- The point Haas is trying to get across when she talks about becoming literate at the college level is that you cant be literate in a certain texts if you cannot read scientifically or in that specific field. Scholars from many subjects say ” within their disciplines, texts are best seen as not as static… but as dynamic” (Haas 44). These scholars are saying that texts cannot just be read lightly you must read it and understand it at a deeper level, you need to understand the overall point.
- The myth of autonomous texts is “… educational task of helping students recognize the human nature of scientific activity and rhetorical nature of of scientific texts may be a larger parts of the problem in academic literacy for students” (Haas 45). What this is saying and what the myth is, is that students dont read text to its full potential. They read and pull out facts but do not really read and focus on everything. Autonomous texts is just the facts. Its the little things you pull from the writing while ignoring all the other information presented or the point trying to be made.
- As college students grow they realize reading texts shouldn’t be seen as “…sources of information, and her [Eliza] job as a reader was primarily to extract this information for use in texts or reports.” Eliza took information in the beginning of her college career and treated it like a source but over time realized all that it could be. Haas is saying their minds will open more to the dynamic of text rather than the autonomous parts we take away. As they progress through school students will realize how much more there is to the texts there reading and that will give it more meaning. Instead of focusing in on just the facts they will see the big picture like Eliza did.
- A rhetorical frame is like a background or just like it sounds a frame for understanding the motives of texts and writing. “Elements of the rhetorical frame include participants, their relationships and motives, and several layers of context” (Haas 48). So before the reader gets into the writing they have a little background including the author and the title and maybe a little bit about the context. This can help them when they read and try to understand the text not autonomously but dynamically.
- In James Gee’s text “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” he talks about his idea of what it means to be literate. He says that “It is a truism that a person can know perfectly the grammar of a language and not know how to use that language (Gee 50). He is saying that you can understand a language through and through, know all the facts you need to but still not understand that language at all. This directly connects to Haas idea that she talks about in the first sentence “to become literate is in many ways to learn the patterns of knowing about, and behaving towards texts in a disciplinary field” (Haas 43). So she is saying to become literate you need to learn and understand the text that you are reading. In other words just because you know all the facts written on the paper doesnt mean you know what the overall point is or how those facts came to be. This is where Gee and Haas connect. They both say you can understand the reading or the things you are saying. However, you may understand but that doesnt mean you can apply what you are saying/reading and it doesnt mean you understand the overall meaning.
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