Contents introduction chapter I: Strategies to make students read purposefully

2.2. Importance of getting students to read purposefully
Setting a purpose for reading helps keep students focused and engaged while reading, and gives them a mission so that comprehension can be reinforced. Reading with purpose motivates children and helps students who tend to rush, take their time reading so they won't skip over key elements in the text. Here are a few ways teachers can set a purpose for reading, as well as teach their students how to set their own purpose. Definitionally, literacy is the ability to “read, write, spell, listen, and speak.”Carol Anne St. George, EdD, an associate professor and literacy expert at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education, wants kids to fall in love with reading.“It helps grow their vocabulary and their understanding about the world,” she says. “The closeness of snuggling up with a favorite book leads to an increase in self-confidence and imagination, and helps children gain a wealth of knowledge from the books you share. And it only takes 15 minutes a day of reading together to nurture this growth.”Reading is necessary for learning, so instilling a love of reading at an early age is the key that unlocks the door to lifelong learning. Reading aloud presents books as sources of pleasant, entertaining, and exciting formative experiences for children to remember. Children who value books are more motivated to read on their own and will likely continue to hold that value for the rest of their lives.Instilling a love of reading early gives a child a head start on expanding their vocabulary and building independence and self-confidence. It helps children learn to make sense not only of the world around them but also people, building social-emotional skills and of course, imagination.“Reading exposes us to other styles, other voices, other forms, and other genres of writing. Importantly, it exposes us to writing that’s better than our own and helps us to improve,” says author and writing teacher, Roz Morris. “Reading—the good and the bad—inspires you.”Not only that, but reading is a critical foundation for developing logic and problem-solving skills. Cognitive development is “the construction of thought processes, including remembering, problem solving, and decision-making, from childhood through adolescence to adulthood”.
Students often seem mystified when asked to determine what is important in an assigned reading. Teachers see this confusion when students' book pages are overly highlighted in bright yellow.⁶ Media specialists see it in requests for printing out massive numbers of documents from the Internet. Parents see it when their children complete reading assignments and equate note taking with copying entire chapters. It's frustrating for everyone concerned, but especially for the students. As one of my 11th grade students told me, most of the time, I don't like to be told what to think, but at school I have to be told, especially when I read hard stuff. I have no idea what's important.
At the beginning of the year, I ask my students how they know something is important in an assigned reading. More often than not, they reply, "Anything in bold print is important." When I ask why bold print makes text important, they respond, "I don't know why. It just does." Clearly, these students are using ineffective reading strategies that seem logical to them. As Mike Rose notes, Everyday in our schools and colleges young people face reading and writing tasks that seem hard or unusual, that confuse them, that they fail. But if you can get close enough to their failure, you'll find knowledge that the assignment didn't tap, ineffective rules and strategies that have logic of their own.
There are always frequently asked questions about how the perception that reading is just ‘work’ amongst students can be changed, how students can be more active readers.
Questions like these come up again and again amongst teachers. They cut to the heart of the conflict between viewing reading as part of ‘doing school’ and reading for purpose and pleasure. What often accompanies these questions is the observation that students can often tell teachers about what they are reading or can explain the reading tasks they are doing, but struggle to articulate why they are reading in the first place. Considering that a sense of purpose shapes students’ perception of what’s worthy of their further attention and plays a crucial role in determining their ongoing commitment to learning⁷, the importance of ‘why’ is paramount if we’re serious about developing rich and meaningful learning experiences in our classrooms.
This piece builds on our previous introductory post in this series, aiming to explore how a truly comprehensive approach to designing rich and diverse reading environments for students begins with establishing a strong ‘why’ for reading. More specifically, it is about shifting the perception of reading as a ‘chore’ or a shallow transaction to viewing it as a more active, intentional and meaning-making process. 
More than just work: Developing authentic reasons for reading and valuing what students ‘bring to the table’
Most of the teachers 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. 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. Teachers experienced their 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 texts⁸. 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”. 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.
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 the notion called 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 concept of the ‘virtual schoolbag’ is also helpful metaphor when thinking about what a student can bring to a text.⁹ 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 outlines that there is great potential to improve learning from the knowledge acquired through students’ own households and communities.
We can begin to challenge the notion that reading is just ‘work’ by opening up students’ ‘virtual schoolbags’, tapping into their ‘funds of knowledge’, and acknowledging what they bring to the reading experience. As a starting point, this might include:
Activating, sharing and discussing background knowledge
Making connections to reading based on students’ own experiences
Thinking about a text’s representation of something in relation to something they have experienced or heard about.
Reading texts in which they can see themselves
Balancing efferent and aesthetic reading stances
Encouraging students to value purposeful reading: Why ‘the why’ matters 
So why does this ‘why’ matter? As Cris Tovani puts it, “A reader’s purpose affects everything about reading. It determines what’s important in the text, what is remembered and what comprehension strategy a reader uses to enhance meaning”.¹⁰
It can also shape a student’s motivation to focus and persevere while reading, builds personal connections with texts and the act of reading, and can help develop self-efficacy and effort in regards to reading. Without purpose, students are more likely to experience their minds straying from a text, feel bored or experience disconnection from what they’re reading.
They might ‘go through the motions’ and ‘say the words’ without constructing meaning from their reading. Without a clear purpose, students have no ‘game plan’ for interacting with texts and can find it difficult to separate important information from interesting details. They might find themselves highlighting anything and everything on the page, like one of us did in our first year of university when encountering increasingly challenging texts:
Without a clear reading purpose, students might struggle to distinguish important information ‘from the rest’ and can resort to highlighting ‘anything and everything’ like the example featured here.
Without being supported to determine their own reading purposes, students can come to rely on others to ‘give’ them reasons to read, developing the habits of passive readers. They might confuse genuine purposes for reading with reading assignments, like “Finish reading Chapter 6 so you can add to your character map” or “Complete ‘The Giver’ in time for the quiz on Friday.” In this case, the ‘point’ of reading becomes something that’s narrowly driven by products to be created after reading and determined by someone else other than the reader. The crucial foundations aren’t in place to approach reading as an active, personal process of meaning-making, and opportunities to develop more nuanced and original thinking are lost.¹¹
Entering a reading experience without purpose can also be likened to entering a kitchen without having any idea about what to cook. Lacking direction before being ‘let loose’ in the kitchen can produce unpredictable experiences and results. It might stop some people from even attempting to cook anything at all because it can seem too overwhelming. Others might rigidly adhere to a cookbook’s instructions and display an unwillingness to move beyond ‘the recipe’, despite their circumstances suggesting a need to adapt and be more flexible (eg: perhaps they need to cater for various dietary requirements or different palates, or for more people). On the flip side, some people might enjoy the freedom and happily experiment, feeling confident in what they are doing while drawing on their prior knowledge. An experienced chef would relish the challenge, seeing themselves as being capable of determining their own recipe. They would use their professional knowledge, experiences, utensils and ingredients intentionally and to the best of their ability, while managing to enjoy the process. So basically, without a clear purpose, the cooking process and outcome is left to chance rather than to design, which is not ideal for the chef’s kitchen OR for the classroom!
So how might we encourage students to see the ‘point’ of reading with purpose? One way to introduce this to students in an experiential way is through Cris Tovani’s ‘house’ exercise featured in her book I Read It, But I Don’t Get It, based on a passage from Pichert and Anderson (1977):
Students are given a copy of a short text titled ‘The House’ available here, and are given three different coloured pens - blue, red and green.
The teacher invites the students to quietly read the piece and with their blue pen, circle what they think is important. No further instructions are given at this point —the teacher is deliberately vague.
Students are asked to read the piece again. This time, they are asked to put themselves in the shoes of a burglar who wants to rob the house. Students are then asked to use the red pen to mark places in the text that a burglar would find important. If students need extra support to do this independently, the teacher might pause before the ‘second read’ of the text and think aloud or ask the class about what kind of information a burglar might look for, and make a list to help support them. Students might notice that having a clear purpose helps guide them in highlighting important points. 
The teacher asks students to read the text for the third time. Students are asked to read it from the perspective of a homebuyer. If students need more support, the teacher can think aloud from the perspective of a homebuyer or engage the class in discussion about what a homebuyer would be looking for. In green, they are asked to mark places in the text that a homebuyer would find important. 
Students share their responses and discuss why they selected particular information as the burglar’ and ‘the homebuyer’. The teacher explains that each of these people have different purposes for reading the text about the house, which helps shape what they’re looking for and how they read it.
’First draft’ reading: Students are asked to complete a ‘first draft’ reading of a text with a blue pen, with the purpose of identifying any parts they find confusing, challenging or unclear. The purpose here is to clarify these parts and reflect on their initial understanding. After this ‘first draft’ reading, they are asked to individually rate their understanding of the text out of ten and are invited to make a few notes about what they’ve read. Students are asked to discuss what they found confusing, challenging or unclear with a partner for a few minutes. They are welcome to ask their partner if they can help them. Student pairs share any points that remain unclear with the class and together, the teacher and students clarify these before reading further.

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