Teaching Reading

A happy accident

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

My plan for this week was to write about reading—specifically, how I’m helping students learn to do it better, and how I’m assessing their efforts. I started having second thoughts on Tuesday, when I opened Bluesky to an onslaught of bad news for higher ed (and, frankly, for everyone else, too). This happens to me often: faced with the neverending dumpster fire of American politics, my little blog posts about grading start to feel silly.

But then I thought, what could be more important right now than making sure our newly-minted voters and future community organizers know how to—at the very least—read? So, we’re sticking with the plan for today.

A few months back, I wrote a blog post about my revised approach to teaching Rhetorical Analysis and the kind of standards-based way I decided to assess it:

My friends and conference co-organizers over at The Grading Podcast were intrigued by the ideas in the post and invited their colleague Joe Zeccola, a high school English teacher, on to discuss it. (Listen to the podcast here!)

Joe said something during that conversation that I had implied but not fully articulated (even to myself) in the process of writing the post: that “rhetorical analysis is a reading skill,” as opposed to a writing skill. I think you could broaden this to any kind of analysis. Breaking down the pieces of a text and understanding it on a deeper level is not the same thing as writing a coherent paper that explains your analysis.

Okay, yes: I have a miniature English professor sitting on my shoulder, smoking a pipe and telling me that reading and writing and thinking are all interrelated—that writing a good paper is a sure sign, maybe the best sign, of strong reading and thinking skills.

Fine. And maybe this guy is right insofar as he means that creating good arguments is a sign of strong reading and thinking. But you can make a good argument without making it in well-organized, beautifully polished prose, and I’m not sure how much those qualities have to do with reading and thinking skills anyway. ChatGPT is proof enough that you can produce a very pretty “writing-related simulation” or “vaguely writing-flavored product” that shows little evidence of good reading or thinking.

So: analysis is a reading skill. Or rather, it’s a kind of advanced reading skill that goes beyond mere comprehension. Unfortunately, reading skills of all kinds seem like something our students need more support in developing these days.

I’m not an expert on reading or literacy, and I think the jury is still out on exactly how, and why, students’ reading abilities have evolved since the pandemic. Anecdotal reports from the field are not encouraging. Many college educators believe that their students have less reading stamina and more difficulty comprehending simple texts than they used to.

It’s hard for me to say what, exactly, has been happening with the students I teach, because I never teach the same class with the same population of students for long. But I can say that I’ve been troubled by student reading skills lately. In particular, many students seem to understand the meaning of individual sentences but can’t figure out how those sentences combine to make meaning as a larger whole. For instance, they might read a sentence that is clearly, based on its context in a larger passage, meant to be sarcastic but then proceed to take that sentence at face value.

Of course if you read each sentence as its own little package, unconnected from all the other sentences, it’s hard to understand what a text is saying, much less to analyze it. And that’s before we even get to the paper-writing part of the process.

So, that’s partially how I ended up with the method I used last semester. Instead of asking students to write a rhetorical analysis paper, I developed short rhetorical analysis exercises in which students answered a series of questions about the texts they read. These were pretty basic questions: What’s the argument? Who’s the audience? How does the author support their argument, using what kinds of evidence? What stylistic choices did they make, and why?

These questions allowed me, and my students, to break down their analytical skills in a more fine-grained way. Student A kind of understands audience, but they’re having trouble identifying elements of the writer’s style. Student B can identify the various kinds of evidence the text employs, but they don’t really understand the larger context of the argument. Student C simply doesn’t get what the text is saying, on a basic level. When I returned analyses to students, I indicated whether I thought they were at the level of “developing,” “proficient,” or “excellent” on each category of question.

In last semester’s post, I observed that these exercises, and the way I provided feedback to students, made our mid-semester conversations about their achievement more robust and specific. I’m happy to report that reading and rhetorical analysis also came up quite a bit during our end-of-semester self-assessments and conversations.

I was kind of shocked by students’ takeaways from the class. This is the first time I’ve had several students note, unprompted, that their reading skills had improved during the semester, even when they didn’t put it in those terms. When I asked follow-up questions, they said things like…

• When you slow down and really think about what you’re reading, you can find a lot of deeper meaning.

• I had to read things multiple times to actually understand them, and I learned that you can read the same thing several times and get something different out of it every time.

• I can read a paper and understand the argument now, even if I don’t understand much about the context.

• I never really thought about the fact that things you read are tailored to different audiences, and you can find out who the audience is by reading closely.

• I used to have trouble understanding why writers used certain words, images, or other details, but now I can see how they’re used to persuade readers.

• Now when I read, I look for certain things and take notes instead of just reading the words.

Or simply:

• I can comprehend things I read better now.

I’m paraphrasing a little here, but these are all sentiments students actually expressed, either in writing or in our conferences, at the end of the class. And sometimes they were said with a kind of wonder—like they didn’t know they could get better at reading. I’ve been wondering at their takeaways too, since I didn’t consciously set out to teach reading.

One interesting thing about these comments is that almost all of them are describing the development of skills or knowledge that I’ve often assumed students are already coming into college with. I learned to identify an argument? I learned that arguments have audiences? I learned that written texts contain multitudes? These are all sources of revelation, at least for some students. Even if I wish they had gotten there a little sooner, I’m glad they got there in my class.

I think what I’ve accidentally done to spur this development is simply to break down the task of analytical reading for students into a few of its component parts. My sense is that students mostly need focused, deliberate practice with domain-specific reading tasks. We think of “reading” as one overarching skill that students practice in every discipline, which is, of course, true. But what we’re actively doing when we read varies quite a bit across disciplines. Since I teach a writing class, we’re focused on “reading like writers” (language I used in my syllabus and that some of my students echoed in their final comments). That means we practice identifying arguments, thinking about how they were constructed, and responding to them as a way to enhance our own writing.

In my other subject (English literature), of course, reading looks different; literary works demand that readers ask different questions. I’m kind of appalled that I got all the way through three degrees in that discipline without anyone explicitly or systematically discussing with us what it is that literary scholars are actually doing when they read literature and why—I guess we were supposed to pick this up through osmosis or something. I’m only just now, as a teacher, developing a solid sense of what I think we’re supposed to be imparting in literature courses aside from content knowledge and some nebulous collection of “critical thinking skills.”

The point is that we, in higher education, need to talk with students more explicitly about how to read in our specific disciplines, instead of just modeling it and hoping they’ll pick it up. Students are hungry for this kind of support, and they seem to benefit from it.

It does seem like a problem that none of us are trained in how to teach reading. But when has a lack of teaching training ever stopped us before?

Further Reading on Reading

Lots of people have been helping me think more deeply about reading in the last few weeks. Here are four:

Jenae Cohn’s UVA Teaching Hub collection on Reading Pedagogy is indispensable. I haven’t read through everything in it yet, but I’m excited to dive in.

Betsy Barre’s recent podcast interview on Tea for Teaching got me thinking more deeply about some of these issues (and I can’t wait for Betsy to visit us here at UM in a few weeks).

Trevor Aleo

has been writing a series on the key practices of English teaching that has helped me solidify my own thoughts about what habits of mind we’re teaching when we teach literature:

On Teaching Interpretation (Part 2)

And ditto for my fellow early modernist

Scott Newstok

, whose work on the history of close reading has given me a lot to consider:

the history of close reading

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If you’re a literacy expert, please tell me what I’ve gotten wrong here! And if you’re not: what are you noticing about students’ reading skills? How are you teaching reading in your courses or disciplines? And how are you assessing it? I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts.