Reading Practices Conventions

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Reading PracticesConventions

• Common features of texts and readings which help
  to stabilize the range
• of meanings
• that circulate in a society

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Teacher Page

• Reading Practices Conventions
• Grade 11
• Karyl Schwint
• Adapted from Literary Terms A Practical
  Glossary, Brian Moon (1999).
• MAP Standards
• active reading, analysis of content, drawing
  conclusions, reading for specific purpose

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To get you thinking

• Which of the following are features of a typical
  Western movie?
• The sheriff is a loner.
• The outlaw is the leader of a gang.
• The schoolteacher is a man.
• The store owner comes from outer space.
• The shoot-out occurs in the middle of the film.
• Justice is defeated in the end.

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Western movie features (cont)

• Presentation
• The story is punctuated by song and dance
  routines.
• The actors sometimes play characters of
  a different sex.
• Time changes are indicated by
  fading out and fading in.
• Scene changes are signaled by raising and
  lowering a curtain.

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Theory

• The items which you have checked in this activity
  are conventions. These are common features of
  texts and reading which help to stabilize the
  range of meanings that circulate in a society.

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Consider . . .

• Texts do not simply reflect the real world.
  Instead, they produce versions of reality by
  organizing their elements according to certain
  familiar rules or codes. Similar codes guide the
  reading of texts and determine which features
  will be considered significant.

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Continue considering

• . . . If textual codes and reading codes do not
  match up, or if too wide a range of codes was
  available, the number of competing readings of
  any text would be so great as to be confusing.

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Conventions

• By applying the rules in repetitious ways, texts
  and reading practices reduce the degree of
  confusion through familiar patterns and methods.
  
• They enable stories to get told, for example,
  without everything having to be explained.

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Conventions

• Because so many of the texts which circulate in a
  culture work in similar ways, the process of
  reading seems obvious or natural.
• But ways of reading are highly conventional.

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Conventions

• Changes in reading practices may only become
  apparent over long periods of time, or in very
  different cultures.

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Conventions of the past

• It has been suggested that readers in the
  seventeenth century did not think of characters
  in stories as individual people but merely as
  conventional types, like the pieces on a chess
  board.

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How about us?

• Modern reading practices, however, see characters
  in terms of their psychology from the inside
  rather than the outside.
  
• Both ways of reading are conventional.

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Tips for determining conventions

• It can be useful to distinguish between textual
  conventions and reading conventions, even though
  the two are not always separate.

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Textual conventions

• Examples of textual conventions include
• The use of a musical soundtrack on films, the
  division of plays into scenes the division of
  novels into chapters the use of an a-a-b-b-a
  rhyme scheme in limericks.

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Reading conventions

• Examples of reading conventions include
• Reading characters through psychology looking
  for a theme in a text reading silently (this,
  too, is a recent development).

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Practice

• Lets look at the famous poem,
• When I Heard the Learnd Astronomer, by Walt
  Whitman.
• Read the poem then work through the activity.

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When I Heard the Learnd Astronomer
Walt Whitman

• When I hear the learnd astronomer,
• When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in
  columns before me,
• When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add,
  divide and measure them,
• When I sitting heard the astronomer where he
  lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
• How soon unaccountable I become tired and sick,
• Till rising and gliding out I wanderd off by
  myself,
• In the mystical moist night air, and from time to
  time,
• Lookd up in perfect silence at the stars.

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Conventions

• By using this poem as an example, we can explore
  the two types of conventions.
• Use T, R, or B to indicate whether each of the
  following is a textual or reading convention,
  or both.

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Convention Type
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What have we learned?

• Take a minute to explain conventions and how
  conventions are used to enhance our understanding
  of the text we read.

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Thats right!

• Conventions are common uses of textual or reading
  codes which stabilize the range of meanings which
  may be applied to a text.

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Pulling it all together

• Texts do not simply reflect the real world.
  Instead, they produce versions of reality by
  organizing their elements according to familiar
  rules that we call codes.

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Convention Type