How to Make Reading Difficult Texts More Accessible in the Classroom

There was a time when literacy was a rare and prized skill. These days the ability to read isn’t so rare but it’s not so prized either. We use technology to distill great amounts of information down to the tiniest bite-size chunks, spelling and grammar not required. Texts and tweets teach us that communicating ideas doesn’t have to be an ordeal. So when teachers ask students to spend time reading (and re-reading) complicated texts, we shouldn’t be surprised by the backlash.

It’s fairly easy to get by without being able to read. I’ve done it. I’ve lived in two countries where I was not only illiterate, I didn’t even know the alphabet. My students have figured out ways to circumvent reading without embarrassing themselves, just as I did in Japan and Cambodia. When I give a reading assignment, I rarely hear complaints that the text is too difficult. Instead, the topic is boring/dumb/gay, or a student remembers that he has to see the guidance counselor about an urgent matter, or the class suddenly needs to know why my beard is darker than the rest of my hair. Even when I assign a reading that I know they can handle, my students are conditioned to reject it on principle. In order to get my kids reading, I need a strategy that offers a bit more finesse than the old “Do it or get a zero” coercion.

Fortunately, the good folks at Pittsburgh’s Institute for Learning (IFL) came up with a reading model that gives me permission to teach reading the way I myself read. In college I majored in philosophy, which required grappling with some really dense texts. The philosophy department stressed depth of content over breadth, which for me meant reading the same passage over and over again until I understood what the hell Aristotle was talking about. Similarly, the IFL model prescribes four readings of a single text, each time with a different purpose:

1^st reading: Identify the gist

2^nd reading: Select “significant moments” (the most striking passages)

3^rd reading: Ask interpretive questions (infer the author’s meaning and purpose)

4^th reading: Ask evaluative questions (critique the underlying values / challenge the premise)

Three characteristics of this model impress me. First, there is a distinct point to each reading. My students are unlikely to re-read a text simply “to understand it better.” Instead, there’s a clear objective each time. Second, readers are meant to do more than just absorb the ideas they’ve been presented. They’re also asked to evaluate the soundness and validity of an author’s claim (this model was intended for informational texts). In short, readers must reflect on what they’ve read. Third, and most important, the effort threshold at each step is relatively low. This feature motivates students to try.

You don’t start with evaluative questions because it’s too big a task. But after steps one, two and three, the reader has enough familiarity and confidence with the text to do what would have seemed impossibly hard in the beginning. My students are so used to failure and humiliation in the realm of literacy that a little confidence inspires a lot of effort. My goal for them is what I call “reading swagger.”

What I changed in the IFL model, and why:

1^st: Predict what the reading will be about

2^nd: Select “significant moments”

3^rd: Identify the gist

4^th: Answer interpretive and evaluative questions

– I added a non-reading step at the very beginning. “Look at the image at the top of your article. Make a list of everything you notice in the image. Now look at the title. Based on these two clues, what do you think this article will be about?” I always use readings with some sort of image, be it a photo, political cartoon, or other art piece. This gives students something to interact with other than those dreaded words, and it provides a more approachable threshold than eliciting the gist (which is actually pretty hard for my self-contained kids—more on that next). Not to mention making predictions is a habit of highly effective readers, as they dive into the text with an eye out for something specific to prove or disprove.

– I switched the gist and “significant moments” steps. Self-generated responses can be huge hurdles for students with learning disabilities. Even when a student knows more or less what she wants to say, putting that thought into words—something you and I take for granted—can be unimaginably hard in the presence of speech and language impairment, or even just a severe lack of confidence. By asking students to identify the passages that stood out the most to them, I’m effectively saying “As long as you try, you will be successful.” After all, they’re using the author’s own words to express their understanding of the text. Guaranteed success is a great motivator.

– Rather than tell students to ask interpretive and evaluative questions, I provide the questions and they provide the answers. Again, the issue of spontaneous self-generation. Students do have to come up with their own answers, but the task is less daunting than in the original model, which essentially asks students to assume the role of teacher. This modification is, in my opinion, the most drastic. Yes, there is a big difference between answering questions and asking them. And so I word my questions carefully, so that each one is a little harder than the last, so that by the end of the lesson my kids have to ruminate the same big issues as the honor students, albeit with training wheels.

It’s hard to say with certainty whether my reading model has been a success. I won’t pretend my students have catapulted up to grade-level reading ability. They are, however, demonstrating varying levels of understanding, and all with high-level informational texts. Sure, I modify those texts by writing footnotes for difficult vocabulary and obscure references. As is too often the case, if I want a measure of success I have to look somewhere outside the gradebook. While I can’t swear I’ve made my kids better readers, I am encouraged by the quality of student-to-student discussion I’ve witnessed in the past few weeks. Most recently, I was able to facilitate a lively debate over whether a Mississippi teen deserves life imprisonment for a heinous hate crime. It was the first time in that class when students shared and critiqued one another’s text-based claims. I’ll take it.