Reading Comprehension as Intertextual Practice: Building Meaning Together

Building on recent scholarship in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and social practice theories, this book reconceptualizes reading comprehension as intertextual practices. Rather than view reading comprehension as the interaction of a reader and a text, the book outlines reading comprehension as a set of dynamic social practices enacted by people in and across social events in which they together build and assign meaning to one or more written language texts. The interactive meaning-building process is inherently intertextual as people act and react to each other, propose connections among multiple texts, and reflect and refract social practices, histories, and ideologies. The theorizing in this book is oriented to generating new images and metaphors to imagine ‘reading comprehension’ differently. The reconceptualization also derives from using jazz as a metaphor for reading comprehension. This is a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and teachers in reading and literacy education.