“Reading is like breathing in, and writing is like breathing out.”
-Pam Allyn
Why Should You Teach Reading Skills?
We all generally accept that our students need to learn college-level writing skills. While, ideally, they come to college with a basic understanding of academic writing, they still need to develop and adapt to the methods, genres, and disciplinary conventions of college-level scholarship. And since (much to the WAC Director’s relief), the Carleton faculty generally acknowledges that students are unlikely to develop these writing skills without guidance, we teach writing broadly and frequently across the curriculum.
And yet we have no similar consensus with regards to college-level reading skills, even though the same basic factors apply. While it’s reasonable to assume that our students can read in the sense that they can understand words on a page, consider some common limitations to students’ literacy:
- In our classes, students frequently encounter texts from unfamiliar contexts and genres, many of which assume that readers have specialized knowledge that the students don’t yet possess. Students will naturally struggle to navigate these texts.
- Many students have never been asked to complete the sheer quantity of reading that their college courses require, and they generally don’t know how to adapt their reading strategies for this load.
- Instructors choose the readings in their course for specific pedagogical purposes, but students don’t necessarily know those purposes, and even when they’re told explicitly, they often don’t know how that purpose should affect the way they read.
- Secondary school classes tend to rely heavily on a read-explain-test format, in which students are assigned reading which the instructor then explains thoroughly in class, after which students are tested on their understanding of the instructor’s explanation. Consequently, beginning college students often assume that their instructors will simply tell them everything they need to know about the reading, making the students’ understanding of the text itself a secondary concern at best.
- Much of the reading our students do (both in and out of academic settings) is mediated by digital technologies, and this has been the case for most, if not all, of their lives. However, most college instructors learned to read primarily with analog texts. Digital and analog texts encourage very different types of reading and engagement. Thus, the methods of reading that are most intuitive to us (such as reading a text linearly, from top to bottom, or annotating in the margins) are not intuitive to our students.
The common thread between these limitations is that, regardless of how generally proficient they are as readers, it’s likely that your students won’t know how to read in the particular ways that you expect them to read for your classes, especially when they’re new to college-level work.
These gaps between the ways our students read and the ways we expect them to read make it imperative for us to teach reading skills explicitly in our classes. If we don’t, then a fundamental part of our curriculum remains hidden, making it harder for students to succeed.
Like all aspects of the hidden curriculum, this issue is particularly pronounced for students with one or more marginalized identities, but the vast majority of our students don’t learn how to read at a college level before they get to college. Therefore, by explicitly teaching reading skills, we can provide all students with a clearer understanding of our expectations and better support their academic success.