Composition studies seems relatively unified in the belief that “active,” “rhetorical,” and “conversational” modes of reading are students’ best hope for facing the challenges of college reading and writing tasks. As commonplaces, however, these descriptors mask both reading outcomes and the specific practices presumed to support them. Through an analysis of three popular composition textbooks, we disentangle and reveal some of the reading axiologies most fundamental to the field and which we contend these commonplaces gesture toward but leave vastly undertheorized. We argue that more precise explications of these distinct reading axiologies ultimately provide a contextualist framework for reading, helping students approach their reading-writing tasks with greater clarity, flexibility, and purpose.

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Recent reading scholarship suggests that instructors should carefully attend to their students’ reading practices. Although reading journals offer insight into student practices, we continue to treat reading journals as a mundane, process-based document and overlook the important metacognitive work that journals contribute. Through the examination of a corpus of student texts, this article argues for reenvisioning the work of the reading journal, demonstrating how this commonplace assignment contributes to students’ recognition of reading-writing connections and describes a new lens through which to approach reading journals.