A New Rhetorical Approach To Text Reading

Reading is a basic social activity that engages humans in the world. Research onreading originated with studies on reading strategies and skills, followed by cognitive andpsychological linguistic approaches. Since the1990s, new breakthroughs have been madein the study on the reading process home and abroad; reading is defined as a social activityof meaning construction on textual level. Sociality of reading is represented as text readingand readers’ social practice of meaning reconstruction. Based on this notion, text readingcan be investigated within the sphere of new rhetoric, which is an interdisciplinary field ofdiscourse studies, spanning such disciplines as the philosophy of language, text linguistics,sociolinguistics, and so on. New rhetoricians hold the view that all human discourseactivities are symbolic acts that rhetorically necessitate intersubjectivity. The role of thereader in meaning interpretation, therefore, is at the core of new rhetoric theories. It is thesociality of reading that bridges text reading and new rhetoric. Specifically, new rhetoricviews text reading as a symbolic act, reflecting a rhetorical interaction between rhetors,texts and reality. Also, text reading is a process of meaning “re-invention”. In short, newrhetoric emphasizes the readers’ initiative and advocates that there is no “simple” readingbecause the reader always reconstructs textual meaning from his or her own opinion orstandpoint in the reading process.Current research on reading is primarily in the theoretical realms of second languageacquisition, cognitive linguistics and psychological linguistics. It produces fruitful researchfindings. However, such research pays little attention to the sociality of reading. In otherwords, most current research does not acknowledge readers as constructors of textualmeaning, but rather limits them to the status of participant or recipient. This study attemptsto propose a research paradigm of “text-rhetoric” interface which is formed on the basis ofnew rhetoric theories on meaning interpretation and relevant theories of text lingusitics.Accordingly, text reading is the crux of this paradigm, thus highlighting the reader’srhetorical act of “re-inventing” the meaning of a text in a rhetorical situation. Its aim is tomake a theoretical analysis and exploration of rhetoricity of text reading and to construct anew teaching mode of rhetorical text reading. This study is conducted according to a qualitative methodology and focuses ontheoretical connections between new rhetoric and text linguistics. This explorationlogically gives a strict and valid argumentation of rhetoricity of text with text analysis inorder to make a careful analysis and elaborate induction of rhetoricity of text reading.Moreover, this study theoretically and practically combines relevant theories and principlesfrom new rhetoric, text linguistics and foreign language teaching, breaks theoretical andpractical boundaries, and discusses the pedagogical implications for language teaching.The present research is a tentative exploration of text reading from the new rhetoricperspective undertaken to accomplish the following aims:1) propose a paradigm for“text-rhetoric” interface study;2) redefine the rhetoricity of text reasonably and proposethat “rhetorical identification”,“rhetorical situations” and “rhetorical dialogue” constitutethe rhetoricity of text and build up rhetorical system of text operation;3) emphasize textreading as rhetorical act via the process of “re-invention”;4) construct a new mode ofrhetorical reading of texts, which serves as a new way of teaching for college English textreading and has practical significance for cultivating evaluative reading competence ofcollege students.