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64. GETTING STUDENTS TO READ PURPOSEFULLY
We’ve all encountered those students who, as soon as the word ‘reading’ is mentioned, tell us they ‘don’t like reading.’ Or, when given the opportunity to pick their own book to read, say that they have never finished a book or haven’t read one ‘they liked.’ These are students who see reading as ‘work’, who believe that reading is a task they must do to demonstrate or complete something, who wait for the teacher to tell them what they need to do. For these students, reading is a singular task: I am reading this text because it is what I have to do to achieve something else. This can also be the case for the avid readers we know who consume books in their own time yet find reading in class to be something entirely different. As keen readers ourselves, we’ve both experienced our own disengagement while reading some class novels as students because they weren’t books we felt connected to. In these cases, we read to answer comprehension questions or complete assessment tasks. We separated the reading we did in class from our developing reading identities.
Having students see themselves as readers who bring as much to a reading experience as the teacher opens up new opportunities for deeper engagement and enriching discussions of texts that go beyond the ‘work.’ So how can we foster authentic reasons for reading that value students’ reading identities?
Literary theorist, Louise Rosenblatt, provides a useful starting point for valuing what readers bring to texts. She writes that ‘text is just ink on a page until the reader comes along and gives it life.’ Rosenblatt’s transactional reader-response theory (1978) frames purposes for reading into two stances and asserts that most reading experiences fall somewhere between the two: the efferent and the aesthetic. Efferent reading refers to the “the cognitive, the referential, the factual, the analytic, the logical, the quantitative aspects of meaning,” while the aesthetic stance deals more with “the sensuous, the affective, the emotive, the qualitative” (Rosenblatt, 1994: 1068). An efferent stance is adopted when a student reads to prepare for another experience: when students read an article to extract specific information about a topic for a research project, when an apprentice electrician is reading a workplace safety manual to build knowledge about OHS procedures, or when television viewers evaluate electoral candidates while watching the presidential debate in preparation for an election (we realise we might be hitting a little close to home, here!). The aesthetic stance positions reading as a full emotional, intellectual and evocative experience in itself, the kind of reading where one ‘falls into’ the world of a text and ‘lives’ it. When reading, we tend to adopt a stance based on how we think the text should be read, or how we are reading it, and might move back and forth between the two. Many students see most of their reading experiences in the classroom as being purely efferent; reading instructions or finding key information to be used later on. At worst, they assume what Cheryl Hogue-Smith (2012: 59) calls the ‘deferent stance’, which involves students ‘deferring’ to the negative emotions they experience when reading difficult texts. They don’t allow themselves to ‘live’ the text or respond to the language in a personal way, nor do they draw upon their personal experiences and preferences to make meaning from the text. As teachers, we want to treat texts as stimuli for our readers, prompting closer engagement and connections. To do this, we need to value what the reader brings to the text just as much as the text itself. This ‘transaction’ creates a reciprocal relationship between reader and text.
Pat Thompson’s (2002) concept of the ‘virtual schoolbag’ is also helpful metaphor when thinking about what a student can bring to a text (if we allow them to). It’s the idea that each student brings with them diverse experiences and background knowledge to tap into which can enhance or become a jumping-off point for further learning. If we take this into account and apply it to reading, we are showing that we value what a student brings to the table, encourage them to be more aware of themselves as a reader, and support them in connecting the new to the known (by acknowledging what they already know). To build on this, the ‘Funds of Knowledge’ theory (Gonzalez, Moll and Amanti, 2005) outlines that there is great potential to improve learning from the knowledge acquired through students’ own households and communities.
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