8 READERS READING - THE INTERTEXTUAL LINKS OF PROFICIENT READERS READING MULTIPLE PASSAGES

THIS STUDY chronicled the intertextual links that 8 able readers made as they read across five passages. During the 3-hour sessions, each reader reported aloud his or her thoughts while silently reading and then responding to prompting and debriefing questions. Three scholarly traditions-cognitive psychology, semiotics, and literary theory-were used to analyze the data. In particular, intertextuality as a cognitive construction, where readers absorb, transpose, and build a mosaic of intersecting texts, was used to analyze the connections readers made among textual resources. The analyses revealed two general types of intertextual links: (1) links among ideas, events, and people, and (2) social, cultural, political, and historical connections. The readers adopted various discourse stances, reflected in the ways they positioned themselves in relation to the passages, and used textual resources in different patterns oi distribution, These findings suggest that our models of expert readers have been unnecessarily narrow. As the 8 readers in this study indicate, proficient readers employ a plurality of ways to read, even when given the same passages and task.