Using Mariolina Salvatori's "difficulty paper" assignment to explore student experiences when reading, this paper examines basic writing students' difficulties with reading in the composition classroom. The authors argue that examining difficulty can provide an entry point for understanding how students experience the (dis)connections…

Asserts that teachers should help students move beyond an information-exchange view of reading to a more complex rhetorical model of constructing meaning. Reports on a study which investigated meaning constructions and compares the more traditional function/feature strategies of constructing meaning with rhetorical strategies, which construct…