As part of my job teaching English to high school juniors, I prepare students for the Prairie State Achievement Exam. For those outside the realm of high school education, the PSAE is the two-day state test all juniors in Illinois must take, and day one of the test is the ACT. Consequently, I spend an hour a week on test preparation to assist my students with varying levels of ability to pass a test designed to assess college readiness. In particular, my focus is on the reading, English, and writing sections. It is the reading section they always have the most trouble with. On days where we are completing an ACT exercise, I’ll pass out a reading passage, put nine minutes on the clock, and watch the inaction. Yes, most of them start strong as I watch their eyes dart back and forth across the page, but usually two to three minutes in, their attention wanders. Suddenly they don’t have the exact amount of lead they need in their mechanical pencil, or they don’t trust the clock and need to look at it every fifteen seconds. Some still attempt to engage the text, but by focusing on the questions and then going on a “seek and find” as they repeatedly (and noisily) flip their papers from front to back to front again.
Over the course of the year I’ve taught them strategies for annotating, underlining topic sentences, and using context clues for understanding vocabulary. It’s obvious that what I need to teach them the most is FOCUS, so they stop looking at the page and start reading.
In his article “Too Dumb for Complex Texts?” Mark Bauerlein confirms that what I’m seeing in my classroom is the new norm for high school teenagers. They are unable to comprehend complex texts because they have become unaccustomed to reading challenging materials that require them to slow down and process as they read. Most teenagers read a steady diet of text messages, blog posts, and Facebook news feeds. All material, as Bauerlein points out, that is written and read in haste. No complex thought required. A few weeks ago after a particularly challenging ACT reading, I asked my juniors if they read every status and post on their Facebook newsfeeds. They looked at me blankly and said, “No.” One girl pointedly asked, “Why would I want to read all of that?” A valid question which led me to respond with a question of my own, “So what are you doing when you look at a Facebook page?” There was a pause and a few sideways glances before the same girl responded, “Skimming for the good stuff.”
As a Facebook skimmer myself, I understand where they are coming from and what they are doing. I do a lot of online reading; it’s where I get most of my news. However, when it is time for me to read something complex, such as a reading for this class, I always print it out to read and annotate. Online reading begs for interruptions. Embedded hyperlinks take you out of the article and out of your thought process. If a paragraph is dull or confusing and I’m losing interest, I can open up a new window and check my email. When dealing with a printed text, they are still opportunities for distraction, which my students explore weekly, but they are not a part of the medium. The internet is a place of speed, which doesn’t equate to a place of fluency.
Where do teachers and librarians go from here? As digital texts continue to grow, will complex print literacy still be a valuable skill? Or will our education system evolve with our brains for this new type of digital literacy? In higher education, I think complex texts are here to stay, whether they are in a textbook or a PDF. All reading is good, but it is important for teenagers to realize that they are different types of reading for different types of text. As I take away the pressure of timed readings in favor of partner readings and summary responses instead of the ACT questions, I’m hoping that they will see that they need a new approach in order to comprehend the complex texts, not just to score well on an assessment, but to become stronger readers. Engagement in printed text must come through active reading. After all, there are no comment posts available at the end of a printed text, nor is there a “like” button, and it is much more difficult to “skim for the good stuff.”
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