Week 2: Active Reading

Question: Briefly discuss how you might teach or convey the ideas in "Active Reading" to a developmental reading writing class.  How would you help students to understand these processes and strategies? And how might we use writing to practice some of these readings processes and strategies?  

When introducing the concept of Active Reading, Van Woerkum states that readers are viewed as “active persons who bring a lot to the text from themselves,” so that we must focus as instructors on “what readers do with a text” (266). If what the reader brings to the text is as important as the content of the text itself (266), then if I were to convey the ideas of Woerkum’s article in a developmental reading/writing class, I would take some time to explore and discuss the predispositions that my students bring to the classroom before entering into the reading process. I would ask them to create a portrait of themselves as a reader and writer, finding out about their particular interests as well as any strengths and weaknesses that they become aware of as both readers and writers. As part of this pre-reading self-portrait assignment, I would ask students to identify which areas of the reading process they anticipate they will have trouble with when they read a text.

In the Before Reading process, Woerkum discusses three stages: the act of selecting; the inferences that are made; and how this leads to anticipation of the reading itself. So in an in-class pre-reading assignment, I would ask students to identify, in a thoughtful paragraph, what kinds of gratifications they are seeking when they read, and assess whether these align with Woerkum’s categories of: information, personal identity, integration and social interaction, or entertainment (267). This written assessment could provide a sense of how well these particular students will identify with the chosen readings.

Also as a Before Reading activity, I would ask students to preview an assigned text and then make a prediction, in a thoughtful paragraph, about what the text will be about, and to draw an inference about how they as a reader will respond to this text (i.e., will they agree or disagree with it, and why?). Once the reading process is completed, they can assess the accuracy of these predictions. Woerkum states that inferences can be visual, so students could be given the option to draw the associations triggered by a text, in order to visualize the inferences they are making. I would explain to students that developing an awareness of our predispositions, along with our initial assumptions and predictions about a text is an important first step in the reading process, as it informs our engagement and comprehension of the text itself.

Moving on to the During Reading process, Woerkum notes that the reader makes “ongoing inferences while reading,” which is connected to ongoing acts of “focusing and reflecting (including coping with surprises)” (269). In order to identify and discuss the inferences that students make while reading a text, I would ask students to keep a journal as they read and record a certain number of quotations per section of the reading, and then to interpret the meaning of these quotations AND draw a conclusion/make an inference about how these specific quotes relate to the broader meaning of the entire text, or to the thesis. This relates to Woerkum’s notion that one form of inference involves “how the fragments in a text are linked to each other” (270), focusing on the relationships between the parts of the text and to the larger whole.

Woerkum also describes how the process of reading leads to an active process of connecting to other concepts outside of the text, so I would provide study questions to guide students’ reading of a text, which ask them to make connections between the content of a text and either other texts they have read, or social and cultural issues that can be connected thematically or stylistically to the text. I might ask as well, “what other ideas or images came up for you while reading this text? Which specific parts of the text triggered these associations?” This can get students to connect the text to the world beyond the text, to draw deeper connections between text, world, and self.

In terms of the Focusing and Reflecting aspect of the During Reading process, I would ask students to revisit their initial predictions about the text during the Before Reading process, assessing if these predictions seem correct. Woerkum also mentions the experience of “dissonance,” when there is a conflict or gap between the reader’s views or assumptions and the text’s perspective; this can lead the reader to rethink their initial assumptions (271). In light of this idea, I would ask students to write about how the text has either reinforced or challenged their initial assumptions, and to think about how their Before Reading predictions fit into this.

As part of the After Reading process, I would ask students to discuss and write about how their initial predictions and assumptions during the pre-reading stage might have been reinforced, challenged, and/or transformed by the reading process. In terms of Woerkum’s notion of “activation of new reading,” I would ask students to think about what other texts they might read to develop the ideas encountered in the current reading, in order to “stimulat[e] the reader to look further” (273). I believe it is very important for students to connect the current text with texts they have already read and might read in the future, to see how the assigned text could be situated within a broader framework. Finally, in order to translate Woerkum’s notion of readers as members of discourse communities, I would assign group activities that ask students to develop their own discussion questions based on their reading and to share these with the class. Hopefully, each of these steps in the process will continually be connected to the topic of their upcoming essay, so that each step of the reading process is completed with the larger purpose of the writing assignment in mind.