As a high school English teacher, I spent a lot of time and energy outside the classroom trying to figure out why high school students are such poor readers; why they don't read, why they "don't like to" read, why they struggle with reading, why they resist reading, why they try so hard to avoid reading, why they get so little out of reading, and what I could do as an English Language Arts teacher to change and improve the situation.
I should note that I'm not talking about illiteracy here; I'm not concerned with high school-aged kids who are actually unable to read. What I'm concerned about is aliteracy, i.e., having the ability to read but essentially choosing not to. To me, what aliteracy amounts to is not knowing how to read, which I mean to distinguish from not being able to read.
It's inevitable that when given a reading assignment, such as a new novel, play or series of poems, some students will complain about it, whether to the teacher, to each other, or to themselves. These complaints typically fall into three categories:
1. "I don't like it."
2. "I don't understand it."
3. "It doesn't interest me."
There are two knee-jerk reactions that I think ought to be rejected out of hand. They are both tempting, but are ultimately unhelpful if our goal is to understand why students don't engage with a text or with the reading process, and ultimately to foster and improve that engagement. The first is to reject the complaints out of hand, chalk them up to intellectual laziness and/or closed-mindedness on the part of the student. Sometimes this is indeed the case, but to leave it at that solves nothing. The second is to accommodate the complaints and either give them something else to read or eliminate the assignment altogether. There is some merit to this as well, but it is no more helpful.
That said, I think it is nonetheless important to focus the remedy on the reader rather than on what is being read. Choosing useful and appropriate materials is important, yes, but at the end of the day our goal is to improve reading, and that begins and ends with the reader. Reading is a skill, like anything else, which means that some people are going to be "better at it" than others. Hence, the question is, how does one get "better at" reading? The key is to focus on the reader, on what the reader does when he is presented with a text and attempts to work his way through it. What do skilled readers do?. What do unskilled readers do that prevents them from becoming skilled readers?
The focus on the reader instead of the material being read may be jarring at first to high school students (and, indeed, their parents as well). There were two things I used to tell students at one point or another, when the inevitable complaints cited above began to emerge, the last two in particular:
It is not the book's job to interest you.
It is not the book's job to be understood by you.
Needless to say, a lot of kids and parents didn't want to hear this. For many of them, the text had always been the key element, the determining factor. If I don't like this book, or I can't understand it, or I don't find it interesting, that means there must be something wrong with the book; it has nothing whatsoever to do with me. It relieves the reader not only of any responsibility for his own reading skill, but indeed of any role whatsoever in the reading experience. This is not to say that there is something "wrong" with a person who doesn't like, can't understand, or takes no interest in a particular text, and this is not about "fault" or "blame." But a person can never become a better reader if the onus is always on the text to provide comprehension, interest and meaning all on its own. The text is what it is; it's not going to change, and it can't do anything. The reader has to play a role and has to recognize what his role is. It's not the book's job to interest you; it's your job to take an interest in it. It's not the book's job to be understood by you; it's your job to understand it.
There is no such thing as an uninteresting book; the only thing that can exist is the disinterested reader.
Getting the reader to recognize his role in reading, and to put the burden of comprehension and interest on himself rather than the text can be very, very difficult, especially for high school readers. And even then, it's only the first step. But it is an absolutely critical first step. Everything else flows from it. Until a student can get over that hump, his reading skill will not improve.
Once we establish that the key to reading, and to improving reading, lies with the reader and not the thing being read, we need to examine reading behaviors that distinguish skilled from unskilled readers. Broadly, there are four characteristics that skilled readers must have: fluency, curiosity, patience and imagination. In order to be a skilled reader, one needs to know the language in which one reads (fluency), be open to exploring new ideas and unfamiliar subject matter (curiosity), be willing to take the time it will take to engage with a text and not rush to finish it (patience), and have the capacity to envision whatever thoughts, ideas, images, etc. the author has preserved in the text (imagination). Unskilled readers tend to lack one or more of these qualities, to varying degrees. The key for the unskilled reader is to identify them, understand them, and work to develop them.
The topic of fluency always raises the issue of, quote, "understanding." Students will often complain that they "don't understand" a text, a passage, or even a solitary sentence (e.g., a quotation) written in English. My response to that has always been that it is simply false; not necessarily an outright lie, but a mischaracterization of what is really going on, of which the student may not necessarily be conscious. See, it just simply isn't possible to read something in one's own native language and, quote, "not understand" it, in the same sense that one might "not understand" a sentence written in a foreign language. The point here is not to dismiss or trivialize the struggle; the point is to characterize it properly so that it may be overcome.
Regardless of whether the claimed non-"understanding" stems from intellectual laziness, insufficient fluency in English, or genuine cognitive difficulty, it cannot be overcome by characterizing "understanding" as a binary, all-or-nothing concept; i.e., by asking oneself only the binary question, "Do I understand this or not?" These are not, and cannot be, one's only options, and limiting oneself to these two options is of no utility, especially since the second is so easy to fall into. The proper question to oneself is not one that can be answered yes or no, but rather an open-ended inquiry: "What is my understanding of this?"
"Understanding" a text is not an event, it's a process. It is not a prerequisite to thinking, writing and discussion about a text; it's the purpose and result of those activities.
There are two things, I think, that teachers sometimes do wrong in this situation, wherein a student says "I don't understand" a text, passage or sentence in English. One is to simply "explain" it, to just translate English into English, which is quick and painless but ultimately ineffective in developing literacy. What it does is not only relieve the reader of any obligation he has to derive meaning from the text on his own, but it turns the entire experience of reading, and of studying a particular text, into a tedious and pointless exercise in translating English into English. (This tends to happen often when reading Shakespeare in high school.) "Understanding" is not translation, and merely translating English into English, let alone having someone else do it for you, accomplishes nothing.
Another is to ask what I came to realize over the years is a really, really dumb question: "What don't you understand?" Not only does it reinforce the non-useful binary concept of understanding discussed above, it is also a self-defeating inquiry. See, if a student can articulate or identify that which he "does not understand," then that means there is some understanding that has occurred. Otherwise, he could not answer that question.
It took me several years to figure this out, but I found that the best response when a student claims to "not understand" a text, passage or quotation is to say:
"Ask a question."
The idea here is to distinguish a genuine desire for understanding (and a means of seeking same) from a declaration of helplessness. Where this takes us is in the direction of teaching students how to ask questions, not make statements that indicate generalized helplessness ("I don't get it." "This doesn't make sense."), or requests that the teacher do their thinking for them ("What does this mean?" "Could you explain this to me?"), but actual questions that indicate at least a nascent bit of intellectual effort ("Why does Holden call himself a liar?" "What does Macbeth mean by 'all our yesterdays'?") How exactly we do that is a whole separate topic, that might take up a whole separate diary one of these days. But the point is to try to remove helplessness from the equation and give students a way to seek, and ultimately find, understanding on their own. A lot of students will need to be led by the proverbial hand out of the proverbial woods, through the process of questions and answers, but they need to find their own way out, by following the proverbial trail of bread crumbs that thoughtful questioning provides. It starts, though, with letting go of the binary concept of "understanding" and embracing a more open-ended and process-oriented one.
So what's really going on when a student says he "doesn't understand" a text or a passage in English? Often, it means that he has encountered difficult, challenging or unfamiliar language (let's call that DCUL for short) and doesn't know what to do about it. This brings us to our first important distinction between skilled and unskilled readers.
To the skilled reader, DCUL represents an opportunity to learn the language and improve fluency. The skilled reader sees it as his job to understand DCUL and incorporate it into his own reading abilities and experience. He uses whatever resources are available, including (obviously) a dictionary, as well as context clues, past reading experiences, and asking questions of other readers, to discover the meaning of the DCUL.
To the unskilled reader, however, DCUL represents an insurmountable obstacle to reading and understanding. Part of this is the result of that binary thinking I keep harping on, part of it is the result of putting the onus on the text instead of the reader, but whatever the reason, unskilled readers can be intimidated by DCUL.
There are more distinctions between what skilled and unskilled readers do, but this diary is running long so I'll hold off on those for now.
The only way we can begin to solve the reading problem in high school is to focus on the reader, and on his reading-related behavior. What I've described today may be the hardest thing for high school students to understand, the hardest obstacle to overcome, in order for them to start down the path toward becoming skilled readers. They have to understand that they can become skilled readers, they have to understand what skilled readers do, and they have to do it. It is no easy task. But it does work.