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Literature Review-Questions About Reading Strategies

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: