Randy Bass’ post within the Visible Knowledge Project presents two crucial insights into the minds of college readers. The first point that Bass, a leading figure in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) movement, makes is that students obsess and focus on unclear reading passages. If a certain sentence or section is not immediately clear, students will spend enormous amounts of time attempting to decode that particular area. As a result, many readers will either never finish the rest of the text or they will lose interest in the work entirely.
My experience with college-level readers, particular those in developmental courses, mirrors Bass’ findings. I have noticed students struggle with a single sentence for several minutes. Consequently, they do not finish the reading on time, and they tend to fall behind. Some students will waste a considerable amount of resources and time looking up new vocabulary words when they should focus instead on the text’s overall meaning and value. Once the meaning for that word, sentence or section is clarified, they have no trouble progressing.
This brings up Bass’ second major point about reading: deferral. Teachers should advocate and explain the idea of “deferring meaning” while reading.
Expert readers may not fully grasp each and ever sentence during their first read. However, they are experienced, so they refuse to allow a small element in the work to impede their progress. The importance of the piece’s overall meaning overrides the desire to understand a specific sentence or unknown word. Novice readers operate from the standpoint of a recipe. I find the recipe analogy appropriate because it fits the mindset of many readers. From the novice reader point of view, every sentence and word must be understood as they are encountered if the entire work is to make sense. Recipes must be followed sequentially; therefore, the meaning of a book or essay must be decoded sequentially. The idea of skipping sections and deferring meaning until later seems “dishonest” or “incorrect”.
In my English composition courses, I try to encourage students to skip over difficult areas in a text. As a class, we can always cover these trouble spots later. Novice readers must remember that the first goal in reading is to comprehend the meaning of the text. Vocabulary and bizarre sentence structures can be dissected later. Nonetheless, many of my students refuse to “let go” of the recipe or formula schema. They continue to spend a great deal of energy on individual elements. Coupled with a lack of confidence in their own abilities, this recipe schema undercuts the ability of novice readers to tackle difficult readings. Students must build up confidence by exploring a variety of texts to reassess their approach to reading. Expert readers, on the other hand, tend to skip over sections quickly without consciously acknowledging this activity.
Francois–
I’ve had similar experience with students getting bogged down by small pieces of the text. However, when I assigned the difficulty paper last week, I was pleasantly surprised by the results. Although I encouraged students to read through the text once, only marking areas where they were confused, they still had time to start figuring things out or drawing conclusions before coming back to class. By reflecting on their reading through the difficulty paper, many of the students started drawing thoughtful conclusions about the text. Even though they weren’t confident about their conclusions (they used modifiers like “I think that maybe” or “It seems to be”), the difficulty paper allowed them a safe place to start formulating their ideas. This gave them a concrete starting point for contributing to the class discussion as we started looking more closely at those difficult sections.
–Karen
This seems to be one of those difficult moments. Whil I understand the concept of not getting bogged down over the meaning of a single word or line in a reading, what does this do to the concept of dealing with difficulty? If we tell students to just skip over the tough parts and aim for the overall meaning, are we skipping a step in the reasoning process? As Karen says, I thing they need to note those areas/moments of difficulty, keep reading, and them circle back. This relates to my comments about reading in a non-linear fashion. Though a story may proceed in chronological order, it is not necessarily linear. Meaning will not come simply by following Francois’ recipe. Nor can we leave out some of the ingredients because they are difficult measure/locate/deal with.
Edith
I agree that it’s a fine line between the deferral of meaning and dealing with difficulty.
I wonder how we–as presumably advanced readers–deal with this issue in our own reading? What do you do when you crack open a new novel, start reading, and nothing makes sense? The names, the places, the scenarios in the book–it’s all confusing. Some novels even seem to revel in creating this alienating effect. What strategies do you have in your arsenal to deal with this? And how can we coach them to our students?
From my experience, a worthwhile novel or story will eventually give the reader some concrete image or idea to decode the text. The trick is to have the patience to muddle through the text until you reach that one moment. Then the first part of the novel or story will solidify. For students, experiencing these types of stories is vital. Far too many young readers stop reading after a few pages if novel is deemed “difficult”.
Looking back into my reading experience, I agree it was very difficult for me to open a novel and not understand the book until the third or fourth chapter. And this would many times encourage me to quit reading that particular book. But on the other hand I do agree with Francois on informing the students to have patience, and not worry about the few words they do not understand. Probably one reason I got interested in Literature in the first place was becoming interested in the concept as a whole, as opposed to getting caught up by a few words. I say this because I remember constatly looking up words in my biology or history book, which never allowed me to complete the entire assignments. But because literature allowed us to follow a story and then discuss it in class, I did not feel that pressure.