Reading literary and transactional texts involves students in learning to develop thoughtful interpretations of what they are reading. Students need to approach the task as active makers of meaning. Teachers can encourage students to become active participants in the classroom literary community by tailoring their instructional strategies and methods to the needs of their classes and the individuals in those classes.
Instructional activities such as the following might be considered.
Help students prepare to read by:
Help students employ effective reading strategies during reading by:
Help students understand and respond after reading by:
Providing the necessary direction, support, and guidance for students before, during, and after reading helps students become strategic readers of literature.
| Prereading | During Reading | After Reading |
Reading begins before a book is opened. Pre-reading strategies: ... help students to activate what they know about a topic and anticipate what they will read or hear. Such strategies also direct students' attention to the major points in the reading. Teachers can also use pre-reading strategies to point out how a text is organized, to teach unfamiliar vocabulary or concepts, and to provide students with a purpose for reading or listening.
(Irvin, 1990, p. 96)
A pre-reading activity with the focus on arousing interest in a literary or transactional text and getting students started reading will be different from one with the focus on establishing a common understanding about the main idea or technique employed in a text. To this end, teachers need to consider how to initiate the reading of any text.
Activating What Students Know
During the pre-reading phase, students may need assistance to activate what they already know regarding the ideas they are about to encounter. Teachers need to do more than inform students of the topic of the literary selection. For example, in a selection dealing with the theme of "courage" students might:
Students might use an anticipation guide--a brief reading passage to capture their interest--while building predictive reading skills, connecting with their previous experiences, and establishing a purpose for reading. For example, if teaching the short story, "Lather and Nothing Else" by Hernando Téllez, teachers could present the following question as an anticipation guide:
Your enemy, a vile killer, is sitting on the barber's chair and you are standing over him, your razor in your hand ready to shave him. What are you thinking?
Another type of anticipation guide involves students placing a checkmark next to those statements with which they agree.
___a) Heroes are always courageous.
___b) There are many acts of courage in a war.
___c) A barber can be courageous.
___d) Courage always involves sacrifice.
Three to five statements are usually adequate.
Building Background Knowledge
If a selection deals with a military academy, for example, and students have no knowledge of such an institution, then they must be given background information.
Speakers, films, slides, news articles, maps, and photos can be used to build students' background information.
"K.W.L." can also be used to activate what students know and need to know before reading. Individually, in small groups, or as a class, have students design a chart with three columns indicating in the first what they know about a topic, in the second, what they want to know, and in the third, what they learned after they read. A variation could be: What do we know? What do we think we know? What do we need/want to know?
| What do we know? | What do we think we know? | What do we need/want to know? |
Determining Purpose and Strategy
Encourage students to use predictions to set a purpose for reading. For example, titles help a reader predict what a particular work is about. Based on the title of the poem (short story, play, essay, film), jot down a brief prediction of what you think the selection will involve.
Good readers also make predictions about characters and plot before and during their reading. After students read the first page of a selection, teachers can pose the following questions:
Focus students' thinking by setting purposes to guide their reading. An example follows.
"Beowulf" is a long poem about a legendary hero who battles evil. Like all heroes, Beowulf represents the values admired by his society. Think about the qualities of modern heroes and the kinds of enemies they battle. Make a chart like the one below and record phrases that describe today's heroes. As you read, decide if Beowulf displays any of the qualities you listed.
| Heroic Deeds | Enemies | Abilities | Virtues |
(Applebee, Langer, Hynes-Berry, & Miller, 1992, p. 21)
Explaining the Forms, Techniques, and Vocabulary Employed by Writers
Writers employ certain literary forms, techniques, and vocabulary to create their effect. If students are to understand the impact of a literary work, they have to understand how this effect is achieved. To help students better understand a literary text, it may be important to help them understand the elements and structures of literary texts, as well as the strategies for reading the different types of literature.
Literary forms, techniques, and vocabulary can be addressed in short mini-lessons before students read a selection. These mini-lessons should provide knowledge to help students experience, think about, and respond to what they are reading. They should not become disconnected terminology or treatises on literature.
Prose fiction is literature about "imagined" people, places, and events. The purpose of prose fiction is to stimulate the readers' imagination and communicate the author's perception or view of the world. Short stories, legends, myths, and novels are made up of the same basic elements--events (plot), persons (characters), places (setting), point of view, conflict, theme, and sometimes symbol and irony. Because of their length, novels usually introduce a greater variety of characters, and may include sub-plots and even use more than one point of view to give different perspectives on the events of the narrative.
Where a novel might have many focuses of sub-plots, a short story usually has one focus. Where the novel usually creates a broad exterior world that develops as the story unfolds, the short story creates a smaller world, often an interior one. However, the basic elements are the same with the novel and the short story. When reading stories students must note whether the person telling the story is a character within the story or someone watching the action from the outside. As the story unfolds, they must note the central conflict or focus and decide why the characters behave as they do. Finally they must decide how they feel about the story's events, their reactions to the main characters, and the comments or questions about life that the story conveys.
The novel, on the other hand, requires that students keep sub-plots separated and recognize their relationships to the main plot. As the characters are likely to be dynamic rather than static, they must be aware of their motives and be able to recognize the events that lead to changes in the characters. If students enjoy the novel, they may unconsciously identify with one character or idea inherent in the novel. They need to be aware of the nature and implications of such identification when they respond to what they have read.
Prose nonfiction is writing about real perceptions, lives, and times. Included in this category of prose are forms such as essays, articles, editorials, letters, journals, biographies, autobiographies, speeches, and full-length books. With suspense, richness of expression, and ingenuity of style, nonfiction is as exciting as fiction. In fact, much contemporary nonfiction uses the traditional tools of fiction writing. Terms such as new journalism, creative nonfiction, and literary nonfiction have been used to describe this type of prose writing. Contemporary nonfiction can be read for the same pleasure people experience when reading novels. Because it is vivid and personal in nature, it can serve as a model for much of secondary school students' own writing.
Students should also be aware of the typical organizational methods used in traditional nonfiction prose including simple listing, time order, comparison-contrast, cause-effect, problem-solution, and description. They may need to read a work of nonfiction more slowly than a work of fiction and, if they do not understand it easily, reread. If they are reading for information, they need to keep their purpose clearly in mind. Students may need to take time to summarize or restate the main points in the reading and make some notes on the main and supporting ideas.
Poetry is literature that communicates feelings, impressions, images, and ideas through the careful choice and arrangement of words for their sound and meaning. The purpose of poetry can be to capture a mood, convey a feeling, tell a story, or explore ideas, language, rhythms, or images. Poets use various literary techniques to convey the meaning, mood, and feeling of a poem including choice of speaker, form (order and arrangement), imagery, sound, and figurative language.
Plays can be read as a script for performance or as literary text. In the first case students, as they read, imagine the play brought to life by actors. They should try to understand the staging that will bring the script to life through acting, costumes, scenery, props, sound effects, and lighting. They should think about the motivation for characters' actions and resulting conflict. Learning objectives related to the drama strand of the arts education curriculum can also be achieved in language arts lessons where students are reading plays as dramatic scripts.
Students can also read plays as literary text. In this case they should pay particular attention to the language, the images, and the literary devices used by the playwright.
Understanding Key Vocabulary
If students do not understand the author's vocabulary, they will not understand the text. Memorizing vocabulary for a test or studying lists of words isolated from the reading experience have virtually no effect on comprehension or on improving one's vocabulary (Nelson-Herber, 1986).
Words selected for the purpose of pre-reading vocabulary development should be selected judiciously and there should be a variety of instructional techniques employed. There are three criteria to keep in mind when selecting words for study:
Also, the amount of pre-teaching of vocabulary depends upon a teacher's approach to a selection. If the selection is read aloud by the teacher, an oral interpretation may convey the meanings of the unfamiliar words. If the momentum of a selection is best not broken and key words are not necessary for understanding, then vocabulary can be addressed after the reading.
There are numerous ways to help students prepare for the words they will encounter in their reading:
E.g., if the word "rejuvenate" is a key word in a selection, students can associate this word with "juvenile".
E.g., "He is a juvenile. He is a juvenile delinquent. Stop acting so juvenile."
E.g., How would a judge use the word "juvenile"?
E.g., "Re-" as in "reproduce, renew, rejuvenate".
Other useful pre-reading vocabulary strategies include analogies (e.g., young is to old as juvenile is to....), listing, sharing the etymology of a word, encouraging wide reading, vocabulary self-collection, mnemonic devices, and games.
Generally, teachers should keep three guidelines for effective vocabulary instruction in mind:
| Prereading | During Reading | After Reading |
There are several approaches to the first reading of a selection. Sometimes teachers read the selection to the class; sometimes students read it silently; occasionally, students read it aloud (but only after they are given rehearsal time). The basic responsibility of students during reading is to make sense of text and construct meaning in the process of reading.
During reading, students need to become engaged in the reading process. Proficient readers know how and when to use certain reading strategies. Students also need to monitor their own comprehension. They need to know when the reading selection is making sense, and when it is not. This may mean rereading a part of the selection or consulting an expert source such as a dictionary.
It is important for teachers to help students become aware of their metacognitive strategies for reading. Students need to know the kind of reading and thinking required of them to understand:
Throughout the reading process, teachers should encourage students to have a clearly defined purpose, anticipate, predict, hypothesize, be tolerant of ambiguity, and reflect and reread.
When reading any particular text, students need to employ several strategies. Teachers need to engage students in the reading task and model appropriate strategies including:
An effective way to teach students how to make sense of text is for teachers to demonstrate how they make associations, how they infer, how they reread, how they create visual images, how they check predictions, and how they adjust their reading rate to match purpose and material.
Active reading requires students to bring their backgrounds into the reading, to interact with the selections, to become imaginatively and intellectually involved, and to share and shape their responses within the classroom setting. Teachers can help students read selections more effectively by getting them actively involved in the reading process. Active reading involves students in creating dialogue with the author, striving to reformulate what the author is saying and then extending it. This involvement encourages students to concentrate and think about what they are reading.
As students are making sense of a literary or transactional text, they are building "envisionments"--understandings about the text at any given time. Students must realize that reading is an active, cognitive process involving more than physically looking at the printed words. It involves looking at the meanings and ideas behind the words. Langer and Applebee (1994) noted an envisionment includes:
At different points in a reading, a reader will have different envisionments. For example, after the ghost tells his story to Hamlet the reader sees a different aspect of Claudius' personality and perhaps empathizes with Hamlet more than previously. This envisionment is not an end, rather teachers should encourage it as the starting point for contemplation and discussion. It is an exploration of possibilities as to the writer's intent.
There are as many interpretations of a text as there are people reading it. Nevertheless, not every interpretation is valid. Shakespeare's Hamlet is not the story of a basketball player. Response has to be considered, thoughtful, and justifiable. Students should understand that there is an obligation to the writer to construct an approximation of meaning and, at the same time, to appreciate the author's craft. Knowing how to read various texts, students can go on discovering the varieties and delights of reading for the rest of their lives.
During reading, teachers can use the following activities to model and develop the strategies needed for effective reading:
Think-alouds. The teacher explicitly models for the students the thinking/reading process one might go through as one reads.
Journals. Students need practice in thinking through literary texts as they read. Keeping a journal in which they respond to the literature in terms of what they think or how they feel about what they are reading gives students and teachers insights into how students are building meaning as they read. A double-entry journal allows students to jot notes, quotations, and comments as they read (i.e., their initial response) on the left side of the page. After having read and possibly reread a text, they can write more extensive responses on the right side of the page.
Guided Reading Procedure. After a purpose for reading has been set, students read an assignment to remember as much as possible. Next, they brainstorm everything they can remember, individually or with a partner. They check the text for additional information and correct any inaccuracies. Finally, they organize their recollections into an outline or semantic map.
Group Reading Strategy. All students read a common selection. Students are divided into groups. Designated responsibilities for each group are as follows:
Group 1: Rephrase the article in your own words.
Group 2: Identify questions that you would like to ask the author.
Group 3: Elaborate on the implications/ consequences of the author's position.
Group 4: What assumptions is the author making? Evaluate these assumptions.
Group 5: What information does the author present and what more would you like to know?
REQUEST (REciprocal QUESTioning). Students and teacher read a predetermined section of text. Students pose questions of the teacher. The teacher responds by modelling thought-provoking questions in return. Students continue the question-asking process with the teacher and each other using additional pre-determined sections.
Reading and Thinking Guides. Determine the major ideas for which students should read. Develop questions that reflect these major ideas. Assign a reading guide to support independent reading. Have students respond to the guide as they read and follow up with discussion and explanation of their responses. For example, the following guide could be used with the short story "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe. Students who can successfully complete this type of guide are one step closer to independently reading the text.
What does Poe say? Check as many as apply.
__Montresor is a mason.
__Fortunato is a fortunate man.
__A sip of wine is worth the trip.
__Montresor must not only punish, but punish with impunity.
What does Poe mean? Check as many as apply.
__The two men were once close friends.
__Nitre spoils the taste of Amontillado.
__Montresor has an elaborate plan to kill Fortunato.
__Montresor intends to imprison Fortunato.
What is Poe's message? Check as many as apply.
__ Fortunato is a martyr.
__ Fortunato is a drunk.
__ Montresor is insane.
__ Montresor's plan works.
How can we apply the meaning of Poe's story?
__ Stay out of catacombs.
__ Do not drink wine.
__ Do not succumb to flattery.
__ Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Other strategies for students while they are reading include encouraging them to make marginal notes on a selection, to underline key words and ideas, to outline and map key ideas, to summarize, or to retell the selection to a partner. Students may choose to do a second or third reading to clarify and confirm their understanding and interpretation.
Directed Reading-Thinking Activity. Examine the first portion of a selection and make predictions about topic or plot. Silently read the first portion, stopping at a preselected place just prior to an important event. Confirm or modify first predictions. Continue using various pre-selected stops. For example:
(Vacca & Vacca, 1996, p. 219. Used with permission of Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc.)
| Prereading | During Reading | After Reading |
Students need to reflect on what they have read in order to extend their thinking. Well-planned response activities after reading are just as important as those before and during. Although Secondary Level students traditionally have been encouraged to read various texts analytically and to disregard their aesthetic response, teachers need to remember that the aesthetic reaction of students is the one that should be considered first. Teachers need to help students to trust and build on their initial and personal response. They need to lead students from personal response to an analysis of why they responded as they did by critically examining that response in the light of what is contained in the text (Rosenblatt, 1983).
After reading, students need to be invited to respond in ways that bridge reader and text. Giving students opportunities to respond is an important way to encourage them to clarify and extend their thinking about what they read. By talking and writing in response to reading, students become more engaged in reading and develop a deeper understanding and appreciation of various texts.
Teachers need to employ a variety of questions and activities that will provide students with an array of vantage points from which to reflect upon a text. Generally, after students have read a selection, it is important to:
What feelings are you left with after reading this poem? How do you feel about what happened to Annie? In your journal, note what surprised, troubled, or pleased you as you read this story.
Initial responses may take a variety of forms such as tracing and reconstructing understanding
(e.g., At first I thought ..."), thinking of associations (e.g., "I felt like ...", "My mother ...", "This is like ... in the book ..."), and making judgements based on attitudes and beliefs (e.g., "... was wrong when he did...").
Giving students a chance to voice their initial impressions validates their attempts to understand and construct meaning. Although initial responses are important and necessary, they are not sufficient. Students must still be led to further reflection and analysis (Probst, 1988).
In "The Miracle Worker" by William Gibson, how does Annie's attitude toward Helen and her abilities compare with the Kellers' attitude? What reason is there to hope that Annie will be able to teach Helen anything?
In "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, what do you think motivates people who hunt? Do you share the author's response to killing? Why or why not? In this text, why/how has the author ...? Who is telling the story? Whose voices are not heard? Whose point of view is presented and whose is not? What is missing?
Students can reread a text for deeper meaning and, using textual evidence, support their interpretations and make judgements about the text.
What conflicts found in this story are similar to the conflicts in our society today? What is the author assuming is the "natural" way things are or should be? What kinds of people, contexts, and experience are ignored or devalued?
What does the author want the reader to think and feel about particular events or characters? How does he or she achieve this?
It is also important to consider involving as many of the language strands as possible. Some examples follow.
Journals. Students jot down responses, reactions, thoughts, and ideas in their journals, which may be subsequently shared.
Writing. Students can explore the ideas and issues found in their reading through assigned writing. Teachers should ensure there is a close connection between the students' reading and their writing.
Post-reading Discussion. Discussion is an important part of the comprehension process. Students discuss in order to communicate, refine, and enrich their understanding. This can be done in pairs, in small groups, or as a whole class.
Response Groups. Dias (1996) suggests students form groups and choose a reporter/chairperson. Within each group, one member reads aloud the text or a section under discussion. Each student, in turn, reports initial reactions, feelings, or observations occasioned by the reading, including feelings of frustration or puzzlement. Students are asked not to remark on one another's responses until each member of the group has shared an initial response. After the preliminary round, students may comment freely on what they have just heard and share observations in their endeavour to arrive at the sense of the text. They are encouraged to return to the text for confirmation of ideas. After about 20 minutes, students prepare their oral reports. Reporters are discouraged from making written notes and encouraged to build on previous reports. Comments of dissent within groups are welcome and the teacher raises questions and introduces terminology that might help the class make sense of their insights and conflicts.
Literature Circles. Students form small, temporary groups to read and discuss a literary text (often a novel). To assist students, Daniels (1994) recommends that roles be assigned to define student responsibilities, and help students focus their reading and prepare for their discussions. A group of four, for example, might include the following:
These roles can be rotated among group members and, as students become more comfortable with literature circles, adapted to suit the group's needs.
Reading and Thinking Guides. Students review and reflect on ideas from text. Teachers provide students with a series of questions on three levels of understanding (i.e., recall, reading between the lines, and personal connection). The latter two levels extend students' thinking beyond mere "parroting" of textually explicit concepts. Students can use the guides individually, in small groups, or as a class.
Readers Theatre. Students form a group to prepare a dramatic reading of a scene. They sit or stand at the front of the classroom or in a staging area and read aloud their scripts to capture the tone, significance, and drama of the passage(s) which they have chosen.
Role play. Students play characters' roles and dramatize incidents or illustrate issues from the selection.
Notemaking. Students can record and sort out their ideas and impressions about a selection using their own words.
Author's Chair. A student assumes the role of the author and responds to questions from the teacher and other students.
Storyboards. Students create a script based on events taken from a selection. They transform these characters into "stick figures" and describe the use of camera shots, angles, special effects, and dialogue.
Mapping. Students visually portray relationships in text by drawing graphic organizers to represent connections between characters, events, or ideas.
Art. Students create an artistic representation (e.g., pencil sketch, painting, collage) to communicate character, theme, or other significant aspect of the selection.
Graphics. Students develop a story sequence or design a visual representation of how ideas or characters developed.
Extending. Students can read more selections by the same author or selections involving the same or similar theme or issue.
Extending Text. Students can create different endings, add episodes, revise events, alter style, place characters in different contexts, create dialogue, or create a character's diary entry.
Reviews. Students can view a movie or live play, comparing or contrasting it to the print version.