Horning's (2011) research sets out to answer the following questions: what is expert reading? how do expert readers know what to mark up in a text and why? how can can we distinguish expert from novice readers? In this particular article, she never directly states how her theory of expert reading responds to a gap in the literature, though at one point she does talk about the distinction between theory and practice. She says that we need both theory and practice if we plan to teach students how to mark up a text appropriately (4). By implication, then, we can surmise that the problem she responds to is a lack of theorizing. While scholars have heretofore studied both expert and novice reading, and even developed practical solutions to teach them how to read better at the college level, no one has developed a theory of expert reading per se. Be that as it may--that she doesn't derive the need for theory from the literature--she does talk about who she responds to in a more general way. For one, certain folks have developed theories of literate expertise (Scardamalia and Bereiter). Others have studied the reading processes of experts (Bazerman). Still others have developed recommendations based on primary research (Jolliffe and Harl). These are who she bases her theory on. However, this is not to say that her research is based solely off of others' research; she does primary research of her own, although she doesn't describe much of it here:
My own case studies with a few novice and expert readers show some of the differences between the two groups [novices and experts]. I collect reading biographies and ACT reading test scores and then ask both novice and expert readers to read extended informational texts on various topics and talk about their marking of them as they are reading. Readers write a brief summary of what they have read after about ten minutes. My cases suggest that not only do experts read more of the passages and understand more of the content, but they also show their awarenesses and greater skills in their explanations of text marking. The novice readers get fewer of the key points and can say little about why they mark certain parts. The experts use both their awarenesses and their skills in their meta-reading. If I had asked these readers to place manicules in the texts they read, I'm guessing they could have done so, but the expert readers, drawing on the conscious meta-cognitive abilities that are the basis of my theory would have been able to say explicitly where they were putting those little hands and why.What, then, is her theory? While I won't just copy the definition of the it from the article--you can get the article for free here--some of the important aspects of her theory include the fact that it is a meta-cognitive approach. Other important words include skills--important because composition research doesn't talk about skill-learning nearly enough (see Charney)--evaluation, synthesis, application, all of which get emboldened sections of their own in this article.
But the best part of this article is how she describes how she actually puts her theory to use in a disciplinary context (though it might also be said that she only designs her theory for writing in the disciplines, hence the word "expert," which you don't see in, say, Carillo). To teach her students expert reading, she scaffolds by drawing on this guy Harold Herber (Horning, 2011, p. 6). In sum, she scaffolds for expert reading by making sure that students are reading compliant (Nilson); that is, she quizzes them at the literal level, though also develops both interpretative and applied guides (Herber). She also makes her students write two book reviews a semester, perform the experiments they read of in class on their own, and read two different types of arguments in the field of linguistics.
On a different note, early on in the article, she is paranoid about only basing her theory of expert reading on one field of study (linguistics), and only one kind of text in that field (extended informational prose). I think she only bases this theory on one topic too (psycholinguistics). But she justifies this choice with three reasons. I also imagine this limitation to connect to Carillo's paranoia about teaching reading skills in general (since you can't teach writing in general, or you can of course but it's not very effective...).
Her theory also employs three different kinds of awareness: meta-textual, meta-contextual, and meta-linguistics awareness.
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