ABSTRACT
As most are aware, Ken’s initial work was positioned as a psycholinguistic perspective on reading at a time when major developments were occurring in linguistics and notions of language acquisition and use were hotly debated. His model of the reading process built upon this work in ways that expanded or reoriented our views of reading and writing. His work represented a shift away from a view of the reader translating written language to spoken language to a view of the reader as an active participant in meaning making. Further, he cast the reader not just using a single cuing system that changed written language to spoken language, but suggested and demonstrated how readers used a full range of cuing systems-visual, syntactical, semantic, orthographic, sociosemiotic. He redirected teachers to appreciate that students were not recreating the author’s text, but developing their own meanings. Drawing upon Dewey’s and Rosenblatt’s use of the term transactional, Ken refers to his view of meaning making as a give and take between text and reader in a fashion befitting the transactional nature of the socio-psycholinguistic processes involved.
