Reading Comprehension as Social Practice(s) in Social Events

In this chapter, we outline a framework for viewing reading comprehension as social practices in social events, drawing on the social turn in the study of language and literacy. By reexamining the ontological and epistemological philosophies underlying understandings of reading comprehension, we challenge the commonly held conception of reading comprehension as an interaction between a single individual and a single text by defining meaning as socially constructed, emerging from people’s actions and reactions within and across reading events. Reading comprehension practices and events inherently involve multiple people interacting with each other through multiple texts. From this perspective, meaning is heuristically defined as encompassing ideational, social relational, aesthetic and cultural ideological dimensions. We argue that these four dimensions of meaning are constructed not within an individual’s mind, but in between participants (readers), as people act and react to each other in reading comprehension events.