To begin, two short memories. First, I’m sitting in my first undergraduate literature class. We’re reading Tobias Wolf’s In Pharaoh’s Army and I am captivated by the text’s structure and enthralled by the provocative storytelling. But, despite the fact that I have done my reading, I am stuck in my chair not knowing how to contribute to the discussion. I read the assigned chapters, but simply don’t know what to say about them in the context of this class. They were beautiful, emotional, surprising, but I’m not sure how to translate my reading experience to this critical and curious conversation occurring around me. And so I sit, gripping my text, listening but feeling lost.
Second, it is years later and I am now sitting in my first graduate literature seminar. We’re reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Almanac of the Dead and again I feel lost. By the end of my undergraduate career I was fairly adroit in literary conversation, but that was for the undergrad classroom. What’s going on around me now is completely different, including the sound of the conversation. The words and sentences being used to describe the text sound almost foreign to me. Again, I loved the book; and again, I was completely captivated by the narrative; but again, I am essentially at a loss for how to contribute to this scholarly roundtable discussion.
I know that these memories of classroom difficulties are probably not universal. On the other hand, I know that many students, undergraduate and graduate alike, struggle with how to read a text for class. And not because they can’t read in the conventional sense of the word, but because reading for the sake of scholarly conversation is difficult and requires an understating of how to approach a text with practical and critical strategies.
As we find ourselves in the middle of the semester—and our students likely entrenched in reading and discussing texts—it is a good time to stop and have a conversation about how to read. I encourage you to take a day, or even just fifteen minutes, to discuss with students ways to engage in texts, so they can be better prepared to talk (and write) about what they read.
A simple way to get the conversation started in your class is to ask: What are you going to highlight/underline/mark-up? And why are you going highlight/underline/mark-up those sections?
Most students do some combination of highlighting, underlining, and marking up of their texts, but ask them what kind of system they use. Ask why they highlight and underline and how their markups translate into actionable pieces of information for discussion, and you’ll probably get a slew of varying answers and a few blank stares.
Talk to your students about establishing a mark-up system. A system where they highlight for one purpose, underline for another, use little stars for another reason altogether. The system does not have to be complicated to work. Simply being consistent in marking for the same purposes throughout the text will help students as they thumb through their texts in class to quickly identify questions they had, areas of interest they pulled out, and points of connections they might have made.
The same thing goes for marginalia: it helps to have a system. Maybe the system means putting dots in the margins as they read so as to stay on track, check marks next to areas that our found to be important, and question marks next to areas where questions arise. Marginal notes need to be useful. If they’re not part of a larger strategy, they will probably sit on their pages, never to be brought up in class discussion.
One final but important point: before we assign a text, we should explain why we’re assigning it. I don’t mean to suggest a kind of blasé justification, but instead an explanation of how the text fits into the course, why we are reading it in this order, why it is important in the context of the course, and what themes it may touch on. When a student gets this information before they read, they can better know what to look for in the text and what they may be able to pull out for conversation. In the first memory above, I had lots to say about In Pharaoh’s Army but suspected that my observations might not have been relevant to the goals of the course; that was because I never understood how the book pertained to the course. It was listed in the syllabus, but not explained or contextualized. Let your students know why you’ve chosen each text and how it relates to the course themes and goals. It can really help them develop a reading strategy, one that helps to create conversation content.
Sometimes we complain about our students’ (in)abilities to discuss a text in full force. Sure, sometimes they don’t do the reading and therefore don’t have anything to say in class. However, often times, they have done the reading but are unsure of or don’t know how to discuss the text in the academic setting. Take some time to teach reading strategies. It’s worth it: you’ll not only enhance participation—you’ll help your students enjoy the benefits of fruitful and challenging intellectual discussion. After all, that’s what they’re here for.
Right on. It’s so fundamental that it may get overlooked. Teaching critical reading strategies along with different ways of reading – whether it’s the gloss to catch the gist or the in depth zone-in to grasp the whole – is so so so important. It seems like it’s so often assumed that students know how to read critically, and it’s on that assumption that profs sometimes write off quiet students for not having read, when the reality is students do the reading but lack the skill set to talk about it beyond here’s what I liked / here’s what I disliked. The same thing often happens outside of academe with the 25 million adults in this country who participate in book groups. many of whom, I’m betting, find it hard to get a conversation going beyond like / dislike…
You made some very good points. It seems like age is not a factor for teaching students how to read. Yes, reading skills are taught in elementary school but they should not stop there. As our students get older they have different needs with reading and they should be taught new skills the older they get. We should never be done learning. Great post!