Difficulty Reading Salvatori

Difficulty Reading Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition by Mariolina Salvatori

When I first started reading the Salvatori article I once again found myself going back and re-reading portions of the text that I did not understand the first time around.  This is obviously a reading strategy that I use that was made evident through this activity of reading difficult texts.  I found several difficulties I was having getting through the Salvatori acticle.  I did not fully understand the metalanguage or difficult vocabulary the author was using for example Salvatori states, “I began to see that what Coles was indicting was a particularly enervated, atrophied kind of reading” (Salvatori 442). The author goes on to use other vocabulary like gridded and pharmakon that I had troubled making sense of.  I found myself not having the background knowledge for particular terms that Salvatori was using.  Another issue I was having was the author’s introduction of theorists and their theories.  I believe Salvatori just assumes that her reader already has knowledge of these theorists and their theories.  My strategy for getting a deeper reading of this text would be to highlight the difficult metalanguage/vocabulary and try to look up their definitions to derive more meaning from the text.  Another thing I would try and do is do research on the theorists she mentions and see if I can get a better understanding of their theories. Another problem I had was when the author gave definitions of terms in another language.  I am not really sure how I would overcome this type of difficulty other than trying to look up the translations for these words.  Although I found Salvatori’s article slightly difficult to read I understand her argument for enabling students to take deeper reads of the texts they encounter and to not only derive their own arguments, but understand the writers argument as well.