Reading Strand Blog: Effective Reading

Language literacy is so often taken for granted in our society. When I completed my undergraduate degree, I received countless “polite” inquiries on what I hoped to accomplish with a degree as useless as English. To answer them I first politely corrected their pronunciation of the word useful, and then attempted to express the immeasurable value of spending four years building reading, writing, and communicating skills. Being able to communicate your thoughts and ideas clearly, succinctly, and persuasively in any format is an enormous asset to any job. Knowing how to summarize information, how to process it and retain the important details, and then knowing how to identify which details those are, these are all skills that go beyond a classroom or an office, they follow us into our everyday lives.

Reading is one of these skills we as a society so often take for granted. Someone might say they aren't very good at writing and it wouldn't be considered particularly strange because that statement would most likely be understood to mean the person might not be an interesting writer, or a persuasive or creative writer. However, if a grown adult told you they couldn’t read very well it would sound slightly more concerning because reading as a concept is often considered at its most basic level. When a person thinks of reading it is often of the surface level, just the ability to look at words and understand what they mean on their own and how they work together to form a sentence, but being able to read does not make you a good reader. The Grades 1- 8 Ontario Curriculum states that elementary students need to learn to become “effective readers”, to go beyond just understanding the ideas in a text and to start making connections between past knowledge and applying the new information to new contexts (2006).

IMAGE: TUMBLR SHHHHHHIMLISTENINGTOREASON. Retrieved from mashable.com.

As a teacher you need to be able to teach students to think critically about everything they read because, as I discussed in my previous literacy blog post, the world is throwing information at you every second of the day and you need to be able to interpret what is important, what is real and how it applies to you and the world around you. And this process may look different for each student. Some may have to write their ideas down or need to work in groups to hear other perspectives which may spark their own ideas (a great resources for this is Padlet.) Some student may need more time to process these ideas and though it may it seem concerning when a student is reading slower than most of the class, it is our job as teachers to understand that not every student has the same process. I have always been a slow reader and my father who is a professor is also a slow reader and it is not because we lack the skills to recognize the words, as my elementary school teachers mistakenly believed, but because we read and reread sections of the text in our head that we find interesting and important. It is also important to remember that text takes many forms: prose, poems, journals, plays, films, radio etc. and students need to be exposed to these different types of text in the classroom so they understand how to adapt their effective reading skills to any text they may come across in the future.