Reading is best understood as a dialectic process where the influence of reader and text are constantly merging to create a jointly produced and evolving understanding. What occurs as the reader and text come together during reading is similar in form to a dialogue, a model for the reader-text relationship that has not been explored in the reader…

A study aimed to discover a correspondence between the thinking processes and textual structures of six eleventh graders. In a predominantly White, middle class rural high school, six students were selected to think aloud as they read two essays written as part of two assignments for their advanced English classes. The six were selected based on…