The Heart of the Matter: On Reading

Lou Spaventa, US

Lou Spaventa teaches and trains in California, the USA. He is a regular contributor to HLT - The Heart of the Matter series. E-mail:spaventa@cox.net

“Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.”
Augustine Birrell

I teach reading to native readers of English and to readers of English as a second language in the same classroom. At my school, Santa Barbara City College, students must take a reading assessment test, which along with some other factors, places them in reading classes from one to three levels below first year university reading level or places them in first year university reading level, in which case, their reading level is said to satisfy the assessment process. At the end of every reading course, I review the books I have assigned students. Feedback varies from class to class. I have taught Tobias Wolff’s memoir, This Boy’s Life with mixed reviews. Most of the other books I have taught have had mixed student reviews as well. These include such well-known titles as Angela’s Ashes, Iron and Silk, The Color of Water, About a Boy, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Fahrenheit 451, and Into the Wild. A few books received nearly all positive reviews from students: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Kite Runner, and The Alchemist are three that come to mind (Of these three, the only one I will likely teach again is The Kite Runner. To Kill a Mockingbird, as a Guyanese-American colleague has pointed out to me, is a book in which an African-American needs to be saved by an Anglo-American, and in which African-Americans are victims or passive participants. The Alchemist is just too simplistic to hold my attention for repeated classes, and that, indeed, enters into my choice of book. The Kite Runner is still both compelling and relevant for my students and for me.).

Leaving aside the positive reviews, when I try to understand why students rated some of these books negatively, I come up with two main reasons: the book was not compelling for them and the book was hard to read. For those whose English is either native or at a high standard, the first reason, the interest in the book – its setting, its era, its protagonist, its message – is the main criterion for judgment. For those whose English is still developing, difficulty with fluent extensive reading conditions their judgment.

In my second level reading class, the learning outcomes for students all point to making them capable college level readers. Of the three pre-university level reading courses, completion of the second one satisfies the college reading requirement. This satisfying of the college reading requirement implies that students who have finished the second pre-university level course can successfully navigate readings in whichever course they enroll, whether the course is Math 100, Elementary Algebra, Com 101, Introduction to Communication, or Bio 100, Concepts of Biology. If feedback from my reading courses is an accurate indication of student investment in reading, then these general education courses, which many students take and which offer quite a wide range of reading, will not receive the same amount of student investment in terms of their reading requirements. Also, these courses certainly do not match the type of extensive reading students are asked to do in my reading class. Should I be teaching content area textbooks to students to help them succeed in university level classes? At one point, teaching ESL reading through content area simplified texts was in vogue. Perhaps at some schools it still is. However, such texts would not work for me in a mixed class of native and non-native readers because they would not hold the interest of native readers of English, but most importantly because they would only focus on a narrow content area such as mathematics, communication studies or biology. Not everyone is interested in these areas.

Turning to the question of reading level for a moment, one can look at notions of reading difficulty as a determiner of text choice. I am lead to the conclusion that texts that contain short sentences, a preponderance of monosyllabic or disyllabic words, redundancy, high type to token ratios, and non-technical language are optimal for reading comprehension. Through determination of such data, mathematical computations can put a text at a certain reading level so that a 2nd grade designation would mean a text a second grader in the U.S. school system could comprehend. Alternatively, readers can be characterized relative to a text, so that an 18th grade designation would mean that the reader reads the text with the level of comprehension that a doctoral student would. However, for me, how readers are designated is ultimately a decision based on art and experience and less on science and computation because as a text increases in difficulty, so responses increase in breadth and sophistication. It is not inconceivable that the answer to a comprehension question might elude the understanding of the person rating that answer. Furthermore, if students are motivated by interest, then at best a reading level criterion for choosing a text may only satisfy some of my students. How shall I choose my texts?

There is in each of our college reading courses a basic text that affords practice in reading skills: skimming, scanning, recognizing organizers, vocabulary learning, outlining, summarizing, and the like. Students, then, have a way to work on reading skills. This represents somewhat of a bottom up, intensive approach to improving student reading proficiency. The extensive element, which is comprised of the longer texts they read: novels, memoirs, and biographies, is for me the key to the success of the reading class. I try to create a theme for the texts I choose. One semester the theme was a young man’s quest, and the texts were Into the Wild and The Alchemist. This coming semester the theme will be youth in difficulty. The texts will be Slam by Nick Hornby, which deals with teen pregnancy and choices; A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, which deals with killing and redemption, and Little Bee by Chris Cleave, which deals with one’s place in a globalized society. These books will make or break my class. If I have chosen wisely, the class will be successful. This means that students will read these books with enthusiasm and enter into the conversation that their themes present. The small group conversations will continue outside of class and students will be motivated to find out more about the people, places, cultures and events that the books portray. In the class in which I taught The Alchemist, students researched the Moorish influence in Spain and Arab contributions to western culture. In another class in which I taught The Art of Racing in the Rain, a novel narrated by a dog who believes he has a chance to be reborn as a human, students studied the evolution of dogs and learned firsthand how a trained dog can help a brittle diabetic monitor her blood sugar level.

I should mention that ESL students in my classes display no less enthusiasm for books that they like than their native English reading classmates, even if they have some difficulty reading at the rate they need to. I don’t worry about their falling behind because for most of my ESL students, my class represents their first experience at extensive reading under time pressure. They will get better as they do it more. The experience only accelerates their proficiency in English, not just in reading, but in doing the things they need to do with language to succeed in college: discuss, question, clarify, research, summarize, and write. Stephen Krashen has long claimed that extensive pleasure reading is the key to language learning and has put forth the case of a Korean woman who read her way to English proficiency through teen Valley Girl novels to prove his point. Krashen advocates periods of pleasure reading in elementary school, during which time all students may choose their own books and sit comfortably while they read. Comprehensible input becomes more comprehensible when you choose what you want. I agree with Krashen in this sense: reading something that you like leads to more reading and for the college or university student, reading along with writing are the keys to success. In fact, as one goes from BA to MA to Phd, the quality of one’s interactions with texts, whether paper or electronic, self-created or written by others, becomes more and more important.

Should we do away with graded readers? Should we focus on student interest more than we do? No and yes. No, we shouldn’t do away with graded readers. There is a place for them, especially at the lower levels of language learning. Yet, I recall learning basic Spanish through reading comic books, whose level of cultural and linguistic sophistication was not simple, but whose illustrations enabled me to understand. So, graded readers are only one tool for lower level students, and perhaps are weaker than other tools because they lack the element of authenticity and interest. As for student interest, it is hard for me to argue with motivation to read based on a strong interest in what one reads. For me, the art of teaching reading has as much to do with understanding and appealing to student interest as it does with teaching reading skills. One current trend in teaching students whose mastery of English makes them unable to succeed at university level is to have them forego remedial courses and jump into university level English courses with other forms of support for success. Though this trend is probably as much due to the dismal state of funding for education as it is about belief in student motivation and the ability to make up ground given the right support, it still offers at least a partial argument for focusing on what interests students in the reading classroom.

Please check the How the Motivate Your Students course at Pilgrims website.