Strategies for Teaching Reading
My name is Earl H. Brooks, and I am an Assistant Professor of English in Baltimore, Maryland. One of the teaching challenges I encountered was increasing the depth and rigor of class discussions in an introductory college course in rhetoric and composition. One of the first concepts I introduce to the students is “critical literacy.” I borrow this idea from the field of composition studies, and it suggests that an authentic education demands active student involvement in order to support the formation of a student critical consciousness. Therefore, from this view, literacy is a critical, social practice and not just the transmission of technical skills. Throughout my interactions with students, I concluded that the lack of reading by a wide swath of them was one of the most urgent problems challenging the goals and effectiveness of both my teaching practices and the department’s curriculum.
Most writing or literature courses require some degree of outside reading. However, the question of how to encourage students to complete their homework assignments raises a few complications. First, I have always resented test-oriented methods, such as reading quizzes or short exams, because I held the belief that such measures would only further motivate those students who were already proficient in completing their reading assignments. Second, past attempts at such measures seemed to decrease student morale. Yet, discussions within my Faculty Learning Community, and our campus Faculty Development Center, led to several key changes to my pedagogy. I learned that students are working more hours outside of class than previous years in addition to their increased familial responsibilities. This means that even well-meaning, ambitious students are making decisions about how much homework they will complete based on their perception of which homework assignment is most important to their grades. Much of my previous approach to structuring a syllabus relied on the assumption that certain practices would be undertaken by students for their own educational growth. However, the kinds of reading practices I wanted my students to undertake were clearly implied but unquantified within the course grading schema.
To counter this problem, I implemented a structure surrounding course readings that would hold students accountable but also manifest a visceral reward for completing such tasks. This structure included the implementation of graded reading responses, a daily quiz, and small-group presentations on course readings. Thus, when students complete the readings, they are aware that they will earn points on multiple occasions. Additionally, I link each reading to some form of media, such as documentaries, films, televisions series, or music. For example, by devoting a small portion of class time to a documentary, such as LA 92, I can pull students into that historical moment and thus heighten the sense of relevance for readings from writers who responded to the Los Angeles riots of 1992. I aim to build excitement and drama for each reading assignment in ways that will not only encourage students to read through sheer curiosity, but also emphasize the relationship between any particular reading and the social dramas of our current moment.
Although I use class time to emphasize reading comprehension, one cannot take for granted that similar levels of comprehension will extend to the assignments. To remedy this, I devote considerable time to discussion of the assignment instructions and strong, demonstrative examples. One of my past mistakes has been the assumption that students will seek out appropriate models for their assignments (examples of essays or multimedia projects by professional writers or composers) just from my verbal recommendations in class. However, I learned I cannot take such behaviors for granted, particularly with students who may not be accustomed to reading the kinds of material they encounter in my courses.
Another concern was students who had difficulty understanding how various readings fit together to emphasize broader themes within the course. Further, many students do not understand how the content in any one course within the English department relates to another. The ability to discern differences and similarities between ideas, authors, or compositional formats across a wide variety of texts and genres is a crucial component of the curriculum that I believe requires a detailed and focused strategy. One of those strategies includes formatting instructions for essay assignments in ways that will emphasize the necessity of understanding how the readings build on broader ideas. Another strategy I use involves deploying a list of vocabulary words constructed from all course readings at the beginning of the course and finding ways to continuously return to the vocabulary list throughout the semester. My goal is that such a document may serve as a grounding, central text for the course and, if utilized effectively, may help the various readings appear more coherent and cohesive.
The impact of all of these strategies has been exciting. I have seen dramatic improvement of both class discussions and the overall reading comprehension of my students. However, students are still grappling with the aftermath of the pandemic as many of their sources of stability have been shaken. Therefore, the strategies I describe here will be challenged by greater student demands for flexibility and alternative assignment schedules and standards.