Interrogating Texts
Cheryl Hogue Smith teaches at a community college in a large urban city. My students often work full-time or at least work several hours part-time, traveling on public transportation to and from school for one-to-two hours each way. Many also have extensive family obligations, are food and/or housing insecure, and often deal with life circumstances that understandably interfere with or take precedence over their learning. One exercise I use to teach reading is “Interrogating Texts,” which asks students to write individually their responses to open-ended questions about their experiences of a text they are reading and to read aloud their responses before any group discussion starts. By not being able to defer to or parrot someone else’s response, they learn to trust their own ideas; for some, this is the first time they have realized that their thinking has merit.
In practice, “Interrogating Texts” divides a course reading into parts, and the directions for each part are usually identical. The first question in each of the parts asks students to do the following: On your own, silently reread the [first/second/third] section of the text. Based upon your reading of this portion of the text, paraphrase what you think the author is saying. After you paraphrase the text, write down any questions that this portion of the text leaves you with, and try to answer those questions. I ask students to first paraphrase a text in order to have them read for understanding, focusing solely on what they think the passage says. Only after all students read their responses aloud do they then discuss their responses and write down anything new or interesting they learned from their group mates. The point is to get students to write what they think so they can read—and learn to trust in—their responses.
After students complete the first direction, they then move on to part two of the same section of text: Reread the same section, one more time, and underline the one sentence that you think is most important to the meaning of the entire section. Explain why you think this one sentence is the most important sentence in the piece. If you found some of this text difficult, mark what you think were the most confusing parts, and discuss these with your group. The direction to explain why that one sentence is the “most important to the meaning of the entire section” is deliberately vague so students can interpret the question in whatever way makes sense to them. Again, by reading their responses before any discussion begins, students learn that they are capable readers and that they can support their interpretations of texts with evidence from those texts, especially in negotiations with readers who disagree with them. Sometimes a portion of an assigned text is so difficult and crucial to the meaning of the entire piece that I add a third kind of question that leads students through more guided, rather than open-ended questions.