ABSTRACT
What is an academic discipline? As a field it is either granted or proclaims for itself the
status of a discipline, empowering its members. Can the field of reading be said to be a
discipline? Perhaps it is; perhaps it is not. What is clear, however, is that within any field
or any discipline there are subgroups, some of which have high status and some of which
are marginalized. For instance, when you converse with colleagues in the field of English
or read the work of Robert Scholes, it is evident that the study of literature has enjoyed
greater status than the study of written composition in the discipline. Similar hierarchic
status relations exist in reading research and reading pedagogy as well.
