1.) When Haas opened her article by saying ” At the college level, to become literate is in many ways to learn the patterns of knowing about, and behaving toward, texts within a disciplinary field” she was discussing the idea that students need to approach literature differently based on the subject in which it is from. She goes on to discuss the importance of reading certain types of literature with a different mindset, “One of the things that students of science must become privy to, as part of their disciplinary education, is this rhetorical, contingent nature of written scientific discourse. Science educators at every level have been concerned with fostering students’ cognizance of the contexts, conduct, and purposes of science as well as its factual content. (Haas 45) You cannot approach the literature from a science based course with the same mentality that you approach literature from and english course with primarily because of the language or discourses that are used in the different types of literature.
2.) The myth of autonomous texts is that they are reliable and useful sources in reference to literature. An autonomous text is a text that acts independently often without proper information or contextual support. Haas stated that, “In general, the belief in autonomous texts views written academic texts as discrete, highly explicit, even “timeless” entities functioning without contextual support from author, reader, or culture.” (Haas 45) Haas calls it a myth because people have come to believe that these are proper and reliable sources to use in academics, even though they been critiqued and shown to be unreliable and inaccurate.
3.) Haas hypothesized in her work that the a student’s ability to comprehend literature would vary and grow greatly as they were to go through college. Through her research on the reading ability of one student, Eliza created a foundation for her hypothesis” I focused primarily on her reading processes and practices, and on the various texts she read, rather than her writing processes and products.” (Haas 47) Haas chose to focus primarily on one student because that would be the best system to truly understand the reading processes and how they would develop as she progressed through college.
4.) The rhetorical frame consists of everyone and everything that is involved in the making of a piece of literature.“elements of the rhetorical frame include participants, their relationships and motives, and several layers of context” (Haas 48). The rhetorical frame can help a reader to determine whether a source is reliable or not based on the motives and relationships of the author.
5.) The main idea of Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse and Linguistics” is about Discourse and how they are a sort of identity kit, in a way this relates to the idea of a rhetorical frame because in reference to literature is a sort of identity kit for a piece of literature. The rhetorical frame determines the make up of the piece of literature in the same way a Discourse makes up an individual’s personality.
ENG110J
