Reading Stuff Good

            I just ran across something as I was cleaning out my flash drive.  It is a list generated from an education textbook of “Strategies Used by Proficient Readers.”  They include the following: Asking Questions, Visualizing, Determining Importance, Making Inferences, Making Connections, Synthesizing Information, and Using Fix-Up Strategies.  I made a handout for my students listing these and including descriptions of each.  At the time, I thought it might be helpful.

            As I looked at it again I began to wonder.  The truth is “good readers” do these things, and the more they do them the more they will get out of reading.  Yet to call them “strategies” now seems to me a bit off.  The word strategy implies a conscious effort is being made, like implementing a specific strategy in an athletic competition, and I don’t think that applies to “good readers.”  And giving pupils like my high school students a list of strategies to implement may not be the best way to encourage their use.  I’ll try to explain.

            Take, just as an example, Visualizing.  Any time I read a novel I am visualizing the setting, the characters, the events, etc.  But I am not doing this “consciously.”  I do not sit down with a book and tell myself, “Remember to visualize what you are reading.”  If you have ever gotten lost in a book you know what it is like to become so involved in the process of reading that the world around you melts away, and all you see are the words on the page and the images in your head; often it may even seem you are not reading at all but simply existing in the world of the book.  If someone or something distracts you it might take a minute to reacquaint yourself with reality.  That’s a great book.

            But if I tell students to Visualize, if I make it, in a way, an assignment or a task, I am making it conscious, I am focusing their effort on it.  My hope is that the “required task” will eventually become habit, but I am not sure that it will.  Unfortunately the psychology of the modern student, well trained by our educational system, is to do that which is required and then forget about it.  Visualizing becomes a task you must complete to earn a grade or points, not something that becomes habitual and valued.

            The question, which I have no answer to at the moment, is how do we get our students to read organically?  How do we get them to “use” these strategies without having to consciously think about the strategy they are employing?  How do we teach them to read well in a culture that is saturated with images so that they never need to imagine anything in everyday life?  I am not sure that presenting them with a list of strategies is the way to do it.