that they read – whole arguments, specific facts or evidence – can use texts for their own purposes)

manicules are little hands used in medieval text marking to note passages that are interesting/important – what was important or interesting depended on the individual reader (readers read differently)

focus on reading informational prose text

uses her own definition (Horning, 2007) of expert literacy: “Expert literacy is best defined as the psycholinguistic processes of getting meaning from or putting meaning into print and/or sound, images, and movement, on a page or screen, used for the purposes of analysis, synthesis, evaluation and application; these process develop through formal schooling and beyond it, at home and at work, in childhood and across the lifespan and are essential to human functioning in a democratic society”

Harold Herber, Teaching Reading in the Content Areas (1978)

uses an example about how she taught her students to read an experimental research report – understanding the goals and information presented in each section, how the report follows APA

Linda Nilson, Teaching at its Best (2010) – argues that students don’t do the reading that’s assigned to them not because they don’t want to but because they don’t know how too. Nilson argues that teachers need to help students develop strategies for reading the texts that are assigned, marking texts, etc.

David Jolliffe and Allison Harl’s 2008 study published in College English on how novice readers read and what they need to help them be better readers

Charles Bazerman’s 1985 study published in Written Communication of how expert readers read – “Physicists Reading Physics”, argues for the importance of context in expert reading