Constructing Meaning In Text Reading

Reading, as a basic cognitive activity for human beings to acquire knowledge about the world, has long been a subject of great interest among scholars in the world. One of the significant questions goes to the source of meaning in process text reading. Studies before the 1960s generally concluded that meaning was resided with text and reading was nothing but a one-way activity in which readers extracted static meaning from the print. With the boom of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics ever since the 1960s, however, reading has been viewed as a dynamic event in which factors concerning the reader, the text, and the author interplay to generate meaning. Grounded on Constructivism which theorizes that knowledge is constructed through learner's experience in an active and dynamic manner, the author tries to clarify the dynamic and constructive nature of text reading from both the psychological view and the ontological view. Proceeding from the psychological view, the author reviews four significant reading models built on empirical studies (the Information-Processing model (1972), the Psycholinguistic model (1967), the Interactive model (1994) and Schematic-Theoretic view) and analyzes the underlying developing trend toward the "constructive" end—reading is a meaning-constructing activity in which readers'traits interacts with textual characteristics. Proceeding from the ontological view, the author delves into the history of literary inquiries concerning sources of meaning in text reading and orientation goes from the author's intention, the text autonomy, the reader's orientation, and finally to the constructive end—a dynamic gap-filling activity and an interactive horizon-fusing event negotiated and coordinated by all the three parts. The author provides a qualitative case study on EFL readerresponse to a literary text. Results show that readers are inconsistent, interactive, schema-dependent, and author-aided in reading process. The author concludes that meaning is constructed dynamically and collaboratively by the reader, the text as well as the author in process of text reading.