Readers don’t passively take in text. The process of actively constructing meaning using background knowledge has become central to reading.
Prior to the advent of reader-centered reading instruction, reading instructional theories often viewed readers as passive beings who discover meaning in text. However, reader-centered reading instructional theories define reading as an active act in which readers use their own experiences and knowledge to interact with text and construct meaning. This emphasizes the process by which readers use their background knowledge to interpret the text and reconstruct the meaning of the text.
The experiences and knowledge that are used to construct meaning are called “background knowledge,” which is divided into two types. Content background knowledge is the experience and knowledge that readers already have about the topic or subject matter of the text, and form background knowledge is the experience and knowledge about the organization and presentation of the text, such as the structure of the text and discourse conventions. This background knowledge plays an important role in helping readers actively construct meaning as they read.
According to reader-centered reading instructional theory, readers who are effective at constructing meaning from texts use their background knowledge to predict the content and structure of texts before reading. By forming an ideal information structure in their minds, they can easily take in new information as they read and selectively take in only the information that meets their reading purposes. While reading, you use your background knowledge to help you understand the text and make inferences about information not directly stated in the text. Readers may revise their background knowledge based on new information gained during the process, or they may store the new information in their memory and use it as background knowledge for future reading. After reading a text, readers use their background knowledge to reorganize the information in a way that makes sense, and this reorganization is remembered for a long time.
Theorists of reader-centered reading instruction have studied how to use background knowledge efficiently, and one of the most effective ways is to organize your associations with a text. The idea is to think of all the knowledge and experiences that are relevant to the topic or theme of the text, and then organize them into a hierarchy of related concepts. This pre-organization of the reader’s perceptions of the text helps them to better understand the text and to structure the content of the text correctly. For example, when reading a text about a historical event, readers can use their existing knowledge of the event to better understand the flow and context of the text.
At the beginning of their research, theorists of reader-centered reading instruction attributed the different meanings that different readers constructed from the same text to the different amounts of background knowledge that readers possessed. They studied how to build more background knowledge to improve readers’ reading skills. However, in real-world reading situations, they found that background knowledge can sometimes interfere with accurate reading. For example, if a reader has incorrect background knowledge about a particular topic, that background knowledge can interfere with correct comprehension. Therefore, theorists of reader-centered reading instruction have conducted research on other factors that affect reading ability besides the amount of background knowledge. They found that reading ability is not just dependent on the amount of background knowledge, but on a combination of factors, including the ability to utilize and regulate background knowledge appropriately and the ability to think critically.
This reader-centered theory of reading education emphasizes the reader’s background knowledge and how they use it to actively interpret texts and construct meaning. Readers are no longer seen as passive recipients of texts, but as active agents who constantly interact with texts and reconstruct meaning based on their own knowledge and experience. This is a paradigm shift in reading education and an important theoretical foundation for making readers’ reading experiences richer and deeper.
