November 4th's Reflections on Reading

Reading and Writing Connections: Social perspectives

Bloome views reading as a three-dimensional social process, a process that is context-based, culturally-constructed as well as socio-cognitive. Reading is seen as an “event”, and the word “event” itself denotes the pre-existence of context (spatial as well as temporal) in a specific culture through interpersonal and intra-personal interaction. Reading is socio-cognitive in the sense that learning to read necessitates reading and learning cultural ways of “dealing with” things, as it were.

The more I interact with others, the more likely my problem solving ways (a culturally-bound process) will develop. When reading is seen as a social process, I believe here needs to be a shift of roles between the teacher and the students, especially in EFL contexts, and this could be “scary” or “not welcomed” at all. Whenever a social aspect is given to classroom practices or language skills, this could be seen as endangering the teacher’s presence or “image”, especially in contexts where teachers are historically seen as the ultimate “authority” and only source of knowledge.

In such a teacher-oriented classroom, Hirvela states that the more teachers determine what right is and wrong is, the more learning is inhibited and the less empowerment takes place. In this regard, Hirvela also argues for a socio-political dimension of literacy. In other words, it seems to me that he is looking at reading and writing from critical perspectives, as two main skills that shape, and are shaped by, the socio-political surrounding in a ways that echoes in my ear writing the word and the world and reading the word and the world since we are “social being” whether we like it or not, and we do not live in a vacuum. And this could be seen as one way to seeing the connection and interrelation between reading and writing. However, he implicitly and indirectly states that this way of looking at reading and writing, especially in L2 contexts, is “undermined” by the mere fact that the text is the ultimate source of literate knowledge.