There are plenty of people online who get mad at other people online for not having robust reading comprehension abilities. What reading comprehension means has itself become a contested term recently to boot. My background as a scholar is in reading and literacy in early and middle childhood, so I have a number of responses ready to go when such disagreements occur; however, these disagreements are not about fine-grained differences between theoretical models and processes of reading. They’re usually about people who have read different sources talking past each other, which is not something reading theories attempt to explain. Nevertheless, the affordances of Freebody & Luke (1990)’s literacies in context as a means of explaining the purposes of reading has been on my mind when I’ve seen disagreements on my timeline or in the news.
Their brief article describes four roles readers can take on while reading: code breaker, text participant, text user, and text analyst. These levels are not sequential or developmental, but depend on the reader, text, and context. Reading is a socially mediated activity, which is why any given reader may move between the four roles with different texts and contexts.
Each role has an associated question: “code breaker ('how do I crack this?'), text participant ('what does this mean?'), text user ('what do I do with this, here and now?'), and text analyst ('what does this do to me?'). If you’re thinking the recent focus on the Science of Reading has emphasized the “code breaker” stage above all else, you would be correct. We’ve known for decades that systematic, explicit phonics instruction is necessary for literacy. It is not sufficient, though. That is why these other three roles (among many other theories of reading) need to be part of any discussion of what reading and literacy mean. Given that this article is written for teachers and scholars who may be working with adult learners of English, it is also important to note that simply teaching phonics to adults (or to students above primary grades) is not enough to achieve literacy.
For text participants, the goal is to bring to light what might be called the hidden curriculum of reading. Meaning that, there are aspects, such as “narration and exposition” that readers use to make sense of a text (p. 9). Knowing the meaning and pronunciation of each word is obviously necessary, but knowing how writers use those words in different ways or for different purposes will allow a reader to understand the ideas the author is attempting to represent with words in their writing. Freebody and Luke cite an earlier study (Reynolds, Taylor, Steffensen, Shirey, and Anderson, 1981) that clarifies the difference between knowing the meaning, spelling, and pronunciation of each word in the text and understanding what the text means as a whole. In the Reynolds et al. study, Black students from a city and white suburbanites read a passage about playing the dozens. The Black kids comprehended it correctly; the white kids thought the passage was "about physical aggression, importing notions of a race riot and a large-scale fight." Reynolds et al. go on to explain how one of the Black students reacted to that finding. "Upon being told that white children understood the letter to be about a fight instead of about sounding, he looked surprised and said, 'What's the matter? Can't they read?'" This exchange is an excellent example of how each reader’s interpretation of a context is a necessary part of explaining an interpretation of a text that goes far beyond knowing all of its individual words. I’ll give you one guess as to which race’s interpretation is usually given more relevance.
A text user is someone who knows why they are being asked to read or at least what to do when the social practice of reading is engaged. To Freebody and Luke, being a text user means “reading for school, work, leisure, or civil purposes” (10). There are many contexts a reader can find themselves in and only one of them is school, where standardized testing would be a part of the student’s reading experience. I’ve never met someone who gives themselves multiple-choice quizzes or short answer responses when finishing a book and then asks another person to evaluate their understanding of the text with a letter grade based on those answers! The bulk of this section of the article is given to an explanation of how learning how to “do school” (in terms of discussing a text with students) is where many readers learn how to use a text at school. They find evidence, they respond to teacher questions, they build on others’ answers, they think about the characters’ motivations, etc. These skills and abilities are important, but they do not comprise all of the possible ways readers can use texts socially. It’s also worth noting that students can do many of these tasks without being able to decode a text or interpret its meaning independently. Again, these roles are not sequential or hierarchical.
A text analyst is a reader who brings to bear the understanding that “all texts are crafted objects, written by persons with particular dispositions or orientations to the information, regardless of how factual or neutral the products may attempt to be” (13). If this sounds like critical literacy to you, then you are quite the text analyst yourself! They go on to explain how a history text from a secondary school has the hallmarks of “neutrality” when such a position does not actually exist. In fact, a student who decodes the text; brings their background knowledge to bear on it; and makes sense of its structure, format, and terminology could be said to comprehend the text. However, this interpretation does not take into account the “covert ideological position” embedded in the text (14). So, an additional aspect of what it means to be literate is for readers to consider how the text is operating on them as a reader.
What do these roles mean for misunderstandings on the internet? It’s maybe a tenable assumption that most people online can decode text accurately. (After all, social media users have to be at least 13 years old, right?) There may be some confusion in text participant roles because people are coming from all kinds of backgrounds imaginable, with all kinds of background knowledge imaginable, so that could provide an explanation. Think again of the misinterpretation of playing the dozens and how that might be misunderstood online even though its meaning is completely clear to the person posting it. Text users online are also a possible source of interpersonal confusion. Just as students need to learn how to “do school” as readers, so do users need to learn how to “do social media” as readers (and posters and lurkers and reply guys [gender inclusive]). There are variations in netiquette that can lead to consternation. The role of text analyst can also be a source of confusion. Think of the problems inherent in debunking misinformation or correcting disinformation. A user needs to be aware of the rhetorical impact of letting information pollution fester and the effects of giving it a wider audience by calling attention to it (even to debunk it). Three of four roles that Freebody and Luke described in 1990 have explanatory power in helping us understand why attacking someone’s lack of reading comprehension on the internet may not be as simple as it seems. Consider which role that person may be struggling with and you might just be able to understand their confusion a little bit more clearly.
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