Blog Post #6 Consuelo


Students’ reading problems vary widely ranging from not liking to read to having difficulties following basic instructions, and identifying main points of a text. As Bean points out, drawing on Sternberg (1987), one of the students’ reading difficulties stems from their lack of awareness regarding the connection between reading process variation and the reader’s purpose. Very often students apply the same reading speed to reading a newspaper sport section as to reading a difficult text where the goal is to identify main ideas. Failing to adapt their reading strategies to different purposes, students frequently complain about having difficulties understanding the text. In addition to this lack of adjustment of a reading process to its purpose, how students approach the reading process can be a source of reading difficulties, according to Bean. Thus, a difficult text should be approached by reading slowly, rereading, asking questions, and making connections with the reader’s personal experience and other texts (Ben). In short, an interactive approach to reading implies holding a conversation between the reader and the author (Adler, 1941).
 Regarding reading-to-write issues students’ difficulties involve not integrating quotations within the writer’s argument by not explaining the meaning of the quotation or connecting it with what the writer says. Often quotations are not framed. They are just stated using quotations marks and left orphaned.

Comments

  1. UnknownFebruary 26, 2019 at 8:14 AM

    Regarding unframed quotations, that's something I try to teach my classes, but mainly as an issue of writing style. I hadn't considered that by framing quotations they might be forced to read in a more sophisticated manner. That does make sense when considering the "conversation" Bean writes about--when students integrate texts from their reading into their writing, they are fairly literally developing a conversation.

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