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Reading the Hard Stuff
David Klooster and Patricia Bloem
(United States)
We believe in giving our students lots of different kinds of books to read. We want them to love reading, and so we offer high-interest, easy-to-enjoy books to our classes. We want them to acquire a lifetime habit of reading, and so we include brand-new bestsellers as part of our courses, the kinds of books students might pick up in bookstores after they graduate. We want them to know the rich heritage of their culture, and so we include classic texts from previous centuries. We want them to “read around the world,” and so we include books from many different cultures. And sometimes we want them to stretch themselves to understand difficult new ideas and complex genres and new vocabularies, so we include texts that we know will be very difficult for them. We suspect that many teachers at every level, from primary school to university, strive for a similar range of reading for their students. In this column, we focus on some strategies for helping students read difficult texts. 1 “This book is so boring!” “I get to the bottom of the page, and I have no idea what I just read.” “What’s the point? I’m never going to use this information!” No doubt you’ve heard versions of these comments. Sometimes it’s easy to laugh them off, but when students are complaining about a book that you love, and that you believe is just what they need, their words can be discouraging.
1We recognize, of course, the incredible privilege we have in terms of access to books in our culture, and in the freedom we have as college instructors to select books for our courses with very few limits. Yet it seems that nearly everywhere, teachers have more access to books than they did even a few years ago. Part of the credit goes to the oft-maligned “globalization,” which has diminished the problems of cross-cultural access that previously blocked access to books for so many, and part of the credit goes to the Internet, which gives students everywhere access to reading materials that we could only have dreamed of in earlier years.
When students encounter the most challenging books, we try to think carefully about the three worlds that come together in their reading. First is the world of the student reader. Every student brings a wealth of experiences, a prior reading life, personal likes and dislikes, ambitions, dreams, and goals. Next is the world of the text—its subject matter, its way of making its point, its language, its author, its history of influence (both the earlier works that affected it, and its artistic or intellectual descendents), its structure, its purpose. Finally, there’s the larger world beyond the classroom—the world the student reader hopes to enter, to participate in, to influence, and to change. This last world includes many elements—too many to name here—among them career, politics, neighborhood, environment, relationships, beliefs, and values. Whether our students are in first grade or graduate school, they all have their sights set on the world beyond the classroom; part of why we are asking them to read difficult texts is to prepare them for that world. And it is precisely that larger world that most often gets lost or obscured when students get bogged down in difficult reading.
We can imagine these three worlds with the help of the diagram below:
Teachers who want students to succeed with difficult reading assignments need to think carefully about the influence of each of these three worlds in the classroom.
Some readers will hear an echo of Louise Rosenblatt’s influential book of literary criticism, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (1994). Rosenblatt’s work in reader-response theory has indeed been important to us, especially in our roles as teachers of literature. Yet in this context, we are not primarily concerned about reading literary works, nor ultimately about the individual reader’s construction of the meaning of the text. Instead, we are thinking about the ways in which a classroom of readers builds shared understandings of a text, and then uses those understandings to do some kind of work in the world— to interpret, influence, participate in, or change the world beyond the classroom.
It is worth pausing for a moment to consider why certain texts are difficult for students to read. Though it’s not a new issue, there are new obstacles today. The Internet has changed the way students do research. Fewer spend long hours in the library, gaining the patience and discipline to read long, dense texts; more and more content themselves with quick Google searches or Wikipedia references and consider it research. They want to read a screen, rather than a chapter or a book. Accessing and interpreting scholarly articles is an increasingly rare assignment for many university students. Especially for contemporary students who have not developed a habit of reading, and who are not immersed in a culture of books, the challenges of difficult text can be overwhelming.
Texts that are difficult to read have at least some of these features: They are
1) long, often with unclear or unfamiliar structures,
2) theoretically sophisticated,
3) syntactically complex, and employ
4) unfamiliar vocabulary.
Bartholomae and Petrosky (2008) call works like these “strong texts,” and they argue that students need to become “strong readers,” able to engage in a process of “pushing and shoving with and against texts.” To help our students become strong readers, our teaching strategies will have to account for all of the complexities contained in challenging texts.
Anticipation and motivation
As classroom teachers, our first job is try find ways to bring together the world of the student reader and the world of the text:
Teachers can make use of many active learning strategies to help students access their prior knowledge and prepare for encountering the new text. We can use an anticipation guide: Prior to reading, students are given a series of provocative questions that will be answered in the text, and asked to provide answers based on what they already know or think they know. They then read the text with an eye toward confirming their predictions. We can frame a dilemma or paradox, and ask students to write about it or speak about it in a small group or with the whole class. We can provide an example of the problem the difficult text will explore—perhaps from a film, or from a previous reading in the class, or from an event in the news—and try to help students to see that the problem is a compelling and significant one. In all of these pre-reading strategies, the teacher aims to arouse curiosity for what is to come, and to build on what students already know.
Reading teachers know how important student motivation is in this process. Let’s think for just a moment about one of the reading miracles of our times: Young readers of almost every level of ability have been choosing to read difficult, lengthy novels on their own, simply because they want to. We refer, of course to the Harry Potter series. The books contain difficult names and challenging vocabulary, complex plots, intricate mythology. And they are long! Could we have imagined middle school readers tackling 700-page novels on their summer holidays before the Harry Potter phenomenon? What can we learn from the Harry Potter experience about motivating students for difficult reading? We suggest at least this short list:
- Choice. Students tackle hard books when they feel that they are reading them by choice.
- Peers. When students see classmates and friends enjoying a hard book, they are more likely to join in.
- Identity. When students identify as readers—as competent, self-directed, and willing-they are more likely to dive into a long, demanding book.
Researchers confirm that student motivation is a key factor in successful reading. Gambrell, Palmer, Coddling, and Mazzoni (1996) suggest that students’ self-concepts, and the value students themselves place on reading, are key to their success. In another study, Linda Gambrell (1996) discusses a number of factors that motivate young readers in primary school classrooms. These include a teacher who models good reading through enthusiasm and guidance, a classroom rich with books, opportunities for students to make choices about what to read, a familiarity with books developed over time, opportunities to discuss books with other students and with people beyond the classroom, and an incentive and reward system in the classroom that demonstrates the value of reading. Teachers at every level can look for similar ways to motivate their students to want to read, and to want to read well.
Analysis and engagement
In the next phase of the lesson, we need to help students enter fully and skillfully into the world of the text itself.
Part of this work needs to be done in the classroom, with the more experienced teacher guiding the less experienced students into the complex world of the text. The skills students have gained in easier reading assignments are the necessary beginning point, but in most cases these existing skills are not adequate to the task at hand—that’s what makes the reading difficult for students! If we approach the situation with the attitude that our students know a great deal but that they don’t yet have the skills they need to succeed in the present task, we are likely to set the right tone for the next phase of their growth. Without this awareness, too often students’ frustrations with the difficulty of the task quickly become our own frustrations (“They didn”t get it! They didn’t try hard enough. I guess they aren’t very good students after all.”). Remembering that without appropriate scaffolding of instruction, the task may be beyond them— that, in fact, we made the assignment precisely because the task is beyond many of them—helps us to maintain a productive attitude. We can help students in the classroom in a number of ways. Sometimes teachers narrate their own approach to, and encounter with, the text. Peter Elbow (1986) calls this strategy “Movies of the Mind,” an attempt to describe exactly what is going on in the mind as it works on the text. Teachers might draw attention to way the text is structured (the presentation of the central idea, the outline of the supporting elements, the kinds of evidence the author provides, the ways the knowledge is applied in the conclusion, or the calls for further research or the claims of significance). Teachers can help students with difficult new jargon or unusual uses of familiar words, and thereby encourage the close attention to language that may be needed. Often, students have difficulty understanding the disciplinary ways of thinking represented in the text. Difficult reading often presents itself when a professional is writing for fellow professionals, and thus students need to learn how historians talk to each other, or how philosophers converse in the company of fellow philosophers, or the ways scientists communicate their findings to fellow professionals. Unpacking the conventions of this disciplinary way of thinking can be the teacher’s most important work towards building students’ sophisticated reading skills.
But the teacher must also equip students for successful independent reading of the text, and here again some active learning strategies have proven effective. A brief lesson on annotating the text—demonstrating, for example, four ways to mark up a text (highlighting or underlining selectively, sign-posting main ideas and structural divisions, posing questions, and speaking back to the author)—can help students to be productively active and engaged as they read. The Double-Entry Notebook (Berthoff, 1987), in which student readers divide a notebook page down the middle and write notes and quotes directly from the text on the left side, and theirown comments about the text on the right side, is an excellent strategy. The Reading Journal, a more informal response tool, is also highly effective when students record their emerging understandings in the midst of, and at the conclusion of, their independent reading. Toby Fulwiler (1987) describes the journal as occupying a middle ground between the purely subjective personal diary and the purely objective course notebook. These and other methods help students remain engaged as they read, and prevent them from reaching the bottom of the page with the feeling that they have no understanding of what they just read.
The work of understanding a difficult text needs to continue once students return to the classroom after having read and worked on the text on their own. Small groups might gather to compare their Dual Entry Diaries, and formulate questions they want to pose to their classmates. Reciprocal Teaching groups might form, with students taking turns summarizing, questioning, and responding to the text. The teacher might ask students to review their Reading Journal entries and to begin a full group discussion with the elements of the text the students themselves found most interesting or provocative. The teacher will want to work toward two goals in this phase of the teaching: first, to ensure that all of the students have come to a solid basic understanding of the text, by eliminating confusion, clarifying difficult passages, and highlighting main ideas; and second, to focus on the enduring challenges and philosophical complexities of the text. The goal is not to make the difficulties disappear, but rather to concentrate on what makes the hard parts hard. This second goal, then, is to ensure that by the end of the in-class discussion of the text, students have identified the main questions and ethical dilemmas the text raises, and the issues that merit further inquiry and application.
Reflection and application
The final phase of our work with students, when we assign them difficult texts, is to ask them to inquire, through writing or through discussion, how their own world, the world of the text, and the surrounding world come together.
Effective writing or discussion assignments in this phase of the process will ask students to do several things. First, as always in the reflection or consolidation phase of a lesson, there is huge value in asking students to put their new understanding into their own words. Restating, summarizing, and paraphrasing what they learned from the reading serves the vital purpose of associating words with new knowledge. The more students are able to say in their own words what they have come to understand, the more they make the knowledge their own, and the more we, as teachers, are able to determine whether they truly understand what they have read.
Second, an effective writing or discussion assignment at the end of a reading task may ask students to put the text they have just read into dialogue with other texts. We want students to see how ideas develop over time, how one writer builds on the work of previous writers, and how one text can contradict or refute another. Good teachers will ask students to work with a cluster of texts, and to inquire about how the ideas in those texts connect and interact with one another.
Third, an effective writing or discussion assignment will ask students to take a stand on the ideas of the text they have read, and to inquire about how the ideas can be applied in the world, about how the text illuminates contemporary issues, in their own lives or in the world around them. Assignments might ask students to use the ideas from the reading to solve problems, to interpret a case study, or to guide the decision-making of contemporary people. We might ask students to take the role of the writer of the text they have just read, and enter into debate with other students playing the roles of other writers, politicians, doctors, or philosophers in a panel discussion. We might ask students to write a position paper, stating their own informed view of the dilemma or paradox the reading addresses.
All of these approaches help students read difficult texts by acknowledging the three worlds that come together in the class-room—the world of the student readers, the world of the text, and the world in which we all hope to participate beyond the classroom. Rather than allowing students to ignore or avoid the difficult text, these approaches encourage an engaged, active, complex reading of the text, guided by the understandings of the more experienced teacher-reader. They encourage student readers to apply the knowledge they gain from reading to address the problems they face in the world beyond the classroom. We believe the three-phase model we have described here—activities before the reading to motivate careful attention, specific active learning strategies during the reading itself, and follow-up activities to encourage reflection and application—can help students tackle difficult texts with greater success. The reading will still be difficult, but the outcomes are more likely to be successful.
References
Bartholomae, D., & Petrosky, A. (2008). Ways of reading, 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Berthoff, A. (1987). Dialectical notebooks and the audit of meaning. In T. Fulwiler (Ed.) The journal book (pp. 11–18). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/ Cook.
Elbow, P. (1986). Embracing contraries: Explorations in learning and teaching. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gambrell, L. (1996). Creating classrooms that foster reading motivation. The Reading Teacher, 50(1), 14–25.
Gambrell, L.B., Palmer, B., Codling, R., & Mazzoni, S. (1996). Assessing motivation to read. The Reading Teacher, 49(7), 518–533.
Rosenblatt, L. (1994). The reader, the text, the poem: A transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press (original work published 1978).
David Klooster and Patricia Bloem, both children of teachers, are married and have three sons. Pat is Associate Professor of English Education at
Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, USA. David is Professor and Chair, Department of English, at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, USA.
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