The document discusses the importance of rethinking reading and literature teaching, emphasizing that students possess inherent language skills that should be nurtured through engagement and reflection. It highlights the need for educators to create an environment that encourages students to explore their own theories and values regarding literature. Ultimately, effective reading instruction relies on a rich language environment, active engagement with texts, and ongoing discussions about literature's relevance to students' lives.
The document discusses the importance of rethinking reading and literature teaching, emphasizing that students possess inherent language skills that should be nurtured through engagement and reflection. It highlights the need for educators to create an environment that encourages students to explore their own theories and values regarding literature. Ultimately, effective reading instruction relies on a rich language environment, active engagement with texts, and ongoing discussions about literature's relevance to students' lives.
The document discusses the importance of rethinking reading and literature teaching, emphasizing that students possess inherent language skills that should be nurtured through engagement and reflection. It highlights the need for educators to create an environment that encourages students to explore their own theories and values regarding literature. Ultimately, effective reading instruction relies on a rich language environment, active engagement with texts, and ongoing discussions about literature's relevance to students' lives.
The document discusses the importance of rethinking reading and literature teaching, emphasizing that students possess inherent language skills that should be nurtured through engagement and reflection. It highlights the need for educators to create an environment that encourages students to explore their own theories and values regarding literature. Ultimately, effective reading instruction relies on a rich language environment, active engagement with texts, and ongoing discussions about literature's relevance to students' lives.
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Reconsidering Reading
Reconsidering reading in many ways has many implications for the teaching of literature. First, anyone who has learned a language has years of experience building theories about the ways words work. Therefore, many students have the capacity to think about the language. Many students have played with the language, which is a rich and firm foundation for reading literature. How well students read is fed by the kinds of questions they ask, the nature of the discussions they are part the types of writing they do, and the sort of responses their writing provokes (Brown 1988; Brown and Palinscar 1986; Petersen 1988; Scholes 1985; Aquires 1988).
If the act for reading is, in fact, a matter of thinking and feeling along any number of paths at once, we are shortchanging student if all we talk about is decoding or analyzing the structure of a text. We have the responsibility to recognize and educate other reading processes that frequently go unstudied or unnamed. These include the ways students engaged with what they read, their reflections on the reading process, and whether they think about books as comments on, or questions about the culture in which they live.
Since reading is a profoundly social and cultural as well as cognitive and as
development of expression, the smallest other tasks or acts like reading assignments, commentary or reflection papers about the selection or specific topic, or questions asked in class are all infused a teacher's particular view of language and reading. Do away with reading and the language part will be useless. But many of the readers in any classroom may bring a quite different set of expectations and values to a text. Rather than presuming views and values, teachers might, and perhaps ought to, use their beliefs to challenge students to know their own theories and values. What is literature for? What is its importance to our students' academic life? What is a reader supposed to do? Is it all right for a writer like Hemingway to offer cool, detached descriptions of war and wounding or like Edgar Allan Poe to demonstrate the bizarre in his horror stories? What is being portrayed in the stories of Mark Twain? Is a poem that sounds like ordinary conversation doing what a poem should do? Getting along with these kinds of questions is not a digression but a part of acquiring a deeper literacy (Graff 1987; Scholes) Increasingly there are classrooms where teachers, working with students who vary in their expectations and abilities, are rethinking how they teach literature and reading in the past year I have spent teaching communication arts classes (undergraduate level) and applied linguistic classes (graduate school level at the same time, observing and interviewing them to understand how they enabled student to think and play with ideas as they read. Much time was spent with students, asking them to think aloud as they read their assignments for the next day and reading journal entries and essays they wrote. I interviewed them about what they read, what place it had in their lives, and what they find troubling, interesting or hard when they read.
In collecting those observation and interview sessions, I have also worked
with average students. Nevertheless, most of the examples were feature active; committed teachers and student would think out loud about reading. While some of what they say is taken directly from classroom exchanges, other portions were collected in personal interviews. At the same time the observations are not always of exemplary moments; they are simply occasions when teachers and students wrestle with important questions about reading. They are slices of classroom interchange rich enough to provoke discussion. Such observations as a way of sparkling discussion, not of legislating practice. Teachers know their own students, schools, and situations with an intimacy that makes them the unmistakable judges of which issues are most central and which ideas are most applicable. The particulars offered here are not part of some complete system for teaching students to read literature. They only suggest the kinds of climates in which all students might learn to read literature.
On what things does learning to read literature depend on? Many teachers and a number of students demonstrated that learning to read literature depends on the following: aj taking part in a rich and varied language environment; b) learning how to engage with literature; d interesting reading material and reflecting on the process of reading it and d) participating in an ongoing conversation about the selection ideas and their accompanying highlighted activities or discussion.
