Read All About It

John Bean’s analysis of reading skills offers insights as to why college students struggle with reading. He suggests that the skill set needed often remains undeveloped because bright students can get by without needing it, and less skilled readers are simply overwhelmed. Teachers are partially to blame for creating an unending circle of support for students who don’t do the reading by providing what they need in lectures, which they have to do because students have learned they can count on it.  Bean asserts that most college students don’t know how to differentiate their reading levels based on the task at hand, are unfamiliar with structural contexts, don’t engage with the author or the argument or don’t have the cultural or grammatical background they need to understand the text. Bean presents strategies for teachers to use to overcome these issues, such as having students prepare for interactive class activities that require them to read and apply the text before they come to class, avoiding superficial quizzes, opening up dialogues about exactly how to read difficult texts, based on personal experiences, teaching students to look up what they don’t know, developing a critical eye to see what the paper says and what it does by saying it, developing a critical eye for bias, assessing cultural codes, and to play the “believing and doubting game” – approaching the text dialectically, and taking copious notes all over the text not just anemically highlighting in yellow.

Mike Bunn’s approach to reading skills is an interactive one as well, but his approach is experiential vs. academic skill acquisition. He suggests analyzing the techniques of a text to determine how it was written, and why, so that the skills used in that piece could be applied later to a writer’s own work. He uses the metaphor of looking at reading not as finished work but as an architectural structure, and taking it apart metaphorically down to the nuts, bots and boards. He invites readers to analyze writing techniques bit by bit as they read – why is a particular sentence phrased a certain way, why did the writer open with a quote, etc. Readers should determine the audience the writer is writing for, and why a piece was written; the genre or type of writing it is; and if it is applicable to future writing assignments. All the techniques the writer uses should be analyzed for effectiveness and stored for future use as a reader reads, and reading should be intensively annotated in the margins and with additional notes. That is a point Bean makes as well. By reading in this way, Bean suggests that readers develop an arsenal of writing weaponry to use for future writing endeavors.

I found Bean’s approach far more useful to understand how and why students have trouble with deep reading, and given my experiences as an observer of student reading technique, as well as my own struggles with psychology research paper analysis (my nemesis this semester), I found some of his suggestions both apt and useful. Not much of what either author said felt particularly “new” to me, instead it seemed more like a clarification and elaboration of realities with which I was already familiar.  Something about Bean’s way of writing really irritated me, although I agreed somewhat with his premise I had a hard time taking him seriously. I think an intense focus on reading as a writer could actually make a struggling student less, not more effective as a reader. I thought Bean’s approach was more systematic and useful. I also found it incredibly entertaining to discover that Bean’s “Believing and Doubting Game” is essentially the assignment I wrote for our last class. So that answers what I might use from the readings! I think that much of what Bean has to say is very useful, and could be adapted from a college to a high school level.