Because the thing is, most of my students just aren't very careful readers. This isn't to say that they aren't experienced readers--most are English majors because they genuinely love reading, and they can read closely enough to remember a wealth of plot details, the names of major and minor characters, and that kind of thing. But when I ask them to look closely at a single passage in a reading response, or when they go to write papers, it often seems as if they're incapable of taking a chunk of text and analyzing it carefully; at best, they summarize, but more typically they talk about something else entirely--the work's Timeless Themes and Universal Ideas being popular options.
BUT! When I work with my students in class, and we pause to look at a passage or short poem, they can do amazing things. With only a little prompting, they'll start talking about interesting word choices and rhyme schemes and image patterns and all that good stuff. Afterwards, I'll often even break down exactly what we did and tell them how this should translate into the analysis that they do alone in their rooms. . . but it just doesn't seem to sink in with very many of them.
So, short of assigning a million response papers or full-on essays in order to give my students ample practice (and, sorry, with 80 students that ain't happening), what else could I be doing?
So far, these are my strategies:
- Tell my students, repeatedly, that they need to be reading slowly, looking up words they don't understand, and taking approximately a page of notes every night.
- Give reading quizzes that not only cover content, but that also contain a passage or two that I ask them to identify, paraphrase, and then answer a question or two about (this is intended to cut down on the SparkNotes problem--students who are reading study guides or "modern English" translations instead of the original).
- Spend time every class modeling exactly what I expect my students to be able to do in their papers, and setting up in-class group work to that same end.
- Assign reading responses approximately every two weeks, in which I give them feedback on the nature and quality of their analyses.
So, help me out, teachers. How do you think students learn how to read more carefully? (I'm not even talking about formal close-reading, by the way--just getting kids to be more sensitive and responsive to nuances in a text.) How did you learn? And how do you teach it?
I'm beginning to feel that my best hope is to catch as many students as possible when they're freshmen, work them over big time, and hope that maybe, by the time they're juniors and seniors, they're up to snuff.
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