The Effect Of Reading Beliefs On Meaning Construction In Narrative Text

Skilled readers use a number of strategies to construct meaning from text. These include lower order decoding skills such as lexical retrieval as well as higher order comprehension skills such as identifying main ideas and drawing inferences. Skilled readeras also invoke a variety of beliefs about the reading processes that affect their conceptual understanding of the text. These include beliefs about reading self-efficacy, the credibility of the author's message, personal ideologies, and beliefs about the meaning construction process.Reading belief is the ideas about reading which the readers believe true and insist on. Reading beliefs which the readers hold during the reading affect the reading comprehension process directly and indirectly. Some learners believe that when they read a textbook, they are passively absorbing information-often in the form of isolated facts-directly from the page to their minds. In contrast, other learners believe that learning from reading requires them to construct their own meaning by actively interpreting, organizing, and applying the information. Learners who realize that reading is a constructive, integrative process are more likely to engage in meaningful learning as they read and more likely to undergo conceptual change when they encounter ideas that contradict their existing beliefs. Reading beliefs not only affect the interpretation on the text, but also the reading strategies they choose.The purpose of the present research is to explore how different types of beliefs affect meaning construction when reading a highly interpretable narrative text. Meaning construction is a dynamic interrelationship system between the reader, text, and author. Meaning is not confined to the text or the author per se, but is a personal construction of each reader interacting with the text on the basis of his or her purposes and intentions. RBI (Reading Belief Inventory) which is worked out by Schraw is translated and tested, after being revised, it become the RBI of this article. This inventory is used to measure the influence of senior's reading beliefs on meaning construction in narrative text. The results indicate that:1. Readers hold the separate reading beliefs, they are transmission belief and transaction belief.2. There is no significant school, gender, and interaction between school and gender difference in whole reading beliefs and each reading belief.3. There is no significant difference between reading beliefs and text comprehension.4. Transaction beliefs increase the number of thematic, critical, and personal responses that were generated in readers' essays.5. There is interaction between transaction beleifs and transmission beliefs in thematic responses.6. Transaction beleifs construct a more sophisticated holistic interpretation of a text.