"Why do you want to go?" I ask, my standard question meant for monitoring students' activities during study hall. I refrain from correcting his improper grammar.
"I'm finished with my book, and I want to return it and take out another one," "Sam" replies.
This conversation takes place between "Sam" and me at least twice a week, for "Sam" is a voracious reader. Any free moment he has, he opens a book and reads it. 'Brendan,' you may be thinking, 'that's great! There are so many kids today who choose to do other things besides read.' Don't get me wrong, I'm happy "Sam" enjoys reading. But here's the catch--when "Sam" is in class and we're having a discussion about an assigned text, or when "Sam" is expected to write about either a text the whole class is reading or one he's selected, what he says and writes shows little thought about what he's reading. It appears that "Sam" reads all of his books on a surface level, concentrating on little more than the plots and the characters' identities and basic roles in the books.
Reading critically is a large focus of the Common Core State Standards. Not only must students be able to identify or explain what texts state explicitly, but they must be able to identify the implicit meanings in texts. This becomes increasingly necessary as students progress in their K-12 education. In elementary school, students learn to read. But once students reach middle school and progress into high school, the focus shifts, and students are must read to learn. Students are expected to learn content by reading, and the texts are increasingly difficult. To meet this challenge, teachers must teach students to use a variety of reading strategies to read both for knowledge and understanding. The following strategies appeal to different types of learners and ask students to gain knowledge and understanding in different ways.
One type of reading
strategy students can learn to use is connecting with the text. This strategy
involves students making connections between the texts they're reading and
their own lives, other texts, and the world around them. Thus, when a student
reads about how Roger tries to steal
Mrs. Jones’s purse in “Thank You, Ma’am,” by Langston Hughes, he might think of the time his mother found out he stole
candy from the convenience store, how Dally, Ponyboy, and Johnny steal cigarettes
in The Outsiders, and the
sentence for stealing in the penal system of the country he's studying for
Cultural Geography. Students are more likely to remember information when they
can connect it to something familiar, and by making the connections, students think about the text at a deeper level. This strategy especially appeals
to those students who are intrapersonal learners, for these students are insightful
and self-aware.
A second reading strategy students should learn is summarizing. For this strategy, students learn to take the important points, events, or information, and write them more succinctly in their own words. For a novel, students might write a three-paragraph summary of the plot. Students in a history class might write a summary of the goals of key actions taken during Roosevelt’s presidency to get the country out of the Great Depression, and students in a science class might summarize the data from graphs in an article on bird migration. For students to accurately put a text into their own words in briefer form, they must know the factual aspects of what they are reading and be able to see how the facts are connected. Summarizing is a strategy which primarily appeals to linguistic learners, those who are most comfortable reading, writing, speaking, and listening to others speak.
Graphic organizers are a third reading strategy students in middle and high schools could learn to use. A graphic organizer is a visual representation of the type of thinking or organization within a text, or a part of a text. Students record information and ideas from the text within a visual structure that shows the relationships between the information and ideas. For example, a student reading The Outsiders might use a Venn diagram for noting the similarities and differences between Greasers and Socs as Ponyboy and Cherry talk to each other; a student studying the Declaration of Independence in Social Studies might use a tree map to record the document’s main idea, its supporting points, and the details related to each supporting point; and a science student might use a multi-flow map to take notes on the process of photosynthesis. Students learn what the different types of graphic organizers are used for and how to recognize which graphic organizer might be useful for a particular reading. Graphic organizers demand that students know what information is important and how it relates to other information and works together to suggest ideas in a text. Spatial learners, in particular, benefit from learning to use graphic organizers because they think in images and pictures.
Another type of reading strategy teachers can instruct students in is called questioning the author. Questioning the author helps students make sense of challenging texts by encouraging them to ask questions to figure out what the author is either directly stating or suggesting in different parts of the text. Students are taught to ask different types of questions, depending on where they are in the reading or what they are trying to make sense of in the reading, and then expected to accurately answer the questions using information from the texts. A student reading Heart of Darkness may ask, “Did the author clearly explain why others in the Company resent Kurtz?” A student studying U.S. expansionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in his textbook might ask, “’All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous’ is what Teddy Roosevelt says, but what does it mean?” And a student reading in a science textbook about the different parts of a plant might ask herself, “Did the author tell me how fertilization happens in a plant?” Questioning the author forces students to reread texts to search for answers, increasing the likelihood that they will remember information. And certain questions encourage students to look at the deeper meaning of texts for the answers. This reading strategy is certainly useful to interpersonal learners, those who are strong at recognizing the intentions and motivations of other people.
A final reading strategy frequently useful to students is a KWL chart. This reading strategy employs three columns across a page. The first column is titled K, which stands for know or think you know. The second column’s title is W, which represents want to know or expect to know. And the third column’s header is L, which means learned. Students prepare for a subject by listing in the first column all that they know or think they know about a subject. Then they move to the second column and write a list of questions about what they either want to learn or think they will learn based on the reading they are preparing to do. Finally, as students read a text, they list information that answers their questions from the second column, clears up any misconceptions they had, based on what they wrote in the first column, and other information they find interesting or important, especially that information which might lead them to begin another KWL chart. For example, take a student who is beginning a unit on the Holocaust. She knows that during the Holocaust Jews were sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. So, she writes that down in the first column. But this girl’s primary experience with camp has been the weeks during summers that she has spent at Camp Coniston, and she doubts that was what the concentration camps were like. So, in the second column she writes, “What was it like to live in a concentration camp?” Then she reads a short history of the Holocaust. In it, she learns concentration camps were places where prisoners were forced to work, lived in crowded, uninsulated, unsanitary barracks, and were almost starved to death because they were given only a measly amount of food each day. So, the student lists these pieces of information in the third column. Asking the questions prior to reading creates bridges for students from what they already know to new knowledge and gives students purposes for reading, which results in students more likely retaining the information they read. Also, students often ask questions which seek implicit answers from the text. This reading strategy is particularly useful to both spatial and intrapersonal learners because the spatial learners can see the progression of their growth of knowledge and understanding across the page, and the intrapersonal learner looks inside at what he or she already knows and determines what he or she either wants to or should know about the subject.
Not all students need to be taught reading strategies. A small percentage intuitively develops effective strategies for comprehending texts. But for a majority of students, students like "Sam," this is not the case, and teaching these students a variety of reading strategies is empowering. They're able to choose which works best for them, depending on the subject and type of text. While it takes teachers’ time away from teaching content initially, ultimately, teaching reading strategies pays off as students more quickly, accurately, and deeply read texts once they master the reading strategies. Teachers don't have to spend as much time re-teaching material because more students get it the first time. And this is one reason why teaching students to use reading strategies is necessary in all subjects, not just English. Teachers who take the time to teach, and give students time to practice, reading strategies are doing their pupils a great service, for these skills are certainly ones they can make lifelong use of as adults.
A second reading strategy students should learn is summarizing. For this strategy, students learn to take the important points, events, or information, and write them more succinctly in their own words. For a novel, students might write a three-paragraph summary of the plot. Students in a history class might write a summary of the goals of key actions taken during Roosevelt’s presidency to get the country out of the Great Depression, and students in a science class might summarize the data from graphs in an article on bird migration. For students to accurately put a text into their own words in briefer form, they must know the factual aspects of what they are reading and be able to see how the facts are connected. Summarizing is a strategy which primarily appeals to linguistic learners, those who are most comfortable reading, writing, speaking, and listening to others speak.
Graphic organizers are a third reading strategy students in middle and high schools could learn to use. A graphic organizer is a visual representation of the type of thinking or organization within a text, or a part of a text. Students record information and ideas from the text within a visual structure that shows the relationships between the information and ideas. For example, a student reading The Outsiders might use a Venn diagram for noting the similarities and differences between Greasers and Socs as Ponyboy and Cherry talk to each other; a student studying the Declaration of Independence in Social Studies might use a tree map to record the document’s main idea, its supporting points, and the details related to each supporting point; and a science student might use a multi-flow map to take notes on the process of photosynthesis. Students learn what the different types of graphic organizers are used for and how to recognize which graphic organizer might be useful for a particular reading. Graphic organizers demand that students know what information is important and how it relates to other information and works together to suggest ideas in a text. Spatial learners, in particular, benefit from learning to use graphic organizers because they think in images and pictures.
Another type of reading strategy teachers can instruct students in is called questioning the author. Questioning the author helps students make sense of challenging texts by encouraging them to ask questions to figure out what the author is either directly stating or suggesting in different parts of the text. Students are taught to ask different types of questions, depending on where they are in the reading or what they are trying to make sense of in the reading, and then expected to accurately answer the questions using information from the texts. A student reading Heart of Darkness may ask, “Did the author clearly explain why others in the Company resent Kurtz?” A student studying U.S. expansionism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in his textbook might ask, “’All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous’ is what Teddy Roosevelt says, but what does it mean?” And a student reading in a science textbook about the different parts of a plant might ask herself, “Did the author tell me how fertilization happens in a plant?” Questioning the author forces students to reread texts to search for answers, increasing the likelihood that they will remember information. And certain questions encourage students to look at the deeper meaning of texts for the answers. This reading strategy is certainly useful to interpersonal learners, those who are strong at recognizing the intentions and motivations of other people.
A final reading strategy frequently useful to students is a KWL chart. This reading strategy employs three columns across a page. The first column is titled K, which stands for know or think you know. The second column’s title is W, which represents want to know or expect to know. And the third column’s header is L, which means learned. Students prepare for a subject by listing in the first column all that they know or think they know about a subject. Then they move to the second column and write a list of questions about what they either want to learn or think they will learn based on the reading they are preparing to do. Finally, as students read a text, they list information that answers their questions from the second column, clears up any misconceptions they had, based on what they wrote in the first column, and other information they find interesting or important, especially that information which might lead them to begin another KWL chart. For example, take a student who is beginning a unit on the Holocaust. She knows that during the Holocaust Jews were sent to concentration camps by the Nazis. So, she writes that down in the first column. But this girl’s primary experience with camp has been the weeks during summers that she has spent at Camp Coniston, and she doubts that was what the concentration camps were like. So, in the second column she writes, “What was it like to live in a concentration camp?” Then she reads a short history of the Holocaust. In it, she learns concentration camps were places where prisoners were forced to work, lived in crowded, uninsulated, unsanitary barracks, and were almost starved to death because they were given only a measly amount of food each day. So, the student lists these pieces of information in the third column. Asking the questions prior to reading creates bridges for students from what they already know to new knowledge and gives students purposes for reading, which results in students more likely retaining the information they read. Also, students often ask questions which seek implicit answers from the text. This reading strategy is particularly useful to both spatial and intrapersonal learners because the spatial learners can see the progression of their growth of knowledge and understanding across the page, and the intrapersonal learner looks inside at what he or she already knows and determines what he or she either wants to or should know about the subject.
Not all students need to be taught reading strategies. A small percentage intuitively develops effective strategies for comprehending texts. But for a majority of students, students like "Sam," this is not the case, and teaching these students a variety of reading strategies is empowering. They're able to choose which works best for them, depending on the subject and type of text. While it takes teachers’ time away from teaching content initially, ultimately, teaching reading strategies pays off as students more quickly, accurately, and deeply read texts once they master the reading strategies. Teachers don't have to spend as much time re-teaching material because more students get it the first time. And this is one reason why teaching students to use reading strategies is necessary in all subjects, not just English. Teachers who take the time to teach, and give students time to practice, reading strategies are doing their pupils a great service, for these skills are certainly ones they can make lifelong use of as adults.
Thank you,
Brendan
