Louise Rosenblatt is a retired educational researcher who developed a revolutionary approach to reading.  She suggested a theoretical model of the reading experience as a “transaction” or reading act as an event involving a particular reader and a particular pattern of signs, a text, and occurring at a particular time in a particular context.  Basically, the “meaning” is not apparent “in” the text or “in” the reader but happens or comes to light during the transaction or reading experience.  The term text implies a transaction with a text; and then term text implies a transaction with the reader.  “Meaning” is what happens during the transaction rather than thinking of them as separate entities instead of factors in a total situation.  Before an inference of the syntax can come about, we have to select a meaning.  Factors such as context and reader’s purpose will navigate the reader’s choice of meaning.  On the other hand, John Dewey, a well-known philosopher and educator for the pragmatism movement, believed that educational experiences required interaction between the reader and the text.  This new paradigm requires a break with entrenched habits of thinking.  The old stimulus vs response, subject vs object, individual vs social dualisms is no longer recognized of transactional connections.  The human being is recognized as part of nature in a continuous transaction with the environment as each one conditions the other.

Cobb & Kallus (2011). Historical, Theoretical, and Sociological Foundations of Reading in the United States. Pearson Education, Inc., Boston, MA.