Using think aloud protocols, Haas and Flower study graduate and student (i.e. Freshmen) readings. They find that “[t]he ‘texts’ or representations of meaning that the readers created as they were wrestling with the text and thinking aloud were dramatically different in both quantity – the amount of information they contained – and quality – the kind of information they contained and the amount of original text they accounted for” (174 emphasis in original). Throughout their study, they identify three kinds of reading:
- Content strategies: “concerned with content or topic in formation, ‘what the text is about.’ The reader may be questioning, interpreting, or summing content…The reader’s goal in using content strategies seems to be getting information from the text” (175).
- Function/feature strategies: “refer to conventional, generic function of the text, or conventional features of discourse. These strategies seemed to be closely tied to the text: readers frequently named text parts, point to specific worlds, sentences, or larger sections of the text…While content strategies seemed to be used to explain what the text was ‘saying,’ function/feature strategies were often used to name what the text was ‘doing’” (175)
- Rhetorical strategies: concerned with constructing a rhetorical situation for the text, trying to account for author’s purpose, context, and effect on the audiences. In rhetorical reading strategies readers use cues in the text, and their own knowledge of discourse situations, to recreate or infer the rhetorical situation of the text they are reading” (176).
While all readers used the first two strategies, only experienced readers used rhetorical reading strategies. These rhetorical strategies were used “in tandem” with the other strategies; “i.e. they used the rhetorical strategies to help construct content, and vice versa” (178). More, those who “used the rhetorical strategies, first, recognized more claims, and second, identified claims sooner than other readers” (179). In fact, only those who displayed use of the rhetorical strategies were able to identify implicit claims.