ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on methods of inquiry into processes of reading across media. It begins with an account of the methodological needs that arise when we examine and evaluate how people read media texts. The chapter provides a review of research methods which use the range of reader-generated data such as concurrent verbal protocols, cued verbal reports, task-based discourses, ethnographic interviews, eye movements, and log files. This review details their potential uses and benefits for examinations of reader cognition and thinking engagement and situates them with prominent (con)textual features of media. It also offers some notes suggesting approaches to methodological prediction, contextualization, and triangulation that may be useful in future inquiries. Indeed, the chapter seeks to remind us that theory and methodology are symbiotic. Research methods must contribute to updating our ideas of reading to augment the singular reader-text-task paradigm and move forward to examine the multifaceted, complex, and even complicated nature of reading in different media text environments.
