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Dina Sowers

Attention Linda, Glenn and Rich: I intended for this wiki to be on several different pages. I am going to separate them with a line of “******.” please link this to Cristin, Amanda, Sarah, John, and Frank - The links that I put in work and link to other webpages. The links that don’t currently work I was thinking they would link within this wiki and but on other pages. Thanks very much! Dina Sowers

Introduction to Reading Strategies

Research (Links to the full-text study articles Gender, Learning, and EFL ) shows reading is an essential part of an effective writing program although, a sometimes neglected and undervalued part. This is an important fact to know as a teacher of writing but it is not always clear how to help students become better readers. What are the best ways to teach reading? What reading strategies do good readers use? Are reading strategies important and why? The treads on reading strategies focus on linking some common educational outcomes to the resources that will help your students to achieve these outcomes in your writing classrooms. In their article “Reading Practices in the Writing Classroom,” Linda Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem write “that teaching writing is closely intertwined with teaching reading, yet many are stymied by how to engage productively with reading in the classroom” (1). This reading strategies section will give some direction for instruction while trying to tackle some common educational outcomes (I used the EMU writing outcomes as a base but the outcomes are very common ones in the field) in your writing classroom.

Reference:

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Questions Surrounding Reading Strategies:

What does the research tell us about the effectiveness of reading strategies??

Research ((Links to the full-text study articles Gender, Learning, and EFL ) shows reading is an essential part of an effective writing program although, a sometimes neglected and undervalued part.

Outcome questions:

David Bartholomae, in his essay “The Argument of Reading,” writes that the issue “is not whether or what students should read, but how” (245). In other words, the content is less important then the way in which a student read. Reading outcomes are closely linked to writing outcomes as students are generally asked to respond to a reading in some way. Different reading strategies can be used to achieve different reading and writing outcomes.

How can I teach my students to “Critically analyze their own and others choices regarding language and form”? (outcome from EMU writing outcomes website)?

This is a writing outcome so what does it have to do with reading? Mariolina Salvatori writes “…the teaching of literature and composition are characterized by an artificial separation between the activities of reading and those of writing” (“Reading and Writing

What can I do to help “[D]evelop relationships among critical thinking, analytical reading, and writing […?]” (outcome from EMU writing outcomes website)?

How do you foster critical thinking? Many teachers struggle to find lessons and activities to foster critical thinking in their students. Sheridan Blau writes “[w]hile reading interpretation and criticism define the overt focus of instruction in the academic discipline of literature, they also analogously describe the sort of critical thinking that is required for responsible intellectual participation in most civic, economic and moral transactions and in virtually every academic discipline and learned profession” ( The Literature Workshop 204).

A popular reading theory is “Reader Response.” But, Mariolina Salvatori, in a more recent article for College English in 1996, warns against this theory of reading. She states that an inexperienced reader should be discouraged from a reader response type of strategy as it may be “counterproductive” (443–4). She advocates for theories that explore help to give voice to a piece of writing. She wants readers to construct meaning through the

How can I teach the “use of writing and discussion to work through and interpret complex ideas from reading and other texts”? (outcome from EMU writing outcomes website)?

Is there just one way to read? What is the important information that the students must consider when writing about what they have read. “Good readers distinguish between important information and details as they read…”(Mi-jeong Song “Teaching Reading Strategies in an Ongoing EFL University Reading Classroom”). How do they distinguish? Some will automatically create their own strategies but other must be taught to use them. Song’s research indicates that reading strategies, when taught to students, increases students’ level of understanding.

There are many reading strategy books that can be helpful starting resources. “Literacy Strategies Across the Subject Areas offers teachers and students a flexible set of strategies that can help connect and support literacy learning within and across subject areas” (Karen D. Wood and D. Bruce Taylor). This book contains 24 strategies that can help your students achieve their reading and writing outcomes.

References:

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Questions Surrounding Reading Strategies:

How can I teach my students to “Critically analyze their own and others choices regarding language and form”? (outcome from EMU writing outcomes website)?

Beyond Re-Reading – More than just reading again:

There are as many different reading strategies as there are opinions regarding which ones are most effective. The students that would benefit the most from re-reading are often the ones that will not re-read for clarification or for any other reason. They need to be shown the value of this reading strategy. For his book The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers, Sheridan D. Blau titled his second chapter “From Telling to Teaching: The Literature Workshop in Action.” His main focus for this section was on teaching children to think about their reading instead of teaching what they should think about it. His intention for this chapter is to teach teachers how to help their own students become autonomous. He briefly explains the formatting of the chapter which includes the creation of an imagined lesson. The lesson is a culmination of several actual lessons he has experienced in his classroom. The lesson includes five specific steps. Briefly, the steps included:

Three Readings with Notes and Questions

• Read and re-read
• Rate understanding of reading
• Make notes
• Read a third time and repeat the two previous items

Group Work

• Discuss findings with a group of three to four
• Rate understanding again after discussion

Completing the Experiment and Noticing What Happened

• Discussion of the changes within the students understanding

Collecting Data from the experiment – what changed? What remained the same?

• Drawing conclusions from the experiment – why are there differences in the readings?

Mariolina Salvatori writes “[I]n the act of its reading the work cannot, nor should, be reduced to one meaning, to one perspective; the reader should not deny the possibility of subsequent revisions of meanings, subsequent modifications of perspectives” (“Reading and Writing Text: Correlations between Reading and Writing Patterns” 660). She suggests in her article that they can and must be taught together. The above reading strategy shows the students that a text can have multiple meanings.

References:

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Questions Surrounding Reading Strategies:

What can I do to help “[D]evelop relationships among critical thinking, analytical reading, and writing […?]” (outcome from EMU? writing outcomes website)?

Double-Entry Journals

With regards to helping students to perform, Sheridan D. Blau states that “instruction directed toward fostering performative literacy must focus on the process of reading and rereading, placing an equal or greater emphasis on what student readers learn about their own capacity as reader […]” (The Literature Workshop 215). He adds that the instructor should use assignments that make visible the reader’s own process. To this end, he recommends a double-entry journal. (also, see Beyond Re-Reading? link)

Divide a page in half

• One side is for reading notes
• One side is for discussion notes

‘’

• One side is quotes and page numbers
• One side is reflections on the reading
• Personal or critique

*Blau recommends that students write a new journal page for each rereading of the same text for self-reflection

Mariolina Salvatori writes “[I]n the act of its reading the work cannot, nor should, be reduced to one meaning, to one perspective; the reader should not deny the possibility of subsequent revisions of meanings, subsequent modifications of perspectives” (“Reading and Writing Text: Correlations between Reading and Writing Patterns” 660). She suggests in her article that they can and must be taught together. The above reading strategy shows the students that a text can have multiple meanings by making their own conclusions upon their first read and hearing the discussions and noting the meanings that others ascribed when they read the same text.

References:

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Questions Surrounding Reading Strategies:

How can I teach the “use of writing and discussion to work through and interpret complex ideas from reading and other texts”? (outcome from EMU? writing outcomes website)?

SQ3R

The SQ3R is a tried and true reading strategy that works particularly well when used to study textbooks. Each step in the strategy should be modeled and the lesson should include a guided practice with feedback. The steps for this strategy (from 50 Literacy Strategies by Gail E. Tompkins) are as follows:

Survey – (activate prior knowledge) Preview the reading by skimming through quickly. They should look at headings and make note of the main ideas. They should also, quickly read the introduction and summary. Question – (purpose for reading) Turn the section headings into questions before reading. Read – Read to find the answers to their questions. Recite – Students recite from memory the answers to the questions immediately following the reading of each section. Review – After completion of the reading assignment, the students go back over what they just read. Ask and answer the questions again and take notes (103).

Try this with the text your college has assigned for the basic writing class as a required text. Now, you have a use for the text as a way of teaching a valuable reading strategy that will aid your students in writing, studying and learning in all of their classes and you have made a step toward achieving a common educational outcome.

Teaching the reading strategies seems to be a key component for less proficient readers. According to a study at the Seoul National University, “less able readers benefited more from the strategy training […]” (50). The study found that the less able readers may have even been aware of some of the strategies prior to the training but did not employ them until properly taught to use them. ‘’‘

“*****************”

Questions Surrounding Reading Strategies:

What does the research tell us about the effectiveness of reading strategies??

Research (Links to the full-text study articles Gender, Learning, and EFL ) shows reading is an essential element of an effective writing program, although, a sometimes neglected and undervalued part.

Studies Show:

A study of reading strategies was conducted by Seoul National University in 1996. The findings of the study were reported in an article by Mi-jeong Song for the Asian Journal of English Language Teaching (Link to study information EFL). The basic idea of the study was to look at whether or not reading strategies, when taught to EFL students, would impact their reading proficiency or not. The group was comprised of all EFL students but they were pre-tested and categorized into three groups according to reading comprehension – low, intermediate and high. The study showed that the students reading proficiency and comprehension were improved after learning the reading strategies. The study showed a much greater increase in the students that started with the least amount of proficiency although, even the highest level readers showed some improvement, as well. The strategies taught to the EFL study subjects were summarizing, questioning, predicting and clarifying. The strategies were all taught in the subjects first language, Korean. In the article, Song writes “the results of the study suggest that foreign language reading pedagogy, especially for adult students in academic settings, would benefit from the explicit and direct strategy training” (54).

Another study (link to study Learning) conducted on 485 undergraduate students, reported in the Journal of Instructional Psychology, examined the question of learning problems and how this related to learning strategies. They identified fourteen factors related to needs including poor reading, writing and information processing. They state that “[t]he ultimate goal of all learning strategies is to enhance learning outcomes and performance” (193). They found that many students did not develop the strategies on their own. They paraphrase Weinstein when they stated that students will learn them and use them if they are explicitly taught including modeling, practice and feedback. Self-assessment is an important skill when monitoring comprehension. There is a correlation between student engagement, including the use of learning strategies, in retention and completion of college.

The final study (link to study Gender) to consider in this literature review was an interesting one on gender differences. The study examined if men and women had any significant differences regarding their uses of reading strategies. The conclusion of the study found that there are not any major difference between men and women when it comes to reading strategies. They were very similar in their usage of the strategies. The article also contains a top (and bottom) five list of strategies used by men and women. The top five included:

• Paying close attention while reading
• Re-reading for better understanding
• Trying to stay focused on reading
• Reading slowly and carefully
• Adjusting reading rate (Table 2)

Studies:

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Glenn, Linda, and Rich: This is not a page but a list of key words that go with this wiki section.

Key words for searching:

Reading Strategies Writing Struggling writers Outcomes Benchmarks College writing College basic writing Reading and writing SQ3R Re-reading Double entry journal Teaching reading Teaching writing Literacy strategies Mariolina Salvatori David Bartholomae Sheridan Blau Linda Adler-Kassner First Year writing Freshman writing Better writing Reading studies Reading study Gender Study Reading Research Gender research EFL ESL LD English as a foreign language English as a second language Writing improvement Poetry Lesson plans Learning disabilities

“*****************” Questions Surrounding Reading Strategies: ‘’‘

Further Readings on Reading Strategies:’Emphasized’‘

Click Here? for a literature review of these articles on Reading Strategies

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Questions Surrounding Reading Strategies:

D. Sowers

17-Apr-07

‘’‘ “Reading Strategies: A Literature Review”’‘’

Being a “good” college writer means, first, being a “good” college reader. Reading is an essential part of an effective BW program although, a sometimes neglected and undervalued part. The literature that I read for this review spans across many various ways to teach readers as well as discussions regarding the values. What are the best ways to teach reading? What reading strategies do good readers use? Are reading strategies important and why? These are the questions that this review will cover. I looked at academic sources as well as published teaching methods. In the article, The Argument for Reading, David Bartholomae points out that the word “good” has many versions (251). I use the word “good” within this review, as much as possible, in the way in which the authors themselves have used it.

Experts Say:

In 1983, Mariolina Salvatori wrote an article entitled “Reading and Writing a Text: Correlations between Reading and Writing” where she tackled the question of how to teach composition in a way in which the students will benefit from the interconnectivity between reading and writing. Salvatori explores the idea that a text is dynamic and cannot be held to just one meaning. The reader shouldn’t be trained to think of a text as determinate. Rather, a text is indeterminate. Upon reading a text more than once, the reader may find that the meaning has been revised. She notes that many students will find this idea less than appealing at first. They want one answer and will not like the uncertainty that follows this way of looking at reading. “[R]eading is construction, a matter of composing oneself and the text through interaction with it” (665).

In “The Argument of Reading,” David Bartholomae argues that it is not what students read that is important but the way in which they read that matters. The thrust of the article revolves around his contention that “close reading” should be taught in BW and other introductory English courses. “I want to think about close reading as a form of argumentation, the techniques and goals of which are disappearing from the undergraduate curriculum” (245). He also points to primary reasons close reading is not in many classrooms. Many are political and have to do with the failures of New Criticism but the ones that impact them most as an effective strategy are outlined near the end of this article. “To read closely and carefully demands time and attention from the faculty; this labor is unprecedented and seldom rewarded” (253). He concludes on a hopeful note by stating that there are ways in which teachers can teach reading and writing in terms that do not put them in opposition to one another.

In their article “Reading Practices in the Writing Classroom,” Linda Adler-Kassner and Heidi Estrem write “that teaching writing is closely intertwined with teaching reading, yet many are stymied by how to engage productively with reading in the classroom” (1). Their article acknowledges the difficulty many teachers find when trying to integrate reading instruction into the writing classroom. They call for equal parts reading and writing instructions. Adler-Kassner and Estrem examine reading instruction with an emphasis on fulfilling the outcomes declared in the WPA statement. The outcomes include:

• Using writing and discussion to work through and interpret complex ideas from readings and other texts (reading and roles)
• Critically analyze their own and others’ choices regarding language and form (roles)
• Engage in multiple modes of inquiry using text (reading)
• Consider and express the relationship to of their own ideas to the ideas of others (roles) (4)

They state that a good reader is one that engages “in a dialogue between genre conventions and their ideas” (5). The reader should be actively aware of the their own comprehension that takes place when reading. Adler-Kassner and Estrem caution that sometimes the reading activities assigned by an instructor emphasize something other than the intended lesson. “Reading heuristics – reading questions, rereading prompts, or class activities – often reflected other purposes” (9).

Adler-Kassner and Estrem also outline three different purposes for reading. Content-based reading involves summery and connection. Process-based reading centers attention on the author’s process to create the work. Structure-based reading puts the focus “on developing genre awareness so that student writers can make conscious […] choices about how, when and whether to use” different conventions (9).

Mariolina Salvatori, in a more recent article for College English in 1996, warns against some theories of reading. She states that an inexperienced reader should be discouraged from a reader response type of strategy as it may be “counterproductive” (443–4). She advocates for theories that explore help to give voice to a piece of writing. She wants readers to construct meaning through the

interconnectedness of reading and writing (that virtual, provisional interaction between two extremely complex, invisible, imperceptible processes that can nevertheless be used to test and to foreground each other’s moves) test to be constructed as something either obvious or authorized […] (445).

The article goes on to discuss teaching about the interconnectivity of writing and reading and concludes with sections she titled “Countering Objections” (450) where she anticipates and responds to arguments against her thesis. ‘’‘ Studies Show:’‘’

A study of reading strategies was conducted by Seoul National University in 1996. The findings of the study were reported in an article by Mi-jeong Song for the Asian Journal of English Language Teaching. The basic idea of the study was to look at whether or not reading strategies, when taught to EFL students, would impact their reading proficiency or not. The group was comprised of all EFL students but they were pre-tested and categorized into three groups according to reading comprehension – low, intermediate and high. The study showed that the students reading proficiency and comprehension were improved after learning the reading strategies. The study showed a much greater increase in the students that started with the least amount of proficiency although, even the highest level readers showed some improvement, as well. The strategies taught to the EFL study subjects were summarizing, questioning, predicting and clarifying. The strategies were all taught in the subjects first language, Korean. In the article, Song writes “the results of the study suggest that foreign language reading pedagogy, especially for adult students in academic settings, would benefit from the explicit and direct strategy training” (54).

Another study conducted on 485 undergraduate students, reported in the Journal of Instructional Psychology, examined the question of learning problems and how this related to learning strategies. They identified fourteen factors related to needs including poor reading, writing and information processing. They state that “[t]he ultimate goal of all learning strategies is to enhance learning outcomes and performance” (193). They found that many students did not develop the strategies on the own. They paraphrase Weinstein when they stated that students will learn them and use them if they are explicitly taught including modeling, practice and feedback. Self-assessment is an important skill when monitoring comprehension. There is a correlation between student engagement, including the use of learning strategies, in retention and completion of college.

The final study to consider in this literature review was an interesting one on gender differences. The study examined if men and women had any significant differences regarding their uses of reading strategies. The conclusion of the study found that there are not any major difference between men and women when it comes to reading strategies. They were very similar in their usage of the strategies. The article also contains a top (and bottom) five list of strategies used by men and women. The top five included:

• Paying close attention while reading
• Re-reading for better understanding
• Trying to stay focused on reading
• Reading slowly and carefully
• Adjusting reading rate (Table 2)

Reading Strategies

There are as many different reading strategies as there are opinions regarding which ones are most effective. For his book The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their readers, Sheridan D. Blau titled his second chapter “From Telling to Teaching: The Literature Workshop in Action.” His main focus for this section was on teaching children to think about their reading instead of teaching what they should think about it. His intention for this chapter is to teach teachers how to help their own students become autonomous. He briefly explains the formatting of the chapter which includes the creation of an imagined lesson. The lesson is a culmination of several actual lessons he has experienced in his classroom. The lesson includes five specific steps. Briefly, the steps included: Three Readings with Notes and Questions

• Read and re-read
• Rate understanding of reading
• Make notes
• Read a third time and repeat the two previous items

Group Work

• Discuss findings with a group of three to four
• Rate understanding again after discussion
• Completing the Experiment and Noticing What Happened

Discussion of the changes within the students understanding

Collecting Data from the experiment

Drawing conclusions from the experiment

Blau warns against providing students with all the answers to vocabulary and other issue that may arise before reading a text. He states that it leads to a feeling of dependence on the instructor rather than on themselves to solve the problem and it also “becomes a subtle way of over-determining what sort of interpretation students will produce, prejudicing them in favor of one particular interpretation[…]” (42). His suggestion for the type of background information that a student requires is to provide them with whatever information “any reader is likely to obtain from the jacket of a book” (43). Blau encourages teachers to teach their students the importance of rereading as a valuable reading strategy.

In the book Literacy Strategies Across the Subject Areas, Karen Wood and D. Bruce Taylor outlines lessons, and provides blackline masters for 24 different types of reading strategies. They included strategies like the KWL (What do I know? What do I want to know? What did I learn?) and Double Entry Journals which are strategies that many teachers have found very effective to use with their students. In addition to this type of established strategy they have included newer types of strategies like Web Page Evaluation and CLVG (Collaborative Listening-Viewing Guide). As technology becomes more prevalent in our society, these new strategies are increasingly important to learn. Wood and Taylor paraphrase Baker, Brown, and Scheid,

Research has shown that metacognition—the awareness and monitoring of one’s own thought processes, or. ‘thinking about thinking’ – aids students’ understanding and recall. Strategies that support metacognition can help students become more self-reliant and strategic about their learning (xiii).

The strategies that Wood and Taylor included are intended to help students to think about their own thought processes while they read.

The resource book, 50 Literacy Strategies: Step by Step by Gail Tompkins, took a slightly different approach to presenting similar material. Tompkins slotted each of her fifty strategies into categories to aid the teacher in their usage. She categorized them by grade level (K-2, 3–5, 6–8), by group size (individual strategy, small group or whole class) and by focus or purpose of the reading required (literature focus units, reading-writing workshop, thematic units). Like Wood and Taylor, Tompkins included many strategies that are tried and true staples of the teaching community such as, SQ3R for textbook reading and Venn Diagrams. She included a brief definition of each strategy, step by step lessons for teaching the strategy, examples and applications modeling the method and a reference section for each.

While the authors may have different ideas about which strategies are most effective to teach reading, they all seem to agree that reading is an essential part of any effective college writing course. Best practices in a BW class should include a good portion of teaching reading strategies.

Works Reviewed and Cited: