I have come to the conclusion that I do not teach reading, never have, and probably never will in a secondary classroom. Yet, this is the language I use in my classroom. Read Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart. Read the first 100 lines of Beowulf. Read Chapter 12 of The Scarlet Letter. And, I have also come to the conclusion that my students are really doing exactly what I am asking of them. So, herein lies the problem. What I mean by “reading” and what my students mean by “reading” are two very different things.
When I looked up “reading” in the dictionary, 16 definitions were listed. Among them: “to utter or render aloud,” “to examine and grasp the meaning of,” “to foretell or predict,” “to learn or get knowledge from something written or printed.” And the list goes on. Whether noun or verb, what we are demanding from our students needs to be more clearly defined if we want the results.
I guess by reading, my students are probably more inclined to adopt the definition that involves uttering sound as opposed to thinking critically. But I don’t blame them. That was what “reading” was when they were younger—matching the spelling of words with the phonetic pronunciation.
Now, at the secondary level, when I assign a “reading assignment” I am really asking my students to critically interpret a text. I think I am teaching them strategies to do this; I mean, that has always been my objective. But, I also fully realize that there is in fact a gap between what I want my students to accomplish with a text and what they actually do with it.
Maybe our different definitions of reading and literacy contribute to the problem. Perhaps it’s time that we start truly defining what it means to read or to interpret a text if we ever hope to narrow the gap.
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