Engaging with Texts

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We spend a lot of time in the English Department thinking about texts, whether they are in the form of a physical book written by a famous writer or in the form of the world as a text. We teach texts and produce texts. We require students to read texts and we hope that they will produce texts of their own. Given our passion for texts, is it any wonder that our composition courses focus on helping students engage with texts. In fact, our recent revision of the ENGL 096 scoring guide associates strong writing with meaningful and appropriate “engagement” with texts and adequate or inadequate writing with routine or minimal “response” to texts. But what exactly is the nature of that engagement? What are we asking students to do?

At least part of what we expect students to do is very mechanical. Quotation, paraphrase, and summary, the differences between them and their appropriate uses often occupy parts of several class meetings and feature prominently on learning objectives for first-year writing courses. Then there is the arcane and seemingly impenetrable world of citation and proper bibliographic format. MLA, APA, Chicago, ACS, CBE, ASCE, IEEE, AIM, AIP and other equally mysterious conventions probably strike students as cruel and perverse. Certainly some part, perhaps an inordinate part, of what we expect students to do with texts is mere machinery.

We also expect students to be capable information gatherers. Texts represent repositories of information, data that students hopefully transform into knowledge. But as students become more experienced readers and writers, they hopefully become more analytical and critical as both readers and writers. Texts that stood before as irreproachable in their authority might be subjected to increasing skepticism when viewed against a background of contradictory texts, conflicting perspectives and controversy over what counts as “fact.” Once the bulwark of unthinking deference has been breached, texts become less and less pronouncements from on high and more and more lived rhetorical documents governed by the very real human concerns of purpose, audience and conventions. It is finally at this stage that we encounter something that looks familiar to experienced readers and writers.

Rather than asking what we expect students to do with texts, perhaps we should have started by asking what we do with texts, or even more simply, why we read. Readers might respond that they read because they want to know, learn, feel, experience. “There is no frigate like a book,” according to Emily Dickenson. Perhaps the pleasure we derive from reading comes from the raising and satisfying of this curiosity that appears at the center of our reading experience. Reading, as Peter Brooks notes, might be tied up with desire, a kind of “epistemophilia” that motivates us to become involved and invested in the text.

Curiosity it seems is at the center of our reading experience. Without curiosity and the pleasure that goes with it, students will struggle to move from passively “responding” to texts to actively “engaging,” becoming entangled in and grappling with texts. Active reading strategies can help students enter into a conversation with the text. We can also help by modeling the kinds of conversations we have with texts, and by facilitating the kinds of conversations we want to have about texts. Most important though might be helping students recognize their own curiosity and the pleasures of asking the right question.

Encouraging Active Reading and Inquiry

• Before beginning a new reading, especially one in a new genre, it is important to create the context for the reading. Why are students being asked to read this text? What kinds of questions might they have? What might prove difficult to them?
• Encourage students to read actively, making notes and carrying on a conversation with the text.
• Encourage students to record their initial impressions and questions immediately after reading. What were they thinking about at the end? What did they find satisfying? What did they find unsatisfying? What questions do they still have?
• Encourage students to relate the “knowledge” of the text to what they already know. What did they read that was new? What was surprising? How has the “knowledge” of the text altered their thinking?
• Encourage (or require) students to prepare “authentic” questions for sharing with the class. An “authentic” question is the student’s own question—one is which he or she is invested and to which he or she is likely to persist in seeking answers.

Reading Strategies Revisited

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Repeatedly in the Composition Conversation on invention, participants called attention to the centrality of reading and discussion as an invention strategy. The most recent Composition Conversation focused specifically on reading and the strategies that teachers employ to help students become better readers.
In a recent survey of first-year writing students at CSULA, 30% of respondents characterized their reading ability as average or poor with that figure rising to nearly 50% for students placed in ENGL 095. Given this level of dissatisfaction, it isn’t surprising that, as one instructor stated, students often claim to “hate” reading. Clearly for many students, reading is difficult and a source of frustration. To overcome those frustrations, participants offered a range of strategies.

First, participants noted the importance of making reading explicit and devoting class time to discussing the reading and how to read the reading. One place to begin is the course reader. Most composition readers and reader/rhetoric texts contain an introductory section on reading strategies, such as “Getting the Most Out of Your Reading” in Models for Writers, or “Active Reading, Critical Thinking, and the Writing Process” in 50 Essays. Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum not only devotes an entire chapter, “Critical Reading and Critique” to the subject, but discusses effective reading processes and strategies in virtually every section of the text. These resources provide effective overviews of the reading process and the practices of effective readers.

But simply asking students to read about reading isn’t enough. Participants agreed that significant class time must be devoted to discussing texts and modeling strategies for understanding texts. We might take for granted that students have read and understood the assigned reading, but while they might have “read” it, they often have not understood it in the ways we expect. Some students might struggle to understand what they have read because they have limited active vocabularies, which as one instructor noted can be addressed through explicit attention to vocabulary development through journal writing and even instruction in using a dictionary.
Other strategies focus on more global understanding of texts. Some instructors ask students to write summaries of texts, a task that is common in the classroom, but universally acknowledged to be more difficult than it appears. Some have students “quickwrite” about a reading at the beginning of class to help them focus on the key questions of the text. Others use “recollection” units, where small groups are asked to come up with global summaries of a reading.

All students, however, benefit from focused attention to questions of meaning and significance. What is the writer saying? What is the significance of that? Questions of the first type ask for summary and focus on what might be called the information content of the reading. Questions of the second type ask for analysis and draw attention to rhetorical purpose and the writer’s strategic choices. Discussion that focuses on questions about meaning and significance, and small groups that enable students to discuss such questions, produce two key results: students come to a shared understanding of a text, and students begin to understand that meaning is constructed through deliberation and conversation.

Basic Reading Strategies

• Good readers preview the reading by reviewing the table of contents, chapter titles, headings and subheadings. They attempt to understand how the text is organized before they start reading.
• Good readers identify a purpose for reading: Why am I reading? What do I hope to get from the reading (information, ideas, pleasure)? How will I know when I’ve accomplished my purpose?
• Good readers place the reading in context. When was it written? By whom? For what purpose? What genre does it belong to and what conventions are associated with that genre?
• Good readers read quickly but are prepared to re-read. Does the writer always use topic sentences? Are paragraphs mostly filled with different kinds of evidence all supporting the same claim? Can parts be skipped or quickly skimmed?
• Good readers engage with the text, ask questions of the text, agree with it, disagree with it, relate it to other readings, and note when it confuses them.
• Good readers are able to summarize the text and frequently will reflect on the experience of reading. What is its main point? What was most/least effective about it? What problems did I encounter while reading?

Making Reading Explicit

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Most composition instructors agree that many first-year students need help with reading and the statistics back them up. About 90% of first-year CSULA students are required to take the English Placement Test (EPT) and only about 10% of them score above 151 (the “cut score”) on the reading section. In the CSU system, well more than half of all test-takers score below 151 in reading. While we, as teachers of English and teachers of writing, might feel (correctly) that reading is the responsibility of all departments and courses, the university looks to the English Department to provide leadership in literacy education. But given the level of writing skills in our composition classes, how can we find time to teach reading too?

Experienced instructors already know the answer: we are already teaching reading, at least minimally by modeling for our students the practices and strategies of good readers. What many of us might not be doing is making explicit our assumptions and practices. As writing teachers we probably don’t think twice about talking with students about strategies for developing an argument, and yet we probably rarely discuss with students how we approach a text for the first time, or how we skim a text looking for clues about its organization, or how we decide what to write in the margins as we read. All of us bring to our reading a wealth of expertise that we could make explicit for our students to help them become better readers.

Talking About Reading

What do good readers do? First, they read frequently and for a variety of purposes, including pleasure. Second, they are active readers who seek for ways to understand a text. They read with purpose and attempt to understand the writer’s purpose in writing. And good readers recognize that just as writing requires revision, reading requires re-reading.

If we had to summarize these practices, we might begin by saying that

• Good readers preview the reading by reviewing the table of contents, chapter titles, headings and subheadings. They attempt to understand how the text is organized before they start reading.
  
• Good readers identify a purpose for reading: Why am I reading? What do I hope to get from the reading (information, ideas, pleasure)? How will I know when I’ve accomplished my purpose?
  
• Good readers place the reading in context. When was it written? By whom? For what purpose? What genre does it belong to and what conventions are associated with that genre?
  
• Good readers read quickly but are prepared to re-read. Does the writer always use topic sentences? Are paragraphs mostly filled with different kinds of evidence all supporting the same claim? Can parts be skipped or quickly skimmed?
  
• Good readers engage with the text, ask questions of the text, agree with it, disagree with it, relate it to other readings, and note when it confuses them.
  
• Good readers are able to summarize the text and frequently will reflect on the experience of reading. What is its main point? What was most/least effective about it? What problems did I encounter while reading?
  

By making explicit our reading expertise we can help students become more effective readers.

What Do Good Readers Do?

1. Read for a variety of reasons including (or especially) pleasure
   
2. Read at different speeds and intensities: skim, scan, or study depending on need
   
3. Read actively carrying on a conversation with the text
   
4. Read with an awareness of the text’s genre and associated conventions
   

What Do Good Readers Note About A Text?

1. Table of contents, chapter titles, index, introduction, headings, subheadings, and any other hint of global organization
   
2. The genre of the text (i.e. narrative, academic essay, and so on)
   
3. Thesis, topic sentences, transitions and other focusing devices that help identify the writer’s preferred method of local organization
   
4. Biographical information about the author, time, place and purpose of writing, and any other information that might help contextualize the text