Five Keys to Helping Students Read Difficult Texts

You may be surprised that many of your students are not adequate readers of the texts you assign.  Many simply do not know how to approach a challenging informational text.  You can suggest 5 things that can make a large difference to help them read your texts with facility and intellectual engagement.  How nice to have students coming to class prepared and total of inquiry!

"People get to sleep over skillful books not because they are unwilling to make the try, just because they do not know how to make the effort.  Skillful books are over your head; they would not exist practiced for y'all if they were not.  And books that are over your head weary you unless you can reach up to them and pull yourself upward to their level.  It is not the stretching that tires you, just the frustration of stretching unsuccessfully considering you lack the skill to stretch effectively.  To keep on reading actively, you must have not but the volition to do and so, but besides the skill – the art that enables you to elevate yourself by mastering what at kickoff sight seems to be beyond y'all."1

Of the twenty principles taught in Educatee Development 305 "Advanced Reading Strategies for College Success,"2 several have been identified by students as having made the nearly difference in their reading of challenging texts.  Below are the five pinnacle strategies  students wish they had known earlier in their college careers.  (All are taken from Learn More & Read Faster,two the handbook for the course. The sources and inspirations for these strategies are given in that location.)

  1. Earlier READING:  Preview & Build Anticipation
  2. Earlier READING: Fix Purpose
  3. DURING READING: Synthesize Forth the Way
  4. DURING READING: Enquire Questions
  5. AFTER READING:  Explain

1. Before READING:  Preview & Build Apprehension T.H.I.Due east.Five.V.Due east.S. with Snatches.   Previewing, looking over a text before reading information technology carefully, is considered a fundamental strategy of effective readers.  The three main functions of previewing are to see how a text is put together, to realize the content of what you will be learning and thereby build or bring to memory background knowledge virtually the topic, and to give you enough of the content to set valuable purposes for reading it more carefully.   Building anticipation, a split principle from previewing merely frequently done at the same time, motivates y'all to go engaged and committed to reading an academic text.  It takes reading out of the realm of going-through-the-motions and puts your mindset solidly in the realm of "I have much I want to learn from this and I want to."  T.H.I.E.V.V.E.S. with Snatches is one strategy for doing this, although there are others (encounter Six Ways to Go Fascinated past a "Boring" Text ).

ii. Before READING: Fix Purpose  Launch.   Setting a purpose before reading declares your destination.  If yous are going on a journey, having a destination helps in you make decisions along the manner.  You know where yous are headed and what y'all want to accomplish forth the style.  The educatee who took five hours to read twelve pages wanted to get "everything" out of the text.  Well, five hours is not nigh enough time to do that.  It is like maxim I desire to explore every rock and gully in Utah.  Five hours won't exercise it.  This is not only an unrealistic purpose, it is detrimental to accomplishing your long term academic goals.  In that location are many other important reasons to ready purposes.  Launch lists useful steps for setting purposes for reading.  Closely connected is AFTER READING: Bank check Purpose  Met Purpose? because you will want to follow through to be sure you met your purposes for reading.

3. DURING READING: Synthesize Along the Manner  Download.   Synthesizing Along the Mode means pulling together the pieces of what you are learning at points during the journey of reading a text.   Synthesizing involves explicitly looking for related words, concepts, and ideas in the text and using them to construct a principal idea or summary statement.  This DURING principle involves stopping after a department of text and noting what you are learning from the reading.  You practice this apace, but enough to hold the information until you can think more than deeply about information technology later.  Downloading is a quick mode to practice this.

four. DURING READING: Ask Questions  Prof's Questions and My Questions. Asking Questions is approaching a text with wonder.  Asking genuine questions is more than of import for learning than having pat answers.   Reading with questions in mind is an important part of disquisitional reading; you claiming ideas and demand an understanding of the author's meaning and purpose.  As you attempt to answer your questions, practise not be satisfied with shallow answers.  Become beyond the text if necessary.  Appreciate that the best questions have no ready answers.  Some questions have days, years, or centuries to answer while some may never have sure answers just are questions still worth request and thinking about.  Expert questions change the world.   When yous sustain your questions, ponder them, and allow them to give birth to new questions; you lot are condign a scholar.  Nothing is a more important tool for a scholar than asking good questions.

Y'all accept been request questions since yous could talk; it is a natural manner of being in the world.  Bring that same marvel to the text.

  • Ask questions Before yous read to requite purpose for reading—to discover answers you actually desire to know.
  • Enquire questions DURING reading to analyze pregnant, to probe for agreement, to be metacognitively enlightened, and to gain new insights.
  • Inquire questions AFTER reading to review, to reflect on the significance of what you have learned, and to generate new thinking.

One strategy for request questions when you are in the survival mode is Prof'southward Questions.  Beyond that are asking your ain questions, Socratic questions, and probing questions for critical and creative thinking, but that is non our purpose for now.  Suffice information technology to say: Do not let Prof's Questions be your only questions.

v. After READING:  Explain.  Exist the Teacher.   Explaining is partly retelling but is too providing examples, connecting to information outside of the text, and justifying your outlook on the content.  Understanding goes beyond mere knowledge of facts, giving back on tests the official theory of the textbook or professor, or telling someone about it.  Making yourself explicate what you understand pushes you to a higher level of comprehension.  Explanation involves the following :

  1. Knowledge of Why and How:
  • Providing knowledgeable and justified accounts of events, actions, and ideas and the reasons or theory behind them
  • Verifying knowledge with examples, predictions, back up, analogies, or theoretical perspective
  1. Warranted Opinions:
  • Justifying how yous arrived at an answer and why information technology is correct
  • Giving valid bear witness and argument for a view and existence able to defend that view against other views
  • Seeing the guiding principles behind the problem, miracle, or fact; seeing the principles that clarify and requite value to the facts

There are stiff reasons for explaining what y'all are learning.  The strategy used to apply this principle is Exist the Teacher.

Supporting Academic Reading Strategies

First of all, realize that these strategies are the first of academic reading, non the end.  They help students come to a basic understanding of the text and assistance them finish their texts in a timely fashion.  When they feel capable of finishing their reading assignments with understanding, they are then ready for probing, critical, and belittling scholarly reading. Outset though, what can you lot exercise as a professor to help students have advantage of the benefits of these five basic reading strategies?  Here are just a few suggestions:

  • Since these strategies come from the proficient-reader research3 and because you are the expert reader in your classroom, share your own experiences reading the tough texts in your field.  Research of professors hither at BYU4 shows that we practise these variations of these strategies— only we probably learned them the hard mode through trial, error, and long feel.
  • When you give a new reading assignment, suggest one or more of the strategies you feel will be peculiarly helpful in learning from that text assignment for your learning objective.
  • Considering having a strong purpose for reading is powerful in guiding i'southward reading, you can requite students purposes for reading.  The purpose tin can be as generic as "To learn something fun. To challenge my current perceptions. To gear up to teach others,."four or it can be every bit targeted equally "Describe the respiratory system from retention and describe in detail the purposes and functions of each office of this organization."  Students' common purpose, of "To pass the quiz," is useless for focusing and guiding one's reading.
  • Challenge students to come up upwards with their ain important purposes specific to the text and take them share these in form on the due engagement of the reading.  How did they come up with the purposes?  How did these purposes help them learn from the text?
  • Adapt the handouts linked to this tip to your discipline and give students a hard or electronic copy.  Introduce it and encourage them to use it.  Remind and discuss it after they have had experience trying the strategy with your assigned readings. "What did you try?  How did it piece of work for you?  Why?"
    • T.H.I.Due east.V.V.E.S. with Snatches
    • Six Ways to Become Fascinated past a "Boring" Text
    • Launch
    • Met Purpose?
    • Why Synthesize Along the Way
    • Downloading Patterns
    • Prof'south Questions
    • Why Try to Explicate What Y'all Are Learning
    • Be the Instructor
  • Hold a quick discussion with students about what constitutes effective approaches to academic reading (supporting yourself BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER reading.).
  • Ask several readers to report to the class what they've been doing that has helped them successfully read your texts – in terms of charge per unit, bones comprehension, and higher order critical thinking.
  • Concord a contest for the students who can predict the most questions you lot requite on a quiz or exam.
  • Encourage students to grade study groups and take them share their strategies for reading well in preparation for the written report group.  Suggest they practise "Be the Teacher" during the study group sessions.

Additional Resources

one. Adler, M.J. & Van Doren, C. (1972). How to read a book: The classical guide to intelligent reading.  New York: Simon & Schuster.

2. Isakson, M. B. with Isakson, R. L., & Windham, I. (2011). Learn More than & Read Faster. Provo, UT: BYU Publishing.

3. See Pressley, Yard., & Afflerbach, P. (1995). Verbal protocols of reading: The nature of constructively responsive reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum for a review of 38 practiced-reader studies.  As well see Flippo, R. F., & Caverly, D. C. (2009). Handbook of college reading and written report strategy inquiry, 2d ed. New York: Routledge (Taylor & Francis).

4. Isakson, M. B., Gilbert, J. B., Isakson, R. 50., & Loud, Z. Southward. (ms in prep). "How Undergraduates and Professors Read Academic Texts and Implications for Pedagogy." You may request a re-create of the concluding study at marne_isakson@byu.edu.

Tip conributed by

Marné B. Isakson, Ph.D. (marne_isakson@byu.edu)
Developer of courses: Advanced Reading Strategies for College Success and Surviving College Reading

Author of Larn More & Read Faster: A Handbook of Advanced Reading Strategies for College Success and Surviving College Reading: A Handbook of Essential Strategies for College Success.

For other ideas on improving bookish reading, see Critical Reading Mini Lessons


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