ABSTRACT
Fostering the development of students’ abilities to construct and communicate meaning represents a critical goal of education. And more often than not, it is the construction of symbolic meanings that is the coin of the realm in schools. Indeed, this verbocentrism has gone largely unquestioned in guiding how we think about and enact school instruction and assessment. It should come as no surprise, then, that reading comprehensionthe construction of meaning from text-is one of the most important competencies that students can master. But to defi ne reading comprehension as solely the construction of meaning from text glosses too much to usefully inform pedagogical practices that are educative. Such a defi nition leads to a conception of comprehension that is static, unidimensional, and one that obscures the often non-symbolic, sociocultural origins of meaning (Merrell, 1997).
