University Writing CenterIn fall 2003, 51.8% of entering CSU freshmen were considered proficient in English based on the English Placement Test (EPT). At Cal Poly Pomona, the figure was only 46.4%. The EPT has three sections: An impromptu essay written in 45 minutes, a multiple-choice composing skills section designed to test syntactic fluency and organizational ability, and a reading skills section designed to test reading comprehension. In recent years, the total scores of many students have been brought down significantly by poor performance on the reading skills section.
However, the reading problems are not about phonics or word-decoding skills. The real problems are with academic reading—understanding new vocabulary in context, seeing connections, understanding and evaluating arguments, recognizing and allowing for rhetorical effects, drawing conclusions, and extracting and using information. A CSU-funded task force is working on a twelfth-grade reading and writing course to address these problems. This task force has created a template for designing reading and writing assignments that may be useful for CSU instructors as well.
Fluent academic readers do not usually pick up a book or article and just start reading. It may seem that way, but most of us read and think about the title, skim the table of contents, look at chapter headings and pull quotes. We may even skim the references and the index. Freshmen usually need some work on these habits. For this reason, the Twelfth-grade Task Force template starts out with “pre-reading” activities that include surveying the text, making predictions, and working with unknown words. When we read for information, we need categories and cognitive structures with which to store and understand the information and ideas we encounter. Experienced academics often have the necessary structures in place. Students new to a topic or discipline need to create them, and these pre-reading activities are a good starting point.
When reading a text for the first time, students read to understand the material, and to confirm or disprove the predictions they have made about the text. This is often called, reading “with the grain.” In subsequent reading, the students will read to question the text, mapping the organizational structure, analyzing and questioning word choices and stylistic decisions. They are reading “against” the grain, distancing themselves from the text and discovering their own views. Of course, this “against the grain” reading is more appropriate for some texts than others.
Moving toward writing in response, students engage in critical analysis of the claims and assertions made by the text, looking at the authority of the writer, the quality of the arguments and the evidence, and watching out for emotional appeals. Although the students have been using writing in the form of note-taking, marginal annotation, outlining, and other activities to support their reading, at this point a more formal writing assignment, such as a letter to the editor, an essay, or a research report, is introduced. Thus, reading and writing assignments are tightly integrated, and students learn a reading/writing process that will facilitate future academic work.
Over time, these reading and writing processes, initially overtly modeled for students in a step-by-step fashion, will become internalized and automatic, and we hope that students trained in this way will become fluent academic readers.
