Studying Text and Reading Instruction: Chapter 10 and a Supplemental Article

I know that many students have difficulty reading content-area texts.  Often times the texts that are assigned for students to read contain difficult vocabulary, "boring" content, and possibly difficult vocabulary.  Depending on the student, he or she may find different subjects easier or harder than others.  I personally had a very difficult time reading history texts in high school.  The amount of information that was needed to be taken in in one simple chapter was simply overwhelming to me.  On the other hand, let me read a chapter in my English text and I could do it easily and know exactly what I read.  What I realize now, (after reading chapter 10 of Content-Area Reading, and an article called, "Focus on the Essentials of Reading Instruction") is that it was often the case that my teachers were not teaching me how to read the text properly.  If I were to grade a few of my high school teachers based on the rubric in the supplemental article, several of them would be barely passing or failing.

According to Alan Frager and Elizabeth Frey, the authors of the "Reading Instruction" article, teachers who deserve the grade of an 'F' use poor methods of instruction and provide little support for their readers.  For example, round-robin reading (RRR) is one practice that "very few reading educators advocate... though it is a widely used practice" (p. 57).  This was a technique that was enjoyed by several of my teachers.  The problem with this strategy is that there is only one actively engaged reader, and 25 other passive readers.  Also, this type of forward/one-speed reading is contradictory to developing good reading strategies. When someone reads critically, he or she will reread parts of the text, change speeds, and occasionally stop to look back or ahead.  Luckily for me, I have learned many other strategies to read class texts that are more effective, and therefore my students won't have to survive the infamous round-robin reading strategy.

One strategy that I really enjoyed reading about was the GRASP strategy suggested in chapter 10 of our Content-Area Reading text.  GRASP stands for Guided Reading and Summarizing Procedure, and it's a way of showing students how to summarize information from a text passage.  "After students have read a text passage, they turn the books face down and try to remember everything that was important in the passage.  What they recall is recorded by the teacher on the whiteboard" (p. 335).  The teacher then helps to add or correct recollections from the text to create a graphic outline.  Then, together the students and the teacher create a final summary sentence or two.  In my opinion, this is a great way to make sure all of my students are being active readers.  It also creates the communication needed between the teacher and the students in order to scaffold for future reading assignments.  Hopefully after several times doing this activity, students will be able to do this on their own when reading for class.