How NOT to Teach Reading: Beware the Call of Functionalism
Feride Hekimgil, Turkey
Feride Hekimgil was born into a multicultural, multilingual family in Basingstoke in 1955. She grew up and completed her primary and secondary education in Istanbul after which she attended Boğaziçi University, an English medium university, in the same city. After graduating in 1976, having received a BA in English Literature and her teaching certificate from The Department of Education, she started teaching English as a foreign language at the School of Foreign Languages in the same university. She continues to teach at the same university.
E-mail: pheridey@yahoo.com
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Introduction
Functionalism for beginners
Functionalism and the text proper
Textbooks don’t help either
The issue of reading books
Surely we don’t just read!
Two types of text; two ways of dealing with them
The pitiful lack of background knowledge...
In conclusion
There is this wonderful bay in present day Foça – previously Fokia – on the Aegean coast of modern day Turkey, which is now thankfully a military zone. Thankfully, because this means it gets protected and preserved from the ravages of holiday goers and developers allowing the Mediterranean Monk Seals, whose home it is, to get on with their lives. I had the good fortune of enjoying the unique experience of swimming there some years back and heard for myself the haunting cries of these now endangered animals reverberating round the rocky and mountainous shore line and the little islands dotting the sea. As I swam, I realized how compelling these cries must have sounded to sailors of yore who, I am reliably informed, took them to be mermaids and following the calls, came to a grisly end on the rocks. The call of functionalism, an approach to the teaching of reading, is just as irresistible, and the consequences of succumbing to it are just as fatal so teachers be warned.
Functionalism, which I personally feel should have been dead and buried ages ago, retains its surprisingly tenacious grip on power as it appeals to all our baser instincts as members of the teaching profession: the desire to not only analyze but dissect, to not only decode but place under an electron microscope. The best way to get to the bottom – this being the key word – of what a reading passage is all about is to leave no stone unturned in the effort to discover the elusive “hidden meanings”. Forget about the forest as a whole, it is not even every tree that counts; it is every leaf. Sentences are neatly broken down into bite sized chunks, clauses, which are carefully labeled – multi colored felt tip pens are on optional source of brownie points – as attention is shifted to various vocabulary items (in accordance with the tired old mantra that if you know and absorb all the vocabulary the text will follow), say to depression in the context of The Great Depression of the 1930’s, all the other forms of the word are committed to the board and to notebooks under the eagle eye of well intentioned but seriously misguided teachers, a few sample sentences are spewed out, diligent paraphrasing is attempted, before attention is shifted to a larger chunk of the text: the paragraph. The paragraph is then tackled with gusto: the topic sentence, the introductory statement if there is one, the nature of the support – which is also meticulously analyzed – the concluding statement, the types of transition are all determined with pinpoint accuracy before going onto, yes you have guessed : paragraph two! A few paragraphs of this will cover half the morning if the students are lucky, which will leave a wee while to tackle some further analysis of the text as a whole ( if they are unlucky,” the intriguing” study of the anatomy of paragraphs will take all morning leaving the students without the faintest clue as to what the text was all about and a deep loathing for reading, which the English language has no adjective to describe).
You are greatly mistaken if you imagine for one minute that this stage of the onslaught on the text actually involves reading the text; heaven forbid, no one can be expected to understand the text as a whole without outlining, skimming, scanning, detailed comprehension questions, paraphrasing and to put a tin lid on it, summarizing. All this, I will have you know, is done without just sitting down, putting everything else aside and actually reading the text properly. “Elementary my dear Watson” you might be forgiven for thinking, “if you want to improve your reading skills, just read”. The well meaning teacher pays no heed to basic common sense like this (neither do a lot of text books, which pours fuel on the fire) and ploughs on in every sense of the word. When classes are finally over, she emerges from class wiping the sweat from her brow to exclaim that she has been reading all about The Great Depression of 1930s with the class for three blocks of 75 minutes each; the class would beg to disagree. Depression certainly; but The Great Depression of the 1930s? Really? I don’t think so somehow.
I am yet to see a reading book that actually tells you to just read the text as a whole and forget everything else. On the contrary, any good reader worth its salt will start by hurling a few well chosen skimming questions at you followed by a volley of scanning questions but need I go on? Functionalism is certainly doomed to go down in history as one of the big killers along with heart attacks – which it would precipitate were the victims not so young. Such being the case why, you may well ask, is this state of affairs allowed to continue? The reason is that many of us are still oblivious to the harm it does and its tragic long term consequences. I recently attended a feedback meeting at the university I teach at where our conscientious curriculum planner introduced a new reading book to us, which she hopes to use next term. She had gone to enormous lengths to prepare this wonderful power point presentation consisting of all the points involved in “text biology” running down the left of the screen, and the unit numbers running across the top all encased in this irresistible little grid where she had ticked the relevant boxes. So we could see, at a glance, which of the specific methods of torture were implemented with what frequency, in which unit. I witnessed my colleagues glaze over with delight; their expressions can only be compared to that of a baby who has fallen asleep at the breast; an expression those of you with kids will immediately recognize; our curriculum planner looked ecstatic. What we didn’t get to see was a selection of the actual texts or the table of contents which would have told us what subjects are covered in this reader. The mode of presentation says it all: what is paramount here? The texts or all the activities? What our curriculum planner thinks is obvious but I am going to stick my neck out and dare to disagree. After all, what you really need is only a good text; you don’t need to be told to do the rest and despite what some may think, you can actually go ahead and exploit the text as you will despite the fact that the book may not specify that particular area of freedom and scope for free will. Moreover, you won’t get sued for doing so. What was that presentation all about then? I will give you one guess!
Last week, I had a PhD student (also a junior colleague) listening in on my classes and recording as she plans to make a case study of how I teach. One of the things she enquired of me was whether my students did any extensive reading. Knowing that they all read, a fact reflected in their grades, I assured her they did. What, she wanted to know, did they all read and how did I check up on them. I did my best to explain to her that all the motivating and positive encouragement I provide in class is cleverly stage managed to appear nonexistent; a fact that in no way detracts from their effectiveness; quite the reverse. I have given up on most readers and declared my independence of the restrictions they impose some time ago and reverted to using current magazine and newspaper articles and also academic texts in class; the latter come later in the year when the love of reading is well and truly established (we will get back to them a little further on). You may be forgiven for thinking that textbooks with such material exist; the fact is they don’t and they can’t. Once the book is printed, some of the texts are already outdated. One needs to read about WikiLeaks as the saga is unfolding, not a year later when everything has cooled down and attention has shifted. You need to read about the damage done by gold mining with cyanide in Guatemala as the news hits television networks and videos start appearing on YouTube. You need to read about the latest in symbiosis as the conference is taking place. Material is much more effective and motivating when it is hot from the oven; not after it has been allowed to cool down. Material can flop with time rather like a “Soufflé Suissess”. The immediate advantage provided by such material is obvious: you devour the text savoring every morsel in class and naturally when students come back for seconds, they can just log on and continue ad infinitum. There are related videos, YouTube, magazines, websites, blogs you name it. Wrap all this up with a well targeted writing task and provided you haven’t selected a truly deadly topic, the students will be on side; in short, you will be home and dry. Keep it up for a year and they will have developed a lifelong reading habit. As mentioned in previous papers on the topic, two obvious preconditions for enthusiasm on the part of the students are a good nose for a text and an enthusiastic teacher. The package above described has always proved to be foolproof for me.
Are all reading books on the market to be trashed then? Most certainly not as this would place an enormous load on individual teachers, be immensely impractical and risky. The point I wish to make here is very similar in nature to the one I made concerning who the best person to design a syllabus is. If you recall from my previous paper on syllabus design, I endeavored to explain that the ideal person for this job is the teacher himself as he is the one actually implementing the program. I also said that for various practical reasons – the size of the establishment being one – this was not feasible and committees are commonly assigned to do the job. The issue of reading material is the same. Although a lot of teachers can and do prepare reading material for their classes all the time, the program has got to have a structure; free floating cannot be allowed. Yet reading material is probably the most frequently prepared extra material and there are two very simple reasons for this: it is easy and a good many books get it wrong. You need but two components for a good reading lesson after all, a text and a teacher who knows what he is doing. You don’t need to have all that you can do with a text in black and white in front of you; teacher training colleges should take care of that and failing that, in service training. The shift away from the actual text and the tendency to subordinate it to activities that get ever more detailed has given rise to some of the misconceptions concerning the teaching of reading that I have outlined thus far.
To return for a moment to our feedback meeting described earlier, we never got to see the most vital part of the book: the texts. Yet it is the texts, not the activities, that make or break a book. So the next question that needs to be tackled is the nature of the texts. I would personally avoid technology unless you plan to bring out new editions of the book every couple of years. I would also avoid texts which aim to export western culture – are culturally biased –as it is very hard to get students interested in, say, how American teenagers live or the school system in The States. One must remember that the ultimate aims of reading lessons are to broaden students’ horizons, provide more in depth background knowledge about issues which can, in turn, provide a springboard for further learning and develop reasoning skills. We should ask ourselves what the text contributes to the students’ stock of background information and how it will help them to move forward to other reading material which will only become comprehensible thanks to the former text. In short, we should inquire of ourselves where the students can go with the said text. All this can be achieved via texts on social, environmental, historical or even political issues all of which can be easily supplemented with videos, texts and other material off the internet making them interesting and topical. Personally, I always cover The Russian Revolution, The Chinese Revolution, how India gained its independence, The Antiglobalization movement and many similar issues in class as they all fit in with the criteria described above. Such topics leave students spellbound yet there seems to be some tacit approval to avoid them in readers; a fact that I have never been able to understand. Science texts can also be used provided texts which are going to be outdated in a year or two are avoided. Genetics for instance would be fine as a subject for material prepared by an individual teacher but not perhaps too practical for a book as new developments in the area are coming in thick and fast. Some subjects are pretty safe for longer periods of time though like two texts I discovered on The Scientific American website some years ago. The first is called “Magic and the Brain: How Magicians Trick the Mind” and explains how illusionists depend on the ways our brains work to carry out certain magic tricks and reaches the conclusion that perhaps neuroscientists have something to learn from magicians. Each trick is carefully described and is followed by an explanation of the accompanying brain activity. I coupled the whole text with a video depicting each magic trick prepared by a colleague and the whole exercise turned out to be one of the most interesting reading lessons of the year. A second example would be “The Future of Man – How will Evolution Change Humans?” This text is beautifully organized and starts out by attempting to prove that evolution exists and then goes on to discuss the forms it will take in the future. Being completely futuristic in its predictions, it will be a safe bet for some years yet. History, as I have stated earlier, is a firm favorite with students too; especially 20th century history. Texts concerning Gandhi, Nelson Mandela or Che Guevara for instance will always fly. Couple them with showings of that wonderful Oscar winning film Gandhi , Cry Freedom or Invictus and The Motorcycle Diaries respectively and you are up and away. Sadly, I find most reading books fall seriously short in terms of the quality and nature of the texts they include, which has led me to develop the habit of preparing most of my own material; I haven’t given up though, not by any means and keep my eyes peeled for good books.
To get back to my colleague and graduate student’s query as to whether my students read outside class, one doesn’t need to play the nanny with students so long as you have the attitude and tactics right as described above. In fact, I will go so far as to say it is far better not to, and when you discover one student subscribes to The Economist, while another to The Scientific American, while yet another is trying to decide whether he likes Tolstoy or Dostoevsky better, it is better to act as if this is the most normal thing in the world. One can always do one’s little Indian war dance and whoop all one likes in private later. In public, you just bash on with the next newsworthy text with a good dose of enthusiasm to preserve the momentum. Enthusiasm creates a domino effect and is accompanied by opinions eagerly voiced, which in turn whet the appetites of other students, who in turn hit the internet or library not to be left out. Think if you will about all that extensive reading material that has been placed on the curriculums to date; hand on heart, did any of it work? Don’t you think it is about time to try something else?
Naturally, one needs to do a lot more than just read; one does need to learn vocabulary, examine style and even do some text work but the key to doing this successfully is to subordinate these activities to the actual reading and pure enjoyment of the text; not the reverse, and sort of feed the activities in well coated with cheese sauce so to speak, not just plain boiled. “All in the golden afternoon, full leisurely we glide…” said Lewis Carroll in the Prologue to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and that is what the experience of reading needs to feel like. One needs to get one’s priorities right: the text is paramount and if that goes down well, everything else will follow. Very few things need to be analyzed to death to make them comprehensible; I will go so far as to say that by far the best way to ensure that the desire to comprehend is destroyed is playing surgeon general with texts. Try thinking of the next beef steak you eat as a source of 16 amino acids and go on to look up each one; this activity will be sure to turn you vegetarian and reading texts are no different. The details of how to tackle reading texts the painless way have already been dealt with in two previous papers so we will now turn our attention to another aspect of the actual text itself.
Some of the texts I suggested should be used up to this point were magazine and newspaper articles, blog posts and the like and I have already explained the repercussions of the said choice of text in terms of both short term and long term reading habits. What I didn’t mention is that many of these texts go like a dream due to the fact that students have the background knowledge to cope with the content; they can relate what they read to prior experience and reading. The text they read adds on, if you like, to prior experience increasing the depth of their knowledge on the issue and helping them form opinions of their own. Yet there is a second category of texts: those whose subject matter relates to nothing the students have learnt up to that point, and it is therein that the problem lies. A text covering The Great Depression of the 1930’s for instance would fall neatly into this category in the East; so would a text on The Age of Enlightenment titled Crimes of Reason (The Economist), Reinterpreting the Crusades: Religious Wars (the same), A Good Soldier ( The NewYorker, concerning Napoleon), The Harsh Angel ( the same, concerning Che Guevara). One of the comments made by some of my junior colleagues at the meeting I alluded to earlier was that students get bored with long texts; the long texts being referred to being the ones like the examples listed above. How, in that case, does one get the students to soar with you “Up with me! Up with me into the clouds!” as William Wordsworth would have the skylark do? It is quite plain that the usual formulas won’t work yet the subject matter has so much potential if only the students could be persuaded to see it. The teacher can state that they are interesting as firmly as s/he likes, threaten or discipline; none of these tactics will work. S/he has got to convince them that they are interesting; get them firmly hooked as it were so out must come some very special tackle. Allow me to take you back to that formidable text concerning The Great Depression; I am sure you will agree that the average 18 or 19 year old has nothing much to fall back on here (at least in this part of the world) but help is at hand in the shape of the deep recession we are just emerging from, which has touched the lives of many and continues to do so. Also, rather fortunately, papers have been writing about little else for quite a few years now. A trip to the computer lab will take care of introductions. While you are all there, you could Google The Great Depression and initiate a perusal of the photo gallery you will find there, top it up with a few videos they could listen to and make notes on – one of which is a report prepared by students and is a very gentle introduction to the said event – and Bob’s your uncle. You can then produce that “boring text” which was relegated to the shredder and go into some of the details of one of the greatest manmade disasters of the century. While doing so, the teacher will need to supplement the text with additional information of her own – which means homework for the latter if she really wants the text to take off. Top it off with a reaction essay written about a short text off the BBC website titled “My Grandfather Killed Himself in the 1929 Crash” and I assure you horizons will have been broadened, they will be keen to know more and even better, the new found interest will carry on to that next “boring” text – provided the teacher holds up her/his end of the bargain and steps in to provide the missing background knowledge. The Great Depression can, for instance be linked to a text concerning the authoritarian regimes of the pre Second World War period providing valuable background knowledge and insight.
In his book “The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children” E. D., Jr. Hirsch recounts an educational experiment where two sets of students, one group avid baseball fans, the second not, are asked to complete a reading task concerning baseball. There is no need to tell you who scored better. He states and I quote: “Knowledge not explicitly presented in the text is essential to reading comprehension”. I remember clearly the Eureka moment I experienced on reading his words and better understood Archimedes’ headlong rush out of the public baths; someone had finally said it; background information building up over the years, all linked together contextually and reaching forth into the future… This is what makes a good reader. Hirsch calls this knowledge “enabling knowledge” or “cultural literacy” and it is thanks to the education system that it has been lost, it seems, worldwide. Telling students to read and bemoaning the fact that they don’t won’t work if their careers as students involves ticking boxes or circling alternatives. The current practice of too much testing and too little actual teaching – an epidemic I might add – guarantees that freshman students at university score full points on the local equivalent of SAT but have the background knowledge, attention span, tolerance for ambiguity and intellectual curiosity of geriatric newts ( see my paper An Elusive Quality: Motivation).
As I said earlier, the students described thus far are the people we, as teachers, need to work with since the option of being beamed to a parallel universe where everyone is an avid learner and brimming with curiosity does not really exist. I will reiterate though that there is light at the end of the tunnel and with the correct material and methodology, a transformation can and does take place if not in all, in most cases. I start each academic year in deep despair and claim that I will fail to get anywhere with my class and each year my family tells me I say the same thing every year and have never yet failed to achieve the standard I desired; the same thing happened this year. A group of students who found a single paragraph too long have become competent university students so do not lose hope just observe, plan, work hard, do not lose hope and above all don’t lose your love of teaching.
References
Hirsch, Eric Donald “The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children”; Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 2003
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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