Strategies for Improving the Reading Process

There are many reasons why students have difficulty reading in college, and countless pedagogical theories try to figure out how best to incorporate and teach reading.  Most of the problems with reading comprehension revolve around how many of our students have little prior experience with the vocabulary, organization, or abstract qualities of many academic texts.  Many of our students may have been accomplished readers in high school, but struggle to communicate academic ideas in class or in their writing. With little prior experience with the workings of academic texts, there are often significant and daunting gaps between students’ prior knowledge and the possibility of improving reading comprehension.

It is important to remember that not every student will bridge these gaps with the same reading strategies, and it’s important to approach texts from several perspectives.  There are a great variety of reading strategies to choose from.  Kennedy and Smith’s first chapter from Reading and Writing in the Academic Community, organize several comprehensive reading strategies into three elemental strategies:

1. Reading for Content

    

2. Reading for Genre, Organization and Stylistic features

    

3. Reading for Rhetorical Context

    

The authors suggest that using these three strategies allows readers a flexible approach reading via three different but not distinct ways of reading, and that these can be used simultaneously or as strategic plans involving particular questions and types of conversations with a text.

Reading for Content (Reading to grasp the content: main idea, vital premises, and supporting details)

Questions: What is the main idea? How is the main idea supported and developed? What other content is important?

 For many students, “reading for content” will likely seem to be an obvious or automatic result of reading anything.  However, as we know, reading for content requires various degrees of versatility and exertion. Many students will require a strategy for much more active reading than they are accustomed to in their everyday reading, or even in relation to other courses they’ve experienced.  Kennedy and Smith give some insight into active reading strategies like:

·         Calling up prior knowledge, experience, and feelings about the topic (before after and while reading)

·         Previewing the text and deriving questions to guide your reading    

·         Annotating the text and taking notes

Reading for Genre, Organization and Stylistic features (Reading to grasp what an author is doing as well as saying)

Questions: Is the text in an identifiable genre? How do the different parts function? How is the text organized? What are the text’s distinctive stylistic features?

Just as students have important prior knowledge about content, they also come equipped with important expectations about how authors set up texts.  Helping students understand and expand what they know about genres and conceptual frameworks is crucial to reading comprehension.  Today “genre” is a broader concept than most students realize.  Although they have become familiar with a variety of genres of communication since show and tell, the specialized genres of academic writing, and the patterns of organization and development they entail, may still be largely unfamiliar. 

In the Wayne State Composition Program, the new common syllabus for 1010 and 1020 each focus on particular genres.  It will help students to understand why these are important genres and how they relate to classic types of academic essay writing like: personal essays, response, comparison, synthesis, argument, analysis, definition, evaluation, proposal, and research essays. 

Within various genres, students read for organizational patterns (description, process, cause/effect, comparison/classification/definition/analogy...) that helps them unlock the meaning of texts, identify and understand an author’s purpose, and connect them to broader learning experiences.

Reading for Rhetorical Context (grasping the author’s purpose/motivation, the intended audience, the contextual circumstances)

Questions: What is the author’s purpose?  How is the author trying to affect the audience? What are the circumstances surrounding the production of the text?

Reading for rhetorical context demands the proficiency of a critical reader who is aware of the circumstances surrounding the production of a text as well as the circumstances of your own reading.  The classical tradition of rhetoric has become an indispensable part of first year writing-intensive courses, particularly associated with Argumentative Writing.  Through the study of rhetoric and argumentative writing, students will develop and utilize reading skills in textual analysis, and in applying rhetorical strategies to question the meaning and effect of texts on different kinds of audiences, while constructing their own persuasive, informed arguments while they read.  Reading for rhetorical contexts will enable students to acquire an appreciation of argumentative writing skills as they relate to their own academic and life experiences.