"Context and Rhetorical Reading Strategies: Haas and Flower (1988) Revisited"

Haswell et al.'s (1999) "Context and Rhetorical Reading Strategies: Haas and Flower (1988) Revisited" unsurprisingly emerges out of an engagement with the study alluded to in its title. 

Haswell et al.'s (1999) study is doubly motivated. On the one hand, they want to verify a few of Haas and Flower's (1988) flaws, most specifically its context-dependency, topic choice, and stringent claims. That is, will the results of the study remain constant, if the study is not only carried out in a different institution, but also carried out on the basis of a different reading passage? Moreover, is it really the case that the undergraduates are as bad off as Haas and Flower's (1988) make it seem? On the other, Haswell et al. (1999) want to correct a prejudice against replication studies in the field of rhetoric and composition, most notably the idea that writers' social behavior is too complex to be replicated in empirical studies (see Duin & Hansen 1996). 

That being said, Haswell et al. (1999) rely on Bazerman (1985) and Geisler (1994) in order to hypothesize that, by making the topic more familiar to students, the use of rhetorical reading strategies ought to increase as well. However, the most frequent citation was Pressley and Afflerbach (1995), who they use to corroborate their observations that think-aloud studies contain "tremendous difference in processes" (22), having been "in some way influenced by the sociocultural context in which they occurred" (20).

In order to carry out this replication, then, Haswell et al. (1999) opt to not only replicate Haas and Flower (1988), but to also introduce a single variable into that study (other than that of a different institution, of course). But to do that, of course, they have to conduct two different experiments. In the first, as stated, they replicated the study as best as they can, given that they are at a different institution (and, of course, they are interested in the production of that difference). In the second, they change the topic of the reading. In the original Haas and Flower (1988), students read a passage from a psychology article (Sylvia Farnham-Diggory), but, in the Haswell et al. (1999), students read an op-ed written by a college student. However, due to the intensity and invasiveness of the method employed (think-aloud protocol), Haas and Flower (1988) only managed to enroll six undergraduates and four graduate students, so Haswell et al. (1999) only enrolled the same. Moreover, in accordance with this method's best practices, both teams of researchers trained students in think-aloud protocols before moving onto the passage under investigation. 

At the end of the day, Haswell et al.'s (1999) results more or less ended up confirming Haas and Flower's (1988). However, there were some important differences. For one, while the latter found stark differences between the two groups (undergraduate and graduate students), the former didn't, leading the former to infer that researchers ought to be wary about abstracting students into general categories when it comes to reading. Moreover, Haswell et al.'s (1999) results also corroborated psychological studies that find meta-communicative reading behaviors in young children (23). In other words, undergraduates aren't necessarily lacking in rhetorical reading skills, as popular developmental psychology narratives would have it (6). Additionally, by means of adding three additional coding categories onto Haas and Flower's (1988)--the personal, the judgmental, and the non-committal--Haswell et al. (1999) found evidence to suggest that the personal is entangled with the rhetorical. 

In terms of implications, teachers should be cautious about importing disciplinary writing into the FYW classroom, as students don't have the repertoire of background knowledge (p. 13) in order to interact meaningfully with the text. Haswell et al. (1999) therefore seem to imply that teachers should teach rhetorical reading on the basis of material with which students are already familiar. Haswell et al. (1999) also seem to imply that teachers should rhetorically apply rhetorical reading techniques in the classroom, and in so doing, capitalize on the great diversity of students' reading strategies as a strength (p. 22).