Mapping the Affordances of Language Machines in the Reading Domain

Introduction

A bot can write essays; more precisely, it can write what someone might say if they were to write an essay on a topic.

A bot can analyze a work of literature—or at least synth paraphrase what others have thought and written about that work and might say in a homogenized, pasteurized voice.

We are the producers of texts which bots dehydrate and restore vis a vis simulated digital ontologies.

Of what possible use might a linguistic generator be in a human literacy classroom?

One Way to Think about It

Developed by researchers Allan Luke and Peter Freebody in 1990, later elaborated by P. David Pearson, the Four Resources model of reading is a promising lens to apply in this situation.

The model is firmly grounded in research in the field of reading and is particularly relevant because it doesn't prescribe methods. It doesn’t tell any teacher what to do.

Instead, it asks a truly consequential question: What must readers and writers be able to do with texts? That question remains as relevant in the age of AI as it was in 1990.

The 4 Resources

Consider the model's resources readers avail themselves of:

• code breaking,

• text participation,

• text use,

• text analysis.

A quick way to get a sense of the reach is to think about the gap between the micro level code-breaker resource and the expansive text analyst resource. It’s the space between pronouncing the word “justice” and critically analyzing the discourse of Donald Trump.

AI can do tasks within each resource and provide assists with impressive capability. It can also fall far short in predictable ways. The resource model's emphasis on simultaneous, interdependent human roles—rather than linear skills—provides exactly the framework we need for understanding how human literacy remains vital, unchanged, even as AI capabilities are refined.

Seeds of the Model

In the 1940s, researchers Edward Dolch and William Gray faced a tsunami of “retarded readers” in the public schools. Inability to read with understanding was the norm, not the exception. Today, we abhor the deficit model and its broken readers in need of repair, but then it provided a practical way to think about the problem.

The AI revolution presents similar challenges. We can learn from how previous generations of educators expanded their thinking about reading without losing their focus on what students actually need to succeed with texts in their cultural formations.

Chicago, September, 1940

The autumn issue of The Elementary School Journal arrived on desks across America carrying more than just scholarly papers—it carried a blockbuster review of a book explaining the DNA of American reading instruction for the next century.

In his office at the University of Chicago, picture William Scott Gray, a senior statesman in the field, adjusting his wire-rimmed spectacles and picking up his pen to review Edward William Dolch's latest work, A Manual for Remedial Reading.

Gray was a towering figure in American literacy education, almost of the stature of Edmund Huey (1908), who had established reading as a legitimate field of scientific inquiry.

At 55, Gray had spent decades building the theoretical foundations that would guide American reading instruction. But this review would prove different—it would capture a pivotal moment when practical classroom needs collided with emerging scientific understanding.

The schools were producing an army of deficit readers.

The Pragmatist Meets the Theorist

Edward William Dolch, working from his position at the University of Illinois, had just published something radical in its simplicity. His Manual for Remedial Reading wasn't another theoretical treatise—it was a practitioner's guide with a bold thesis: "The problem is reteaching reading, but reteaching it this time so that it will quickly and surely be learned. All of the common types of cases are described and methods for successfully handling them are given. Any teacher can follow these methods with great success."

Gray recognized immediately what Dolch had done. As he noted in his review, "Although a large number of books on the improvement of reading or books with practice exercises have appeared recently, there have been few which give comprehensive suggestions for overcoming the various reading difficulties of pupils."

Dolch had filled a need and was given a green light by a powerful thought leader.

The Basic Sight Word Revolution

Embedded in Dolch's manual was something that would outlast both men—his "basic sight word" list. I used it myself every day during the two year period I worked in a private reading clinic in the early 1980s.

Contained in the appendixes of his 66-page handbook was a carefully researched compilation of the most frequently occurring words in children's reading materials.

These weren't just any words—they were the building blocks of reading fluency, the words children needed to recognize instantly, automatically, without conscious effort.

Gray understood the significance immediately. In his review, he noted how Dolch's approach regarded "most retarded readers simply as cases of slowness or of failure to benefit from ordinary group methods of instruction, sometimes complicated by physical or environmental factors and frequently involving defective emotional attitudes."

This wasn't about reading disability as pathology. Dyslexia, the crème de la crème of reading problems, was relevant to an affluent portion of the population. It was about reading instruction as systematic reteaching in the public schools.

The Collision of Science and Practice

What made this moment historically crucial for research was the collision between Gray's theoretical framework and Dolch's conceptual framework.

Gray had spent his career building the scientific foundations of reading research, establishing reading as a field worthy of university study. His comprehensive approach to reading research—examining everything from eye movements to comprehension processes—had created the intellectual framework for modern reading science.

But Dolch brought something different: battlefield experience. His manual was "replete with suggestions for dealing with all kinds of reading difficulties and interspersed with cautions about what not to do or to expect." He wasn't theorizing about reading—he was solving immediate classroom problems.

Gray's Measured Critique

Gray's review revealed both appreciation and scholarly concern. He praised Dolch's practical promise: "These methods Dolch sets forth with a clarity and a simplicity that inspire confidence in their practicality."

But his scientific training made him wary of oversimplification: "Yet this very virtue of simplification circumscribes and offers dangers of interpretation in a process with as many complexities as are found in reading."

Gray was particularly concerned about Dolch's confidence that "any teacher can follow these methods with great success." As a researcher who appreciated reading's complexity even without the understandings we have today, Gray worried about reducing such a multifaceted process to simple formulas.

He noted that teachers using "this book as a sole guide may lack a sufficiently thorough understanding of the processes involved to understand fully the nature of the difficulties that give rise to problems."

The Historical Significance

Gray's review captured the tension between theoretical sophistication and practical application that would define reading research for decades. Dolch's sight word approach would become foundational to American reading instruction while Gray's comprehensive research framework would establish the scientific credibility of the field.

Townsville, Queensland, 1984-1990

The tropical heat of North Queensland couldn't match the intellectual fire that was about to ignite at James Cook University. Allan Luke stepped off the plane in 1984, carrying with him the revolutionary fervor of Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Freire's ideas had been burning in him since Jonathan Kozol's lecture at Simon Fraser University in 1975. Luke was the first non-white professor on faculty, assigned to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teacher education programs. The weight of that responsibility was enormous: traditional literacy education was failing these students.

Meanwhile, Peter Freebody had already established himself in Australian literacy circles. Born in Sydney in 1950, he brought something unique to the table—he had been inside the eye of the American cognitive science storm brewing at the University of Illinois from 1977-1979, working directly with P. David Pearson and Richard Anderson on schema theory at the legendary Center for the Study of Reading.

But by the mid-1980s, something was eating at Peter Freebody. The cognitive models were elegant, powerful, but they felt bloodless when confronted with the diverse classrooms of Australia.

Luke and Freebody were both witnessing the same educational crisis from different angles: students who could decode but couldn't access meaning, others who could comprehend but couldn't critically examine how texts positioned them, still others who understood content but couldn't use texts for social purposes in their communities.

The breakthrough came through their shared frustration with the "reading wars" tearing apart Australian education. Phonics advocates battled whole language proponents while critical literacy theorists fought for the moral high ground.

Each side claimed to hold the key to reading success, yet none could address the full complexity they witnessed daily in diverse classrooms.

Somewhere in 1989, circling around insights neither could articulate alone, they hit upon the revolutionary question that would reshape literacy education worldwide: What do readers need to learn to do?

Working intensively through late 1989 and early 1990, they hammered out their manuscript with the urgency of educators who had witnessed too many students failed by inadequate approaches.

Luke contributed his passionate understanding of how texts serve power relations and position readers. Freebody brought his expert grasp of cognitive meaning-making processes, his grounding in functional grammar, and his growing critical awareness of literacy's social functions.

When their paper "Literacies Programs: Debates and Demands in Cultural Context" appeared in Prospect: An Australian Journal of TESOL in 1990, the response was electric.

Here, finally, was a framework that didn't force educators to choose sides in ideological battles. Teachers, who had always known reading was more complicated than any single method could address, found validation and direction.

The Luke-Freebody collaboration represented the convergence of complementary expertise at precisely the right historical moment. Luke's critical consciousness met Freebody's cognitivist creativity. American reading science merged with Australian social justice concerns.

By 1991, the Four Resources Model was spreading across Australia and beginning its journey toward global influence. The flowing together of these scholarly traditions had produced a theoretically sophisticated, practically useful, and ethically grounded approach to literacy that honored both the complexity of reading and the diversity of readers.

David Pearson's Reappearance

P. David Pearson's engagement with the Four Resources Model represents a fascinating intellectual journey in literacy education from cognitive scientist to sociocultural advocate to social action theorist.

His research contributions in 2007 and again in 2023 didn't merely endorse Luke and Freebody's framework; they identified and filled crucial gaps that would prove essential for the model's evolution and global impact.

The 2007 Bridge: Secondary Reading and Theoretical Integration

When Pearson, a mentor of Terry Underwood and Monica Yoo, published "Understanding Reading Comprehension in Secondary Schools through the Lens of the Four Resources Model,” they were addressing a significant gap in the original framework.

Luke and Freebody's 1990 model had emerged primarily from elementary literacy contexts with particular attention to diverse learners in Australian primary schools. But what happened when students moved into secondary education where reading purposes became more specialized?

Pearson et al.’s 2007 work identified and offered insights about several crucial gaps that needed filling:

The Developmental Gap: The original model hadn't adequately addressed how the four resources evolved across grade levels. Pearson and his colleagues demonstrated that while code breaking might seem less crucial in secondary schools, it actually became more sophisticated as students encountered technical vocabularies and complex text structures.

Similarly, text critical analysis at the secondary level required more nuanced understanding of disciplinary perspectives and specialized ways of constructing arguments, what we might think of as “genre codes.”

The Institutional Gap: Luke and Freebody's model had focused on classroom literacy practices without fully addressing how institutional pressures—standards, assessments, curriculum materials—shaped implementation. A mismatch between standards, curriculum materials, and evaluation strategies would thwart any implementation of the robust instructional freamework.

Pearson et al’s 2007 analysis revealed a critical disconnect between the model and the curriculum: while state standards in California and Massachusetts actually aligned well with the Four Resources Model's comprehensive vision, standardized tests failed to capture this complexity, creating "a different view of reading than underlies either the standards or the literature anthologies."

We found that anthology publishers tended to simply repackage lessons written under the rubric of an outdated standard by just relabeling the old standard to reflect the new verbiage. There were few changes in substance.

The American Translation Gap: Significantly, Pearson's involvement provided theoretical legitimacy for the Four Resources Model within American literacy education circles.

His credibility as co-architect of schema theory and his influence within cognitive reading research traditions meant that his endorsement carried enormous weight.

American educators who might have dismissed an Australian sociocultural framework as ideologically driven could not easily dismiss Pearson's systematic analysis.

Pearson et al’s 2007 contribution was particularly crucial because it demonstrated how cognitive and sociocultural approaches could be productively integrated rather than seen as competing paradigms.

The analysis showed that the Four Resources Model didn't reject cognitive insights about reading processes—it situated them within broader social and cultural contexts. The model provided "a full-bodied model of reading, grounded in the best current scholarship, to give teachers a conceptual framework for thinking through reading comprehension as a construct."

The 2007 chapter also identified a crucial implementation gap: how could teachers navigate the tensions between theoretical sophistication and accountability pressures?

Pearson's answer was characteristically practical—teachers needed to understand that "standardized tests ought not to serve as starting points for instruction" because "the model of comprehension at the core of these tests is antiquated and narrow." Instead, teachers should "teach students, and not cognitive strategies, or novels, or modes of writing."

The 2023 Revolution: Text Actor and Social Action

Sixteen years later, Pearson's collaboration with Gina Cervetti on "Disciplinary Reading, Action, and Social Change" addressed what had become the most significant gap in the Four Resources Model: the movement from critical analysis to social action.

The original four resources could take readers through processes of decoding, meaning-making, functional use, and critical analysis, but they stopped short of using literacy as a tool for social transformation.

This gap had become increasingly problematic as educators confronted what Cervetti and Pearson called "the imperatives of this historical moment, when we are confronted with significant challenges that require global problem solving and participation."

Climate change, social inequality, political polarization, global pandemics—these challenges demanded more than critical reading. They required citizens who could use literacy as a tool for democratic action.

The Agency Gap: The original Four Resources Model positioned readers as consumers and critics of texts, but not necessarily as agents of change. Text critics could identify how texts positioned them and whose interests texts served, but the model didn't explicitly connect this critical awareness to social action.

Pearson and Cervetti's "text actor" role filled this gap by positioning readers who "come to see reading (and other literacy skills) as a resource for solving problems and producing tangible actions toward positive changes in their communities."

The Disciplinary Gap: Cervetti's expertise in disciplinary literacy helped identify another crucial gap—how reading functions differently across academic disciplines and professional contexts. In recent years, Gina has worked to regularize the term “disciplinary reading” to replace “content-area reading,” a welcome change.

While the original model had acknowledged that different contexts require different literacy practices, it hadn't fully explored how disciplinary communities use reading as a tool for knowledge construction and social action.

The text actor concept emerged specifically from thinking about how reading works within disciplines like science, history, and social studies, where knowledge is meant to be applied to real-world problems.

The Democratic Participation Gap: Perhaps most significantly, the text actor concept addressed what Pearson and Cervetti saw as literacy education's failure to prepare students for democratic participation.

Traditional approaches, even those incorporating critical analysis, often kept students within academic contexts rather than connecting reading to civic engagement and social action. The text actor role explicitly connected literacy instruction to democratic participation and global citizenship.

Pearson and Cervetti's extension maintained the original model's non-hierarchical structure while adding genuine transformative potential. Text actors don't replace the other four resources—they build upon them.

Students must still break codes, participate in the work of make meaning, understand social functions, and think critically. But text actors go further, asking questions like: "What social problems or opportunities are raised by this text?”

“How can this text inform actions to produce meaningful change toward a safer and more just school, community, or world?"

The 2007 Four Resources chapter showed Pearson continuously moving beyond cognitive approaches while maintaining no less regard for individual mental processes. He recognized that cognitive insights remained valuable but were insufficient for addressing literacy's full complexity in contemporary societies.

His embrace of the Four Resources Model demonstrated how individual cognition could be situated within social, functional, and critical dimensions—and within democratic self-actualization.

Conclusion: AI and the Five Resources—A Framework for Thoughtful Integration

Each of the five resources suggests different relationships between human capability and AI assistance, requiring educators to think carefully about where AI enhances human literacy development and where it might inadvertently undermine it. Students are hungry for expert guidance and mentoring within disciplinary contexts.

Code Breaking and AI: From Decoding to Pattern Recognition AI excels at recognizing patterns in text—identifying linguistic structures, analyzing syntax, and even generating grammatically correct sentences. AI’s main function is to decode and recode informational patterns mathematically.

However, human code breaking involves much more than sounding out words. It requires understanding how various coded lexicons, meanings, and structures resource trained disciplinary readers to participate in genre-based texts.

As students interact with AI systems, they need to develop metacognitive awareness of how these systems process language versus how human minds construct meaning from symbol systems, a significant challenge for meany teachers right now.

Text Participation and AI: The Irreplaceable Human Experience While AI can find patterns in texts and even generate interesting and useful responses, it cannot engage in the embodied, experiential meaning-making that characterizes human text participation.

When students read about environmental justice in their neighborhoods, AI might help them identify relevant information and suggest analytical frameworks, but only humans can connect these texts to lived experience, family histories, and community relationships.

The text participation resource suggests that AI should be positioned as a tool for gathering and organizing information while human meaning-making remains centered on personal, cultural, and experiential knowledge.

Text Use and AI: Authentic Purpose in an Automated World: Perhaps nowhere is AI's impact more immediately visible than in text use—the functional deployment of literacy for social purposes.

AI can draft emails, write reports, and much more with impressive competence. However, the text user resource reminds us that authentic literacy involves understanding how texts function within specific social relationships and taking responsibility for their impact on real people.

Students need to learn when AI assistance serves authentic communication purposes versus when it substitutes for necessary human engagement.

This suggests developing what we might call "collaborative authorship literacy"—understanding how and when to work with AI while maintaining agency, responsibility, and authentic voice in textual interactions.

Text Analysis and AI: Critical Thinking in the Age of Generated Content: AI's capacity to generate human-like text at scale places heavy demands on critical analysis. Students must learn not only to analyze human texts for bias, perspective, and power relations, but also to identify flawed AI-generated content and understand how algorithmic systems shape and distort textual production.

The text analyst resource expands in the AI age to include understanding how machine learning systems are trained, what biases they encode, and how they might be deployed to influence human thinking. Students need what we might call "algorithmic literacy"—the ability to critically examine not just human texts, but the systems that generate texts of all origins.

Text Acting and AI: Human Agency in Digital Democracy The text actor resource, with its emphasis on using literacy for social transformation and democratic participation, offers perhaps the most important framework for understanding AI's role in literacy education.

While AI can help students research social problems, analyze policy documents, and even draft advocacy materials, genuine text acting requires the kind of embodied community engagement, ethical responsibility, and democratic commitment that only humans can provide.

AI should be positioned as a tool that amplifies human agency, helping students gather information, analyze complex issues, and communicate effectively regarding authentic social action rooted in community relationships and democratic values.

The Synthesis: Toward Human-AI Collaborative Literacy

The Five Resources Model suggests that rather than asking whether AI will destroy human literacy, we should ask how AI can be folded into literacy instruction to enhance rather than diminish human capabilities across all five resources.

This requires what the historical development of the 5 resource model teaches us: the willingness to embrace productive tensions rather than false choices, to build from observable practice toward theoretical understanding, and to design frameworks for evolution rather than stasis.

The collaborative intellectual journey from Dolch and Gray through Luke and Freebody to Pearson, Underwood, Woo, and Cervetti and Pearson offers a template for how literacy educators can approach the AI revolution: with theoretical awareness and expertise and practical wisdom, with respect for both human agency and technological capability, and with a commitment to preparing students not just to consume and analyze texts but to use literacy as a tool for positive social transformation in an increasingly complex world.

As we stand at this historical inflection point, the Five Resources Model reminds us that literacy has always been more than individual skill development—it has been about preparing humans to participate fully in their communities and societies.

AI may change the tools available for this participation, but it cannot change the fundamentally human work of meaning-making, relationship-building, and democratic action that authentic literacy serves.

Discussion Questions

Have you noticed ways that AI (like ChatGPT or others) has changed how you read, write, or interact with information in your daily life? What benefits or concerns do you see emerging from these changes?

Which reading or communication skills feel most important to you—at work, at home, or in your personal life? What do you wish you had been taught about language and literacy or should be discussed more widely in our society?

What does your intuition tell you about the consequences of literacy instruction that teaches everything from decoding the word ‘democracy’ to using literacy as a tool to organize a protest?

References

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