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Reading across the Curriculum

 

Julie Odell, Assistant Department Head of Developmental English

 

Developmental English at the College is launching a new Reading Across the Curriculum initiative for Fall 2007. The project aims to provide support and training to faculty teaching in the disciplines so that they can assist their students in fully understanding texts assigned for their courses. One of the biggest stumbling blocks in student success at the college is poor reading dexterity. While developmental English reading courses provide excellent instruction in various reading and study skills, students may still struggle in their content courses. The new RAC program plans to involve instructors in all disciplines to help students acquire content area reading strategies and fully flourish in their college endeavors.

 

The RAC program will include

·         Recruitment of faculty from each discipline to be reading skills liaisons.

·         Training of developmental English faculty to provide workshops to these liaisons.

·         Dialogue between content developmental English faculty and faculty from the disciplines as to how DE reading courses can best prepare students for reading in other courses.

 

The Problem

 

“My students can’t read.” This is a complaint oft hear ‘round the college, in every discipline. Instructors in all departments sometimes find themselves frustrated when they assign reading material for homework and find the next time they meet their class that many students either read the material yet have very poor understanding of what they’ve read, or that they’ve skipped the homework altogether.

 

Part of the blame resides on high schools, which often do a poor job of preparing students for college. A 2006 press release from the ACT reveals the following:  “Only about half (51%) of the nearly 1.2 million 2005 high school graduates who took the ACT college admission and placement exam met the College Readiness Benchmark for reading on the exam, the lowest level in more than a decade.”

 

At the College, this number may actually be lower. As Paula White writes in her excellent article in the Fall 2006 issue of Viewpoints, “Here at Community College of Philadelphia, the summary of placement between January and December 2005 indicates that only 13.7% of incoming students were placed at the college level. This fact, and our overall graduation rate of approximately 9%, could imply that reading is a stumbling block for our students in their attempts to achieve academic success. These data may indicate that many, if not most, of our students have insufficient reading skills that impede them from truly learning, truly comprehending course material which will allow them in subsequent course work to apply new information to a core of knowledge.”

 

While developmental reading courses give students practice in activities such as annotation, paraphrase, summary, vocabulary development and study skills to help them succeed in their subsequent content courses, students may not retain the skills they’ve learned from semester to semester. Additionally, many CCP students place out of developmental reading and begin their content courses with ostensibly “college ready” reading skills.

 

Causes of difficulties

From “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts” in Engaging Ideas by John C. Bean

 
  1. Students struggle and then give up. When they have trouble, a frustrated instructor may just explain the text instead of challenging them to read it, which develops lazy students and a spoon-feeding instructor.

 
  1. They don’t know that they need to adjust their reading strategies according to what they are reading (skimming, finding main idea, finding details)

 
  1. Students don’t understand how a writer develops an argument.

 
  1. They recoil from the unfamiliar.

 
  1. Students don’t understand the context of a writer’s argument.

 
  1. They don’t see themselves in a conversation with a writer.

 
  1. Students have deficits in cultural literacy

 
  1. They often have a poor vocabulary.

 
  1. Students struggle with complex syntax.

 
  1. They don’t understand that reading in different disciplines requires different strategies.

 

 

The solution

 

The new Reading across the Curriculum (RAC) project at the college aims to address these issues in a variety of ways. Developmental reading courses might further target content-specific reading skills. Additionally, content course instructors may address students’ reading challenges in a variety of ways:

 
  • Holding students accountable for reading assignments
  • Providing strategies for reading material in a particular discipline
  • Modeling one’s own reading strategies
  • Providing guided reading questions
  • Helping students develop meta-cognitive awareness of their reading process
  • Teaching students how to annotate a text
  • Reviewing difficult vocabulary
  • Furnishing contextual information to precede reading assignments
  • Requiring students to synthesize material from a variety of sources
  • Facilitating “reciprocal teaching” opportunities for students
  • Providing opportunities for paraphrase and summary of reading material
  • Asking students to keep reading journals
  • Creating a clear purpose for reading assignments
  • Incorporating writing assignments based on textual analysis
  • Facilitating class discussions about reading assignments
  • Discussing study strategies in preparation for exams

           

So what might a RAC program look like? First of all, instructors in all disciplines need to recognize that reading instruction is a college-wide responsibility. Developmental reading instructors, while knocking themselves out to provide students with reading and study strategies, can only do so much.

 

On the other hand, content instructors should assess whether students who have completed developmental reading courses have indeed learned and developed reading and study skills appropriate to their courses.

 

We might begin to fashion a RAC program by surveying instructors in all departments to uncover:

 

·         How students are held accountable for reading assignments

·         What problems students have with reading assigned texts

·         Whether reading instruction occurs in class

·         How developmental reading courses can help

 

The results of the survey should reveal how we will proceed. Certainly the project will ask developmental reading faculty to take on the task of presenting strategies for the teaching of reading to their colleagues across the disciplines. In addition, as developmental reading course protocols take shape in the English department, feedback from content teaching on exactly how their students have difficulty with assigned reading may result in new approaches to these courses.

 

Additional Resources

 

White, Paula.  “Teaching Reading Across the Curriculum: A Collective Responsibility”

 

Marcotte, Madeline.  “Access, Readiness, and College Reading: The Razor’s Edge”



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