Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success
While this article is now almost 20 years old, its key themes and ideas remain salient. Students still struggle with college-level reading because many instructors struggle to articulate the role of the reading in their courses. Horning's article provides foundational ideas for the broad landscape of reading struggles that students face and provides clear pedagogical implications that can be applied across a variety of disciplinary contexts. Specifically, her four recommendations are clear and effective: 1. understand the nature of the reading process, 2. directly teach critical reading skills, 3. provide opportunities for practice, and 4. learn to read in specific disciplines.
A clear definition of reading in terms of the critical literacy needed for college success and full participation in our society is in order. Reading is variously defined, usually as getting meaning from print. In other words, just being able to pronounce aloud the words that appear on a page is not reading according to this definition. At the very least, readers must get the meaning in order for their activity to qualify as reading. But to be successful in college, and beyond, on paper and screen, students must be able to go well beyond just getting meaning and well beyond just being able to work with printed texts. Reading is a psycholinguistic process, involving the interaction of readers' thinking with the language of the text. It must involve getting meaning, but in addition, it must also entail moving beyond meaning to analysis, synthesis and evaluation. That is, as I and a number of other scholars have proposed, reading must function as part of critical literacy.
...Ask teachers about the problems students have with reading, and they will invariably say that students can't read and don't read. And where does this inability to read complex texts with full understanding come from? It seems clear that there are at least three sources of this problem: lack of instruction, lack of practice, and a mythic view that reading is less important because of computers.