Don't Assume a Reading Purpose, Assign One
One way to encourage students to read beyond their surface level understanding of a text is to assign individual readers a particular purpose or perspective. Students read the same material in small groups, or as a whole class, but each with a different purpose.
Alvermann, Phelps & Rideway (2007), citing Dolan's (1979) research on improving reading through group discussion (
Dolan.pdf) suggest these purposes (p. 275):
- Determine one relevant and one irrelevant sentence in the text.
- Look for emotive language in the text.
- Look for evidence of bias in the text.
- Find three facts and three opinion statements in the text.
- Present an alternative argument to one in the text.
- Test the author's claims by researching other sources.
- Write a set of questions about the text that can only be answered by consulting other sources.
Show the Fish What the Ocean Looks Like from the Beach
Culture has been famously described as the air we breathe, or allegorically, the water the fish swims in.
As a language arts teacher, I would add explicitly teaching and coaching students to apply critical lenses like feminist, Marxist, new historical, structural, or postmodern literary theories--among others. (See Wilhelm's thematic book review Let's give them something to talk and think about: Using literary theory to enliven our classrooms."The English Journal (91) 3. Retrieved from JSTOR.
criticalencounters.pdf)
Such perspectives and purposes move students into a critical stance in relation to the text. In any content area, students could take up the perspective of a particular theorist or historian, a professional practitioner in the field--a chemist, an engineer, a librarian. These lenses--or even simpler ones like the point of view of a certain character or historical personage-- expose what is explicit and implicit in the text, or even what is missing all together.
Reading for Different Purposes in My Classroom
To avoid the cognitive overload of teaching literary theory along with reading challenging literature, I have sometimes adapted Rick Beach's basic approaches to teaching literature (topical, historical, textual, social), treating each approach as a critical lens. Students work in small groups, each having chosen a lens and sharing her focused interpretations with the others. A student who chose the textual lens, for example, would focus her reading on text features and use of language. Reading through the historical lens could yield insights about setting and authorial intent. The social lens offers an opportunity for affective response, and the topical lens for related issue oriented research. For example, in reading "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin, the student with the textual lens would focus on irony and imagery, the one with the social lens could explore feelings and experiences about love and marriage, the historical lens could lead to investigation of 19th century women's rights in marriage, and the topical lens could explore divorce. In sharing their focused insights, all readers would gain a more complex understanding of the text.
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