Read in the Name of the Lord!
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
Menu
What and when
The inappropriate
And the appropriate
All time favorites
How
First things first: sell it to them!
Texts and introductions - some examples
Keep them guessing; suspense is good!
The ultimate reading exercise
An alternative approach
There is no rest for the wicked!
When thus commanded to read, the prophet Mohammed exclaimed that he was illiterate; whereupon the Archangel Gabriel once again told him to read in the name of the Lord, and that worked just fine as Gabriel had God to back him, enormous powers of his own and a very willing and able student: the prophet Mohammed. If things were this “easy” in the classroom, the great squares of world capitals would be teaming with wonderful statues of teachers but alas, the reality on the ground is very different indeed as teachers aren’t archangels, they are supervised by assistant directors or principals not God and the students, aside from being human primates, have no resemblance to Mohammed. This being so, one needs to come down to earth, cease dreaming and face the reality that getting students to read is a Herculean task. A few days ago, I was chatting to a colleague, who is also a dear friend, and she explained she had told the students she wanted them to read a novel of literary worth during the summer school. The summer school at our university is organized for prep students who fail the proficiency test. Another colleague and I sort of looked at each other and shook our heads; especially when she said she thought “The Catcher in the Rye” would be a good choice. This, I feel ,is a noble ideal but not really in keeping with the realities on the ground as students these days are, unfortunately, used to bite sized chunks of anything and everything: information (in tests), the answers to said questions (a box or a sentence if you are lucky; although due to the obsession with short answers, they can’t manage that either), emails, text messages in text speak, TV programs broken up into nice fifteen minute morsels with ten minute breaks for commercials… The list goes on and on. I remember years ago Michael Parkinson used to have one guest for a whole hour now it’s three or four and the conversation is punctuated with songs. I once told a class all this during a discussion and they stared back at me with wide eyed amazement: “Weren’t you bored?” they inquired and were flabbergasted to discover we weren’t. Students have chronic attention deficit hyperactivity disorder brought on by their primary and secondary education, fed and aggravated by the media, technology and modern life which can best be compared to the 100 meter dash. The former, their primary and secondary education, is one of the major culprits with the emphasis on endless tests – not papers; Heaven forbid! Technology comes next; the internet and the world of computers, with the emphasis on speed, are not conducive to concentration for any length of time. Then there is life itself were everything needs to be done yesterday. The modern student is a product of this world yet teachers have to teach them to read, understand, analyze and also appreciate reading, as language learning would be impossible without it. It is a mammoth task not to be underestimated, requiring strategy and subterfuge the details of which are the subject of this paper. This paper is dedicated to all those teachers who feel that “The Catcher in the Rye” is the best first step for the modern student.
By far the most important obstacle to reading in the modern classroom is inappropriate reading material. Whatever activity the teacher devises to accompany it, the unsuitable text will fall flat; in short, get this right and you are ready to rock and roll as the saying goes. How should one go about selecting reading material for a generation of students who don’t read much and have no real desire to mend their ways? What must not be done is pretty obvious: the classics and all those wonderful immortal works of literature are out unless the aim is to guarantee that nobody will ever read anything again – and that includes The Catcher in the Rye. I was talking to a young Serbian couch surfer staying with us who was reading Michael Bulgakov’ s famous work “The Master and Margarita” a while back, and he told me he had first been assigned the book in secondary school and had, not very surprisingly, thoroughly detested it. Unlike many of his peers though, he was rereading it at 26. Another couch surfer, an Aussie this time, informed me that “To Kill a Mockingbird” had been forced on him at a similar unsuitable age and this had been followed by Macbeth, a work I personally truly appreciated while reading it for the umpteenth time after the age of thirty. He dealt with the first assignment thanks to the film, which his teacher eventually showed the whole class in despair. Of all the authors, Shakespeare suffers most due to this misplaced zeal leaving the average person with the unfortunate misconception that his works were created specifically to torture modern day students. Assigning reading material the sentiments, language, characters and even the plot of which is beyond students is a very common fault of teachers. As discussed in the previous paper on motivation, the zeal and over enthusiasm of teachers to get students to adore works they themselves are moved by adds fuel to the fire, hastening the demise of a wonderful means of communication. I remember once explaining to a class during a discussion on the role of technology in entertainment that it was common in the 19th century for people to sit together in the evenings listening to someone read out loud; needless to say, they thought this was very weird and wondered if it was perhaps a freak occurrence. The details of the education students are subjected to, not only in the Middle East but in many other parts of the world as well, have been analyzed in previous papers – An Elusive Quality: Motivation – and won’t be gone into again here. Suffice to say that students are fed a diet of what is deemed good for them, rather in the fashion of a 19th century nursery with the nanny in charge, resulting in a natural loathing for reading. Rekindling the flame requires stealth rather like the enemy agent slipping, unawares, into the ranks of the unsuspecting army. It also requires the teacher to be flexible and be ready to back pedal should the need arise. Like a good chess player, the teacher may have to take his time, never taking his eyes off the queen. Crying “Checkmate” five minutes after sitting down at the table is often not possible. The teaching of reading, like chess, requires patience. After all, even the best take their time: Gabriel’s delivery of the Quran took 23 years and he had the advantage of working with a riveting text.
Not everyone has the advantage of God’s word so what should we poor mortals do? It might occur to you – talking of books – that reading books hold the key but you would be wrong. There are various problems with reading books currently on the market, the foremost being that the passages in the books don’t get progressively harder and if, on rare occasions, they do, this doesn’t happen fast enough. Reading books often come in sets of three or four starting with the elementary and ending with intermediate or upper intermediate. The idea is that they get covered over a period of two or three years. The writers of these books must be tucked away in a parallel universe where everything moves at snail’s pace for nothing happens that slowly in the current climate; the language needs to be learnt in a year; sooner if possible. That means unit two needs, lexically, to be harder than unit one and unit three needs to be more challenging than unit two and so forth. What is more, all this needs to happen at decent trot! We, as an institution, have been looking for such a book for years, rather like the quest for the Holy Grail, but have thus far been unsuccessful. We do use books to a limited extent but we get through them fast and don’t drag them out, moving quickly on to handouts we ourselves prepare. The second problem with a lot of reading books is the choice of text: there is often no wow factor. As stated in the paper on motivation, before starting out to work with a team, the leader needs to acquaint himself with them. The writers of many reading books assume the team to be composed either of young professionals in the private sector or children, which is not, strictly speaking, right. There are a lot of language learners between the ages of 18 and 20 who are not the least bit interested in issues of the modern business world for instance. A lot of reading books don’t have the content to interest this group, which is our focus at Boğaziçi University. The solution is simple: the content needs to be such that it appeals to young people and young professionals alike; more all encompassing if you like.
In order to discover what the universal favorites are as topics, the popular haunts of modern man need to be studied. These include papers and magazines, computers and the internet and the entertainment industry in general. When one does so, certain facts leap out at one besides the obvious one that everything takes place very fast; one discovers to one’s surprise, that little has changed since the Middle Ages. The most popular forms of entertainment back then were public hangings, the gruesome details of which we don’t need to go into here, jousts and games. All this is still popular only it has all been transferred to the web; so is news about daring feats, murders, stories of bravery and shocking news on the whole. Murder mysteries such as “Criminal Minds”, “Law and Order”, “CSI”, “Cold Case” and the like; futuristic films and series such as” V”, “Flash forward”, Battle Star Gallactica and the like; vampire films such as True Blood, Vampire Diaries and the like; medical dramas such as “House”, “Grey’s Anatomy” and the like; and soaps involving regular people in their everyday lives are spawned by television companies at an alarming rate. In the last couple of years, it was “House”, a medical drama, and “Dexter”, the story of a serial killer with more than a couple of screws loose who is nevertheless made to seem appealing, that won Golden Globes. It is pretty obvious that that is the rout one needs to take as it is most likely to get the readers engaged. This does not mean one needs to give up on one’s dream of getting students to read publications like The Scientific American, The Economist, Psychology Today, The Guardian, the Times or the Observer; quite the reverse, postponement is a much more effective means of achieving that aim. The concept of “reading” needs to precede all those publications that we have on a pedestal. A good teacher has to swallow his pride if needs be for the greater good, and do the unthinkable as I had to do some years ago. I had a class who, try as I might, I could not get to cooperate. In the end, I put my cards on the table and confronted them: read we had to so what was it to be? They answered that they would be fine with The Cosmopolitan. I took this blow to my pride bravely, without a murmur; one does occasionally lose the battle but never the war. We did read The Cosmopolitan and I still have a few copies lying around, but we did get round to those five star magazines and papers and even books, just not immediately. The best thing was that when we did, the whole class was with me.
One does, over the years, get a feel for texts that will always take off no matter who the readers are, and it might be a good idea to look at a few examples here. I can’t stress often enough how vital it is to get the text right; when one does, the students will want to read and then all you will need to do will be to stand by and man the door while knowledge and skills go floating in. Keeping in mind the areas of interest listed above, I have trawled the internet regularly for years and built up an archive of suitable material one of which is “Overdose Kills Right-to-Die-Man.” It is the tragic story of 21 year old Vincent Humbert who is left completely paralyzed and blind after an accident. From the text, the reader discovers that he is a model citizen and has written to the French president to ask to be allowed to die – he can move his right thumb and like all his peers knows the computer keyboard off by heart. The request, it is discovered, has been refused whereupon his mother has put an overdose in his drip three years to the day after his accident. The text, which I have covered in class on numerous occasions, goes like a dream: there is a lot of excited discussion with students interrupting each other and yelling across the room, the writing task gets done in record time without a murmur and in the meantime vocabulary, critical thinking skills and the like get practiced too. Another text I use is titled “The Ethics of Climbing Everest” and combines excitement with an ethical dilemma. Mark Inglis, a double amputee, has climbed Everest with a team of 40 climbers. During the ascent, quite close to the summit, the team discovers a seriously injured climber who has been abandoned by his own team and left to his fate. Mark Inglis’ team does the same, not interrupting their race to the summit. This text too has never failed to fly; the ethical dilemma is obvious and many arguments and even scenarios are possible all of which are guaranteed to be dealt with noisily by any class. There will be some who will sympathize with the climbers, others who will quote the Bible and the Good Samaritan and still others who will say they should at least have stayed with the man and until he had died. With students focused so completely on the text, you can teach them pretty much everything: outlining, summarizing, vocabulary, you name it. From a text like this, you could move on to something like “Chad Child Kidnapping Angers Sarkozy” which concerns a charity organization which tried to bypass the red tape and take a hundred Darfur orphans out of the country to be adopted by French families. Were they orphans though? Where the motives of the charity pure or were they kidnapping children for the sex industry? Why did the families, who we discover exist, not turn up to receive the children? Finally, what is best for the children; to live their lives in a Chadian orphanage or with French families, who it turns out have paid through the nose for them? I am sure you have noticed the slow movement towards current dilemmas; a hop and a skip and you progress to dilemmas like “Instead of two states side by side why not one superimposed on the other?” which is a brilliant essay published in the Guardian outlining a novel solution to the Palestinian conflict. By playing into students natural inclinations, the teacher can, eventually, get the students to read and enjoy texts about more serious political issues as well. What one should never do is present the Guardian text first, Catcher in the Rye style, despite its quality. If this is done, perfectly good material will be wasted and students’ basic belief that all long texts without pictures are for nerds will be confirmed. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that “When” is as important as “What”.
Waiting is hard though and impatience to just get on with that wonderful text out of The Economist on the Crusades, for example, will be eating at one; yet, desist one must. This only means that the Crusades need to be shelved temporarily while the ground is prepared for the edifice to follow. One possible first building block is a text off the BBC website called “The Origins of the Swastika” which explains the completely innocent and rather surprising origins of the symbol. In the current climate, as one might imagine, it goes like a dream. Like in most things in life, the starting point is the conceptually simple and palatable; the complex must come last. In Europe, democracy followed from the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the Industrial revolution, the French revolution, even the English Civil War. It is a form of government one needs to grow into so to speak; which begs the question why so many intelligent people, who should know better, are experimenting with nation building in Afghanistan but I digress. One needs to grow into reading in much the same way. The problem is that syllabus design should not just involve one particular period in a student’s life but the whole of their education. This, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice to say that this process of growing into reading needs to mimicked in the classroom with the students throughout the year. The syllabus needs to be designed with this in mind. The reading passages aspired to – the end result in terms of reading – need to be determined, and then the reading passages that will lead the students to this point need to be placed in the syllabus. If the order is got right, students will be reading whatever the teacher wants them to and enjoying it to boot come the end of the term. What is more, the students will even develop a lifelong reading habit, a feat secondary education fails to accomplish.
Once the most formidable task, i.e. that of selecting the correct reading passage, has been accomplished, half the work is done; the rest is, as the saying goes, plain sailing. However, navigational skills are still vital; so what are some of the tricks of the trade? Although an attempt shall be made here to provide a straightforward explanation of how a teacher should go about dealing with a reading task, it must not be forgotten that none of the theory provided will truly fall into place until it is practiced in class. This requires patience and a willingness to learn for without these qualities, a truly great teacher cannot exist.
A good teacher, like a good salesman, needs to sell the reading passage to a group of – in some cases actually hostile – students. The teacher is, however, in an advantageous position: he is armed with the correct weapon: a text with potential that the students, although they don’t yet know it, will love. Over enthusiasm on the part of the teacher should be curbed here and that insane longing to hand out the text and tell the students how much they are going to love it should be pushed to the back of the mind. In order for the students to really play along, they need to discover that the text is interesting which means the teacher has to wet their appetites first. It is at this point that an active imagination and creativity come in handy for there is no one magic sales pitch; in fact there are as many different kinds as there are texts. This brings us neatly to our first problem: a lot of people think that all this is a waste of time and go straight for the jugular with disastrous results; working with that wonderful text with so much potential becomes like pulling teeth. The teacher leaves class not being able to fathom how such a text could possibly engender so much yawning, rowdiness and pleas to leave early. The teacher only has himself to blame though. Ten or fifteen minutes spent whipping up enthusiasm would have done the trick, and students would have been surprised to find the lesson over. Taking this unnecessary shortcut will negatively impact the teacher and in turn the quality of the lesson as well as the teacher himself also becomes more engaged while working the crowd; it is, to my mind, one of the most truly enjoyable parts of the lesson.
Preparation the night before means the teacher has to put his thinking cap on. Luckily, today there are many more avenues to explore thanks to technology: YouTube, the internet, music, pre reading questions… the sky is the limit. For instance, let us imagine that the text being read is the BBC text “The truth about torture” – an old favorite with which you can’t go wrong. The text is an argumentative one imparting the views of torturers as to the inevitability, in some situations, of torture as the only and quickest way to get information. The text lends itself to a decent reaction essay when all is said and done too. One of the methods of torture described is water boarding, in accompaniment to The Beatles’ famous song “A yellow submarine”. What the teacher can do is ask the students what use music can be put to. They will come up with a lot of answers but they will not think of torture. Then, the students should be given the opportunity to listen to the song, which is a very happy, carefree one in case you don’t know it. Then and then only must the text be produced; one minute into the text and they will see exactly what use the song is put to, and the teacher will have successfully sold the text to the students. After this point, all my classes have always cooperated like lambs and actually lost track of time despite doing a whole manner of activities they might, initially, have felt to be boring. Let us look at another example: say, for the sake of argument, that the text being read concerns the effects of war; a very popular topic. What I do here is introduce the students to two famous war poets: Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brook. I have two of their most evocative poems on tape read by two good actors. The effect of listening to and working through the poems just enough, mind you, for the students to get a feel for them is profound. One would have to be made of stone not to be moved by Sassoon. The beauty of this introduction is that two birds have been killed with one stone: the students have also been shown that they can understand and enjoy some poetry! Any text concerning the effects of war follows nicely from here. Another sales pitch that works well is posters, pictures or websites shown via a laptop and projected onto a screen. Imagine that the reading passage is the one referred to in part one of this paper titled “Chad Kidnapping Angers Sarkozy”. With a text like this, an appropriate website full of pictures of malnourished or starving children works fine. The pictures could be discussed, how far students would be prepared to go to help these children could be determined – with the teacher egging them on to save the poor children – and then the text with all the suspicions surrounding it could be produced. Failing a laptop, posters or pictures will also do the trick. The obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that teaching aids involving a surprise factor are very useful at the start of a lesson. A word of warning though: it is very unwise to get into a rut with introductions; the lurking zombie mode should not be forgotten. This is also true for the unhealthy obsession with pre reading questions, which have now become a basic ingredient in the recipe of how to tackle reading. To reiterate what was said earlier, novelty and the resulting excitement is the key.
Once introductions are over and perhaps before the students have got their hands on the texts, it is a good idea to read out the subtitle, the few lines in bold following the title or the first few lines of the text and invite comment. Notes concerning the speculation could go on the board; especially if there is a writing task to follow or the text is hard. Only at this point can the texts be distributed. The teacher could continue reading the first paragraph out loud substituting synonyms for key words only. Some words can be guessed from the context and others don’t really matter; this is assuming the level of the text is right. The teaching of ways of guessing key vocabulary, some of which depend on basic logic, should be considered an ongoing process; when it has been going on long enough, the penny will drop without the students being put to sleep by lists of rules and examples. A vocabulary book we used to use, Lexis, did the latter remarkably successfully guaranteeing extreme tedium. In fact, the same can be said for most vocabulary books despite which fact, teachers of all stripes seem to love them. It must be admitted that a desire to meticulously dissect sentences and words is a weakness shared by teachers and students alike. The misconception is that the more thorough the analysis, the more complete the understanding. Sadly for people who devote so much time to such a pass time, the reverse is true: the more we analyze a text, the less we are able to see the complete picture. Not being able to see the forest for the trees, in other words, is the inevitable result, and this is of no help in reading, where understanding the whole text is paramount. Remember the dreaded grammar translation method? What I have just described is its application to vocabulary teaching and should be avoided. Vocabulary is learnt best in the context of a reading passage or a listening exercise; i.e. in context where it should be allowed to float in along with all the joy and excitement engendered by the reading passage provided, of course, the teacher has played his cards right. To get back to paragraph one, which our hypothetical teacher was dealing with, on completing the reading, the students should be asked to summarize the paragraph in one or two sentences, give it a subtitle if it hasn’t got one, find the main idea and then discuss, with the teacher, what they expect will come next. This continual previewing and predicting will prevent boredom, keep students focused and interested and also ensure that everyone is working at a uniform pace; the latter becomes very important in classes where there are differences of level between the students. If there are questions, and there is a question on that paragraph, that could also be done. The teacher can then ask the students to read another section on their own; the length will vary according to the plan of the text, which the teacher will naturally have studied the night before. If, for instance, the next three paragraphs deal with the effects of germ line genetic engineering, they could be asked to read three paragraphs; if only one paragraph is devoted to the topic they should read one. This should be followed by the same exercises stated before. Finding subtitles and one sentence summaries serve the same purpose and can be alternated. Meanwhile, the teacher can start putting the subtitles and the paragraphs they include on the board thus building, for the students, the plan of the text. When complete, the plan will also help the students in their own attempts to tackle similar writing tasks. A few texts covered in this way and the basic reasoning involved in essay writing in general and the ways of writing that type of essay in particular will be painlessly ingested, leaving the teacher to drift happily into a writing task related to the text.
This brings us to the five star reading activity which must round off any reading lesson: the text related writing activity. The students can only truly be said to have understood a text if when all is said and done, they start thinking about where this all leads, what the implications are or what conclusions we can draw. In the case of an accomplished reader, this will be automatic: the brain will start wiring, posing the questions listed above and coming up with answers which the said reader will soon be dying to impart to others. If the teacher has done a good job, the students will have reached this stage as well and as they can’t all be given half an hour each to hold forth, they should be asked to write. This writing activity can, therefore, be very pleasurable to write as well as serving an educational purpose. Because it is enjoyable, learning will also be more successful.
The danger of falling into a rut has been mentioned many times before and the same is true for the teaching of reading. This means that alternative ways of tackling a reading task should be explored. One such way is asking the students themselves to write the questions to a text. However, as in anything, preparation is necessary; one can’t just ask them to produce a sheet of paper and write questions if they are to truly benefit from the activity – learn all the skills they would have learnt if the reading task had been tackled the traditional way. What the teacher should do is ask the students to read the text carefully and underline all the main ideas. The text selected for this exercise needs to be shorter than the ones normally read. When this has been done, the students need to be encouraged to formulate questions targeting these main ideas. When doing this for the first time, it is a good idea for the teacher to check the main ideas students find by perhaps producing the list via a laptop. Then, the students could be asked to write their questions in pairs after which the teacher could again produce questions he wrote concerning those main ideas so that they can compare questions. The second time round, two texts can be used with half the pairs working with one and the other half with the other. When the students have completed their work, they can be asked to switch texts and questions and answer their friend’s questions. Lastly, students can check each other’s work from answer keys which they should also be asked to prepare. When all is said and done, the students will have a good outline and summary of the text thanks to having focused on main ideas. As anyone who has ever written questions for a text will know, actually writing questions enables complete in depth comprehension of the text.
It must now have become obvious that teaching reading is, contrary to what some may feel, a very active process indeed. As explained in a previous paper on motivation, the teacher needs to be at the coal face with the students if they are to learn anything. If a more peaceful vocation not involving so much activity is desired, rethinking career plans might be a good idea. I can’t help feeling that it is immoral not do one’s best when shaping people’s futures. Laziness and negligence are, I feel, inexcusable.
Please check the Literature course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
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