NOT Post Literate

Hello everyone,

I enjoyed graduate school. It was fun to sit in groups and consider great questions and argue answers that were as yet indefensible. During my last stint as a student, we considered the question of whether or not we are entering a post-literate society.

To an English teacher, the mere suggestion that society will not be literate (and worse, that it won't NEED to be literate) is the worst kind of anathema. My feeling at the time was that if indeed our society is going to descend into "post literacy," I for one was going down fighting.

There is some evidence of movement toward post-literacy.

Very little reading is necessary for survival in our students' worlds. (We know that it's necessary in our adult world, but I 'm not always sure the kids realize that.) They write in semi-phonetic code; they read graphic novels; they read web pages with lots of icons and atavars and very little text; they copy and paste; and they watch YouTube.

Personally, I don't think things are as bleak as I'm making them sound. I don't think literacy is as lost as it was even 150 years ago, and I don't believe we are likely to ever return to 19th Century levels of illiteracy.

Still, we need to be realistic when we approach reading with our students--especially when we are asking them to read a difficult or boring text.

Some of us approach our students' poor reading skills and lack of interest in reading by having them avoid it. Other of us simply assume that by high school students should have good enough reading skills to tackle anything approved by the state, so we assign the reading and expect it to be read and understood. Both approaches are wrong.

We must first assume that our students need to read, whether they want to or not. The focus here is on their need. If we don't require reading, they may join the ranks of those who graduate from high school having never read a grade level text.

We must next prepare them for whatever text we'll be reading. We have to get them "into" the text. Sometimes they need background information; sometimes they need perspective ("This part is not important; we can skim it"; "Don't miss this part"; "The italics warn you that this is essential"); often they need key vocabulary (it may be given before, during, or after the reading, but it must be given). Almost always, they need motivation. (Sometimes the best motivation is answering honestly why something is being read: "The Constitution seems like a boring, legal document, but it is the reason we do everything we do in the United States. If one small word were different, our whole country would be different.")

Next, we must take them "through" the text. They must actually read it. There are a number of teacher tricks that we can use to have them accomplish this. Very often, we need to continue to motivate them throughout the reading. Honestly, my students always read when assigned in class--even those who expressed reluctance. Their motivation? I expected them to read and I didn't let them get away without reading. (I used a variety of tricks, but almost never lectures on the importance of reading. That was largely assumed.)

Word attack (recognizing and saying the words correctly) and fluency (reading with speed, accuracy, inflection, and emotional appropriateness) are important, but comprehension is supreme. It is possible to have excellent word attack and fluency but poor comprehension. After the reading is through, we must take the students "beyond" the text. They must enter understanding. They must use analysis (good, for example, in literature) or synthesis (try it in writing activities or role play) or application (perfect for science textbooks) or other high level thinking skills. We must guide them as they do it, however.

You may have noticed that I intended to highlight "into," "through," and "beyond." I have long thought of those words (they're not my idea, so they're in quotation marks) as a good structure to pin reading on. Leaving any of the three steps out can make the reading process painful, and we don't want it to be painful.

I reiterate. Our students are not post literate; they are only pre-skilled.

Jeff Combe