Adolescent Literacy & the Teaching of Reading

Reading = a constellation of critical reasoning skills targeted toward knowledge construction; a way of encountering the world and making sense of it (p.38)

Deborah Appleman's opening argument in Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading is that literature teachers don't think of themselves as reading teachers. I absolutely agree and have had many moments in the classroom when I felt at a loss to teach reading skills. I learned how to analyze literature and how to help kids learn to analyze literature, but I never learned how to teach reading. I think it's hard too for lifelong readers (the English teacher types) to think about what happens as we read because it has become a natural process.

English teachers do tend to teach books rather than how to read them; the first time I had this revelation was when I read Kelly Gallagher's (2004) book Deeper Reading. He says, "If we simply assign writing instead of teaching students how to write, we'll get poor writing. If we simply assign reading instead of teaching students how to read, we'll get poor reading" (p.7). I have felt strongly about teaching writing to students rather than just assigning essays, yet I did not do the same with reading. I eventually realized that I expected students to be able to come to class ready to discuss symbolism, characterization, etc., but how were they supposed to do that after one reading of a difficult text? It really wasn't fair--I had read the book about 5 or more times to their one (probably quick) reading. I started giving students small sheets of paper to use as bookmarks but that also gave them a heads up as to what would be the focus of our discussion the next day. Then they did not have to attend to everything in the reading all at once on a first read through.

I rethought that strategy, however, as I was reading Adolescent Literacy because she finds that students need to engage in the transaction that Rosenblatt described and then name what they do naturally as readers. If I give my students a guide to reading, am I inhibiting them from noticing how they naturally read and work their way through a text?

I absolutely agree that what students can do with a text is more important than what they know about it. This stance would change many high school exams that test knowledge of novels with questions on quotation identification, plot details, and so on. The transfer of skills would be so much more possible; everyone forgets details about books, but if we know how to work through a difficult text, then we can use those skills with other books later on.

I like Appleman's claim that every reader is at some point proficient and at some point struggling. I agree that struggle really is not the issue--we will all find texts that we struggle with at one point or another. It is knowing what to do in those spots of difficulty that matters. Last semester I was with a group of students who told me from the beginning that they were not readers. They hated reading. I wanted them to see that they do read, just maybe in contexts that they hadn't thought about. I brought in a text message, a football play, and a baseball score box. Most of my students could easily read all three. I could read only the text message and had no idea how to interpret the other two. If we can open up what "text" means in our classrooms, I think students will see that they are readers and that all readers struggle with different kinds of texts.