Meaning construction means what?

Langer, J. A. (1990) Meaning construction in school literacy tasks: A study of bilingual students. American educational research journal, 27(3), 427. DOI:10.3102/00028312027003427
This paper is based on a study of Mexican-American students in 5th grade in a public school a low-income area of Northern California. The goal of the study was to observe the strategies used by bilingual students to construct meaning from text, how they use both languages and the knowledge sources they rely on when they read. The student's were all of Mexican ancestry, with a mix of USA and Mexican born students, however all have some literacy in Spanish (mostly their first language) and English. The students where given reading passages in Spanish and English and then answered questions pertaining to the content of each passage. For the responses, the interviewers were bilingual and allowed the students to answer the questions in either language.

To me, the detailed discussion of the results is meaningless - what they say makes sense but I do not understand it in the broader context. And for the detail required in the summaries I think it is not necessary. In the summary they give the broader picture of their results. They found that students with good meaning making strategies in their first language were able to transfer them to their second language. The meaning making strategies employed by students separated good readers and poor readers, rather than fluency in English. Students with poor strategies in Spanish had difficulty making sense of English despite English language proficiency. Through the questioning process, they found that Spanish fluent students thought in Spanish when they encountered difficult concepts in English. The understanding of the readings was, in order of highest to lowest understanding, the Spanish story, the English story, the Spanish report and then the English report (although the English story score was only higher than the Spanish report). The authors attributed this to genre familiarity - not surprising since children of that age are more familiar with stories. Also not surprising was that the type of question asked affected the student's ability to communicate their answer.

In the background part of the paper, there is a discussion of "Literacy as a Sociocognitive Activity" (p431), that literacy is not just reading and writing, but also thinking about language and text. I think it should be taken one step further to it is about thinking. There is also a component to literacy which is about the society in which reading/text occurs. They have three assertions "All learning is socially based", "Literacy learning is an interactive process" and "Cognitive behaviors are influenced by context, and effect the meanings that learner produce" (p431). These are interesting assertions and I think I agree with them.

They also discuss the constructive aspects reading, how understanding the meaning of text is a process which builds upon itself, based upon what has already been read in the text, the knowledge of person reading the text and the sociocultural background in which it is being read. And I hope that passage is as confusing as the three paragraphs in the paper, it takes a long time to say little.