Reading Lessons

As with writing, I teach all kinds: informational, persuasive, narrative, and poetic, working with students from elementary to adult.

General comprehension

As with writing, I use a process approach. I think of reading as resembling a trip to the Grand Canyon.

Step 1: Prepare. Establish a purpose. What are students trying to get from the material? What questions are they trying to answer? This determines, among other things, whether the reader is skimming, scanning, or reading more closely. What do students already know about the topic? Do they need to research the general topic first? For some material, especially textbooks, they can read the table of contents, read summaries at the beginning of chapters, browse appendices, etc., before closer reading. Especially in stories, predicting what follows can be useful both before reading and throughout the process.

Step 2: Start at the top. The initial goal is usually to understand the main idea. Readers can focus on the flow of ideas, understanding how the details create the whole. Summary statements are important to find. The hermeneutical circle (or at least some versions of it) is a useful model for considering the relationships between details and the whole. Transition language is important to note in this process.

Step 3: Understand the signs. This includes using context to understand unfamiliar words and distinguishing denotation and connotation. Awareness of connotation is necessary for understanding tone. Learning new vocabulary involves certain strategies, and there are tricks to reading more difficult texts. This includes changes in English through the centuries. In high school, students are reading challenging older texts like Shakespeare’s plays and Alexander Hamilton’s contributions to the Federalist Papers.

Step 4: Descend to the bottom. This involves getting into the details. The two fundamental questions that can be asked of any text are, what is the author saying? and why? But all of the wh questions are helpful. Context is critical. There are also differences between what the author says directly, what the author definitely implies, and what the author may be implying. Readers should determine the intended audience. Additionally, what is the author’s style? What devices does the author use? What are the immediate effects of these choices, and how do they contribute to the overall point? Is the author effective in making those points? Does the author seem to be correct or incorrect?

Step 5: Debrief. After their journey through the text, readers can summarize what they read. They can determine the answers to their initial questions. Were their predictions right? They can then connect what they read to other texts, to themselves, and to the world.

Text types

Since students spend most of their time in English class on narratives, this is a major focus. In addition to the general strategies mentioned above, I ask students to pay attention to the tools that authors use in narratives:

Characters: How is the character directly described? How does the character behave, and what drives that behavior? How do other characters react to that character? Does the character have a foil(s)? What are the consequences of the character’s actions?

Setting: Where and when does the story take place? What atmosphere does it create? How do the location, time, and atmosphere affect the story?

Plot: What is the central problem in the story? How do the characters attempt to overcome it? What is the relationship between the overall series of events and how they are developed in the story? Where is the climax? How is the problem resolved?

Point of view: Is it first or third person? Is the third-person view limited, omniscient, or objective? What is the relationship between the narrator and both the situation and the other characters in the story? Does the point of view shift?

Genre: What genre is it? How well does it fit genre expectations?

In addition to these considerations, I ask students to analyze the effect of these as well as other factors already mentioned (diction, tone, literary devices, etc.) on the reader. I also introduce background information as needed.

Poetry overlaps significantly with narratives. However, sound plays a much greater role in meaning. I start by introducing various meters used in English poetry so that students can identify patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables and understand their effects. We look at examples of poets’ breaking the rhythm for effect. We examine rhyme, alliteration, consonance, assonance, asyndeton, polysyndeton, refrain, etc., in addition to the devices commonly found in narratives, like simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, symbolism, and irony. We also look at various forms of more traditional poetry, like sonnets, as well as contemporary poems that break from those forms.
In some cases, especially for students who take AP Language and Composition, I teach rhetorical analysis. In addition to elements and devices found in other text types as mentioned above, we examine essays and speeches in terms of Aristotle’s appeals (ethos, logos, and pathos), which are commonly brought up in class. We also examine the use of evidence, the assumptions behind the author’s arguments, and the way the author targets specific audiences.