Can we talk about reading?

I’ve been thinking about what it means to teach reading a lot this year. With one quarter of our current freshman students scoring under 50 percent on the reading section of the HSPT, reading should be something we’re all thinking about.

I just finished The Book in Question: How and Why Reading is in Crisis (Heinemann, 2018) by Carol Jago. The premise of the book is that research shows that students are arriving at college underprepared for coursework. Jago argues that students struggle because they are afraid of complex text — they just don’t have the stamina or perseverance for the material. There is a direct correlation, she asserts, between students’ inadequate reading skills and their struggle to express themselves.

Jago’s book is a call for middle and high school teachers to do something about it. Her main audience is English teachers. She asserts that what and how much students read matters. Students need challenging texts to stay engaged. They are “intellectually starved,” she writes, and well-intentioned teachers often counterproductively address student disengagement by choosing shorter, “easy” books or having them learn content through videos. Complex written texts are needed to build the stamina and confidence students are often lacking.

Jago champions the work of the English teacher in educating the populace through literature. Let me stop and give myself a pat on the back. 🙂 She also writes that most teachers, English teachers included, aren’t actually reading experts and that it is a problem to say that if students can read Hamlet, they can read anything (i.e. a college Chemistry textbook). She argues all teachers should teach reading in their content areas, spotlighting research  that shows teaching generic reading strategies for all of the disciplines does not actually improve students’ ability to read.

And so I’m wondering, Carondelet colleagues: How well do you think your students read? Do you see yourself as a teacher of reading? What does teaching “complex text” mean to you? Do you see reading as a critical skill in our increasingly visual/multimedia-saturated culture? How do you reconcile the benefit of reading volume with student workload/stress? How much reading do you assign? What kinds of questions are you asking about reading?