West Chicago Community High School
An Approach to Reading Instruction
Goals for Reading
- The teaching of reading is an enormously complicated endeavor. The
following summary cannot begin to account for the complexity of effective
reading instruction. However, the descriptions below report practices and
beliefs that the English teachers at Community High School have identified
during a series of discussions. The descriptions follow under four categories:
Motivating Students to Read; Promoting Active Reading; Fostering Critical
Reading; and Creating an Environment for Literacy.
- There are fundamental expectations for reading in high school: (1)
A student should be able to recall what he or she reads. For an expository
text, the reader should be able to recall the development of ideas. A student
should also be able to read a narrative and re-tell the story. (2) A student
should be able to read a text and express a theme or main idea that he
or she has derived from the reading. (3) A student should be able to explain
to an audience how he or she has derived a theme. (4) A student should
be able to judge the merits or validity of a theme by comparing ideas to
his or her own experience, to other texts he or she has read, or to other
related knowledge. These are expectations for students from English and
Communications 1 through Advanced Placement English 4. Students at all
levels need help in recalling what they read, in drawing inferences about
an author's generalizations, in explaining how they made an inference,
and in assessing the merit of a work or its ideas.
Motivating Students to Read:
- Many students do not like reading and have little motivation to read
for pleasure or for class assignments. There are students who have great
difficulty processing printed material and recalling anything of what they
read. These students resist reading and find instruction in reading a painful
experience. Regarding the motivation of students to read, teachers commonly
take these approaches: honoring students for completing independent reading,
finding literature that appeals to adolescents, entertaining students'
genuine responses to literature, providing class time to begin or complete
reading assignments.
- There are several obstacles to students' potential enthusiasm for reading.
Students are genuinely pressed for time to complete their reading, especially
if they are involved in school activities. Reading as a recreational activity
must compete with a variety of attractive entertainment options. Some students
avoid reading because they find the task very difficult, time-consuming,
and unrewarding. In some English classes, students who are attempting the
transition from ESL to mainstream English have great difficulty with the
language, and they lack the prerequisite knowledge for making meaning from
a text. Some students remain reluctant to read, no matter what materials
one offers or which instructional strategies one employs. In many cases,
however, the choice of reading material matters. Many reluctant readers
still enjoy being read to and prefer to have some choices for their reading.
Teachers have heard students who claim that the first books they read in
high school are Catcher In the Rye and Native Son (both read during the
junior year). Their enthusiasm for these particular titles suggests that
even reluctant readers find that reading is a rewarding activity when the
material is highly engaging and relates to their own world and life in
some way. Some students enter classes with negative presuppositions about
certain books. Teachers provide means for students to talk about their
initial impressions of particular titles and offer opportunities to voice
responses as they work with a text.
Promoting Active Reading:
- There are several procedures that teachers encourage students to follow
as they read: surveying, questioning, note taking, writing. Reading means
something more than the passive recognition of words on a page. Skillful
readers work at understanding and evaluating the substance of a reading
selection. There are many things teachers do to help students to become
active readers.
- Some survey techniques serve to generate interest and prepare students
to process new material. Teachers sometimes model traditional study strategies
like SQRRR and K-W-L to help students to work with a text by taking advantage
of its features in order to process and recall the information. Survey
techniques include the examination of illustrations, the reading of titles
and other bold face headings, the identification of repeated names, and
the reading of introductions and summaries. The survey strategies lead
students to anticipate the substance of the text and to pose questions
to guide their reading.
- As students begin working with a text, they might cooperate in small
groups to make graphic representations of the relationships among characters
and events in a narrative. The graphic display provides a means for students
to make connections among characters and ideas. Teachers use graphic displays
as advanced organizers, as note taking devices, and as means for summarizing
the content of the reading.
- In some classes, the students write in their journals the questions
that they have been pondering about their reading. The students introduce
the questions in class, and the questions become the focus for class discussion.
Generally, the questions would not be about basic stated information. The
questions might be literal level questions about key details tied to the
plot. The questions might raise doubts and stimulate discussion about how
to interpret particular passages or the entire work. In other classes,
teachers rely on guided reading activities. In guided reading practice
the teacher controls the pace of the reading so that the class can pause
from time to time to summarize, to pose questions, to answer questions,
and to make predictions. For the guided reading, teachers use overhead
transparencies to control the pace of the reading process.
- Teachers in many ways can show students how to read for comprehension.
Teachers, who are the expert readers, model for the students how they (the
teachers) read a text to figure out meaning: posing questions, making connections,
re-reading sections, consulting other sources, making predictions, etc.
Ultimately, the students would imitate the teacher's attempt at figuring
things out. The process is sometimes labeled reciprocal teaching. The goal
in many of these procedures is to influence passive readers into becoming
more active in working with a text.
Fostering Critical Reading:
- Ideally, teachers influence students to become critical readers. Students
read critically in that they establish criteria for making judgments about
the relevance and validity of assertions and evidence. Students judge whether
hypothetical examples and analogies are appropriate. Students begin to
interpret and judge the significance of statistical data. Students begin
to describe how they draw inferences and recognize relationships within
a text. Students use the literal details to make connections and draw conclusions.
Students can eventually describe the steps that they use to arrive at conclusions.
- It also seems to help that students work with critical issues that
call for multiple solutions or multiple perspectives. The thinking of problems
from multiple perspectives appears to promote critical reading. As part
of the process of thinking about complex problems, it is useful to paraphrase
each other. The paraphrase of other views helps to nurture understanding
of diverse perspectives.
- English teachers at Community High School see pre-reading activities
as valuable means for activating prior knowledge and introducing issues
related to themes in the texts that students study. A variety of pre-reading
activities are possible: posing a question, referring to a related news
article, examining a case study, responding to an anticipation guide, hearing
students' speeches, participating in a simulation, etc. Pre-reading activities
often prepare students to make connections. For some students, the pre-reading
activity will be motivating. In some cases, a pre-reading activity may
help to show students a pattern of thought and allow them to construct
an analogous problem.
Creating an Environment for Literacy:
- Students are likely to read and make an effort to understand and evaluate
their reading when they are part of a literate environment where teachers
underscore the fact that they value literature and language. Some teachers
have modest classrooms libraries. Teachers participate in book discussion
groups and speak enthusiastically about their own reading. Teachers sponsor
reading circles within their own classes so that students have opportunities
to select books for independent reading and talk about the books with other
students who have similar interests. Teachers demonstrate that they, too,
are writers who struggle with writing, yet value its importance. Teachers
also create classrooms where students are encouraged to talk about texts
and ideas. Many related activities support reading and celebrate its value.
- There are several ways in which teachers facilitate the students' responses
to their reading. In some cases students in a large or small group talk
about how they were able to comprehend what they read. Some teachers rely
on the use of reading groups to promote independent reading and to allow
for more open and varied discussion of the literature. Teachers expect
students to write in response to their reading and maintain a dialogue
with a teacher or other partner about what they had read. Some teachers
allow students to respond to their reading in a variety of ways: through
graphic representations of the story or themes, through oral interpretation
or performance, or through a musical composition.
- Teachers rely often on class discussion about assigned reading. Presumably,
discussion helps us put things together and sometimes discover what we
know. In some cases, discussion is an open forum for ideas, and can lead
the way to deeper understanding of the complexity of thought. In some cases,
discussion serves as a means for the teacher to assess the students' understanding
of their reading. However, another image of discussion involves the posing
of questions about which everyone, including the teacher, has some ideas
and some doubts. Valuable classroom interchanges about reading include
elements of both images of discussion. The teacher has some instructional
objectives, and hopes that the readers have mastered some content; but
there should also be opportunities for sharing opinions about the sense
that individuals make of the text.
- Teachers want students to react or respond to what they have read.
Typically teachers encourage written responses to their reading. One possible
written response would be a formal critical analysis essay in which the
student analyzes and critically assesses the ideas, the language, or the
structure of the text. Such discussions could have an historical, biographical,
psychological, philosophical, or political perspective. There are also
less formal opportunities for written responses. For example, it is worthwhile
before oral discussion to have the students write in a journal or learning
log about their reaction to their reading. The writing helps students to
collect their ideas and sometimes discover what they thought about what
they read. Some teachers ask students to write one-page "reaction
papers." Such papers have little formal requirements; they are intended
as a means for students to attempt to make sense of, or otherwise react
to, what they have read.
- Students become masterful readers when they have the flexibility to
alter their reading techniques to conform to purposes and contexts. Reading
flexibility comes from experiencing a variety of reading situations, working
with texts of all sorts and for many different purposes. When teachers
throughout the school assign and encourage reading and recognize a responsibility
to help students to understand what they read in particular disciplines,
students will gain greater skill and versatility.
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