Analysis of White Mountain Apache Myths and Tales in Search of Elements of Poetry

Abstract

The interactive view of reading holds that readers interpret the author’s meaning using their prior knowledge, purposes for reading, and the contextual constraints of the literacy event. The first aspect, then, is that readers combine what they know (reader-based inferencing) with information from the text (text-based inferencing) to construct meaning (Pearson & Johnson, 1978). Readers use textual information such as pictures, the letters in words, headings, and the structure of sentences to figure out the author’s meaning (Stanovich, 1986). They use this textual information in combination with their prior knowledge. As they read, they say “That looks like a word I know, and it fits in this story.”