From a teacher's comment on I Hate Reading Logs:
But in school ONE of our requirements in the teaching of reading is to teach the skills of reading. One of the goals of the reading assigned inside and outside of school is to get the students to stop and think about what they are reading (ask questions, make inferences, make connections, understand the author’s purpose and possible bias). As older readers, we do all of this naturally. Most younger readers have not made these skills automatic. They are just enjoying the story ...
...they simply cannot enjoy reading until they have been given the tools & strategies in which to do so.
How is it possible to read without comprehending? Here's one way. I've studied a little German, and I understand the phonetics well enough that if you gave me a German text I could read it out loud and a German speaker would probably understand me. I, however, would not understand most of it, because my knowledge of the language didn't get that far. So I can read, but not comprehend, a German text.
But how is it possible to read a text in a language you speak, without comprehending it? You might be missing a few words you don't know, or perhaps you don't have the needed background (for instance, you might not understand a story about a baseball game if you don't know the rules of baseball.)
But if you speak the language, and you've got the vocabulary and the background knowledge, can you still fail to comprehend the story? I don't believe it. Story telling, and story listening, are innately human and part of life in every culture.
If you watch the brilliant Billy Connolly tell the story of Eggbert and the Knockout Punch (warning: adult language!), you can see how universal story telling is.
Is Connolly a great story teller because he learned how to analyze a story in Language Arts class? When you listen to this story, do you stop and ask yourself what will happen next, or what's motivating the characters? Would you appreciate the story more if you had to write a response in your reading journal? No, no, and hell no.
When Language Arts teachers claim that kids "don't comprehend" what they read, what they really mean is that the kids can't produce the answers that the teacher wants to hear. This is completely unrelated to true comprehension.
“…to stop and think about what they are reading (ask questions, make inferences, make connections, understand the author’s purpose and possible bias). As older readers, we do all of this naturally...they simply cannot enjoy reading until they have been given the tools & strategies in which to do so.”
ReplyDeleteDoes anybody really do this in the way described? I admit to making inferences and connections, and to coming to understand the author’s mind, but not to “stopping and thinking” in order to do so. Does a mature reader really stop dead in the middle of a story to ask himself, “What do I think Sasha will do next? What would I do in her situation? How do I know this?” No, but educationists assume that requiring kids to artificially produce the kinds of synthesis that a mature reader produces organically will somehow jump-start the process. But ‘younger readers’ have become fluent ‘older readers’ for centuries without this kind of mental dissection. What kids who don’t comprehend are missing is not “tools & strategies”, but experience and context.
It’s as if we observed that children were unhealthy from sitting and eating junk food, and then instead of providing wholesome, delicious fresh food to nourish them and train their palates, and then sending them outside to run around, we gave them little doses of questionable processed foods and vitamins designed by experts, kept them inside, and then lectured them on incomprehensible “food pyramids” that change every few years. Oh, wait….
I read an article recently by a professor at an ivy-league who described decreasing ability in his students to understand a particular movie he showed every year. I wish I remember which film classic it was, but the point was that this movie hinged on understanding that the things characters said were not necessarily the things they were thinking, and ‘making connections’ between successive vignettes in order to grasp the overall point. Just the kind of ‘critical thinking’ that teachers hope to inculcate through their ‘reading strategies’. But what this professor found was that young adults were getting steadily worse at sussing out the characters’ true motivations, and failing to get the point of the movie at all. Were these well-educated students lacking in ‘tools & strategies’? No. Divorced from the past of their own culture more than any generation before them, and fed from infancy on a diet of obvious and spoon-fed storytelling, they lack common reference points for any thought produced before they were five years old, and have no experience in grappling with beautiful and sophisticated literature.
Sigh. I had rather have my daughter spend half an hour reading about Peter Rabbit’s “soporific lettuces” than filling out a vocabulary worksheet any night of the week.
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ReplyDeleteOh my word. Blogger had me believing that my post was too big to process. Apologies for the multiples. Can the OP fix this...?
ReplyDeleteThere are so many flaws in how they "teach" reading:
ReplyDelete- Books are read and discussed over a period of weeks and kids are told NOT to read ahead. Part of the experience of reading fiction is getting immersed in it. How can you do that when to read 20 pages a day and have to stop and analyze each of those sections?
- As far as I can tell, students are only taught to analyze fiction. What they really need to know for the 21st century is how to analyze non-fiction material. What are the author's biases? The agenda? How do you determine if the source is reliable? Etc...
- Some of the "classic" books just haven't held up that well in my opinion. I just finished re-reading Moby Dick and was surprised at how much I disliked it. The book is about three times longer than it needs to be with whole chapters being completely irrelevant to the plot. I remember a number of other "classics" that I had to read in school that were just plain awful.
- Shakespeare. Shakespeare is awesome...for watching on stage. The answer to the typical "what is the author's intent...?" question is that the author never meant for people to read the plays. Watch a video and then look at snippets of the text. Stop making people read the whole thing.