ABSTRACT
Viewing reading as a transactional process argues that meaning is both a bringing to and taking from a text; that meaning is created out of the interaction of the text and the reader in a particular social situation so that different interpretations are possible. This chapter illustrates the nature of the student transactions. Although transactions are usually thought of as being related to the reading of literary or fictional texts, reading as a transactional process is easily extended to the reader-text relationship that is evoked in the reading of a range of genres. There was a range of child initiations-as-transactions expressed in the session of the Reading-Aloud curriculum genre. In collaborative curriculum genres, there is a negotiation of both teacher and student agendas. A collaborative style of teaching is the “search for the best fit”. Finally, underlying the collaborative talk is a perspective that different reading views become literate as a cultural apprenticeship.
