Reading

I hope you had a chance to read the article "The Benign Neglect of Adolescent Literacy" in a previous post. I would like to talk a bit about teaching reading throughout a lifetime (after all, if we are life-long learners, we will be life-long readers, and those demands will increase), and not just to those who continue to struggle. To begin, I would like to present a humble thought experiment that illustrates the "natural reading process" and also the artificial activities we often do instead in the name of reading:
Imagine if in January, during the academy workshop, that I ask Sultan and Khadijeh to do the following during a two hour break (haha, there will be no two-hour breaks, maybe two minutes :) - "Sultan, I would like you to go somewhere outside, find a nice tree to sit under and read a mystery novel (fairly complex with lots of twists and turned) for a few hours as a reward for all the good posts you have made on the website" and "Khadijeh, you are obviously very intelligent, so I want you to go somewhere for a few hours, read this article about the brain and then come back and report back to us."  Now we wait for two hours, then bring them back to the group. Who do you think will be able to give us more details about what they read?
Chances are that Sultan, who didn't know he was to be quizzed on the material will be able to share far more details and information than would Khadijeh who was "studying" to do just that. Sultan was reading naturally, and he was exploiting his "schema" that concept we discovered last week meaning "our own personal bank of knowledge and experience." Most likely, Khadijeh was trying to handle her task without using this necessary tool. Think about Sultan as he read - he was activating his prior knowledge (schema) as he read, thinking about related things, experiences. He then was constantly predicting what would happen next by looking backwards and reassembling clues, constantly checking them. Finally, if we asked Sultan to describe characters in the book (even if there were no pictures or good descriptions), he could do so very accurately and confidently.  This is the way we were meant to read! Khadijeh, on the other hand, was just trying to "tread water" and to keep the information at arm's length, not willing to integrate it into herself, not knowing how. I often tell my students that the information they are reading "compliments" them, not "contaminates" them. 
There are three basic processes at work when we read naturally: Activation, Anticipation, and Visualization. Activation is when we tap into our prior knowledge, what we know, what we believe (right or wrong), our experiences, what we have been taught, etc. As you can see, this is very schema-based, or schema-limited. We used to call some students here in the US, "culturally deprived", meaning they lacked key common experiences so learning was so much more difficult for them. It is now a bad term, but the meaning is not lost.  We have to have experiences and knowledge in order to have a network to build on. On a barely related note - most people say they don't have any really clear memories before the age of 3 or 4 years old. Piaget supposed this is so because we didn't have enough memories to create an interconnected web that would help us provide meaning to the new phenomenon before that age, and meaning is key to interpreting memory. Interesting.
Anticipation is the next stage, and it is the key to comprehension! When Sultan was reading, he was trying to figure out what was coming next. He looked ahead, behind, compared, contrasted, put it all together to form meaning to then extrapolate (a high form of Bloom's concept of comprehension). Anticipation, or prediction, is very key in active reading, something Khadijeh (or anyone else) wouldn't be doing reading a traditional text. A final word about comprehension (in this post anyway :) - one of my favorite terms when it relates to the cognitive development of learners is "tolerance for ambiguity."  Ambiguity (from the Latin ambi meaning "both") means something that is unclear or confusing because there are two or more possible meanings. Learners need to develop the patience and confidence to hold many things in the air (in their mind) until they come together. Sometimes we cannot build concepts in a straight line. Reluctant readers (or learners) will disengage the minute they start to get lost, not persevering to put things together. Many of us are like that when we read, lacking the simple confidence we have when we go to a movie. Think about it, you know when you go to a movie, even if you get lost, things will be brought together at the end, and there might even be a dimwitted character in the movie itself that will have someone else explain it to him (yes, him). We have faith this will happen, so we stay and try to pay at least partial attention.  We often lack this faith when we read however.
Finally, visualization is key to memory in reading, sometimes called retention. Remember that Sultan could describe all the characters in the book?  You probably have heard all about learning styles, but there really are only two "memory styles", semantic and visual. Semantic memory is that type where things have to connect in a meaningful but not visual way. This type is very rare. More common is visual memory where we "see" things inside our minds, or more precisely, our mind's eye. When we see things in our minds, we remember them. Poor Khadijeh isn't seeing much, or predicting much, or activating much - she is merely trying to survive the experience.
Tomorrow, inshalah, I am going to post several reading strategies designed to make textbook or academic reading more natural. If you look carefully at them, you will see how they exploit those three processes; activation, anticipation, and visualization.  I would like to thank Sultan for his expert reading skills in this hypothetical and especially thank Khadijeh for being such a good sport!