Helping Students to Become Active Readers
Writing and reading skills are intertwined. Many university students have difficulty grappling with the unfamiliarity and complexity of academic discourse and have developed few skills to master it. Instructors in all disciplines routinely witness many of the following symptoms that indicate reading problems:
- They tend to wait for the instructor to explain the meaning of a text.
- They stumble over words because of a weak vocabulary.
- They miss the main point of a reading and get lost in details.
- They overuse (i.e., misuse) highlighters in a conscientious attempt to select main points, with the result that the entire text gets painted!
- They miss the organizational meaning or structure of a text because they don’t recognize structural cues, such as titles, headings, new paragraphs, topic sentences, and key words.
- They leap too soon to inferences and conclusions before grasping what a writer actually is saying.
What leads to frequent mistakes and difficulties in reading comprehension? Often the culprit is passivity. Students need to see themselves as active constructors of meaning. Use writing-to-learn exercises to help your students become better meaning-makers as they read.
Remind your students that worthwhile reading requires them to be active readers: active makers of meaning. How? By paying attention to the meaning of words, to the writer's purpose, to how a writer organizes main points, to a writer's reasoning. Increased awareness of how a writer constructs an exposition or argument is crucial.
- Ask students to maintain a reading journal for recording observations, exploring ideas, asking questions, organizing thoughts, and making connections among readings.
- Ask students to read with a relevant dictionary and to make lists of new terms (with definitions and sample sentences that demonstrate usage).
- Help your students to ask the following questions as they read:
- Who is the writer?
- What is the writer's purpose?
- Who is the writer's audience?
- What are the writer's assumptions about her or his audience?
- What is the writer's main point?
- What are the sub-points?
- What are the writer's assumptions about the subject?
- How does the writer build the argument or organize the evidence?
- What is the writer's conclusion?
- Do I agree with the writer's inferences and conclusion? Why or why not?
- Require students to be proactive and to pose their own questions about a reading rather than wait passively to be asked. Require each student to write at least one "Good Question" about a text and to bring it to class, having answered as much as possible of the question at home. Then you and all the students can explore the question further in class.
- Ask students to write a One-Minute Essay that summarizing of the main point of a reading during class. Then ask for a sampling of their responses and discuss the answers.