Topic: Boredom and Difficulty in Reading (4).

10-second review: RayS.’s ideas for helping students deal with boredom and difficulty in reading books and other reading materials.

Previews will stimulate interest and reduce the difficulty of material.

Previewing Short Stories

The previous technique that I suggested when you become mired in boring parts of novels actually came to me when I was reading short stories in The New Yorker magazine. So many of the New Yorker’s short stories were pointless, meaningless and of little interest to me, that I became frustrated at wasting time reading them. How could I learn if the story was worth my time?

That’s when I discovered the one-paragraph-a-page-or-column technique. In relatively little time, I was able to sample the story, gain an idea of the plot and decide if the story was worth reading in its entirety. It never failed. I tried an experiment. If I decided the story was not worth reading in its entirety, I would try reading it all the way through and found that, sure enough, it wasn’t. If the preview of one paragraph per page or column interested me, I would read the entire story. So now I test every short story I read to see if it catches my interest and spend relatively little time doing it.

Finally: Reading Difficult Materials

The preview will help. Even with highly technical textbooks, previewing gives the reader an “overview” of the important ideas. But now you have to go back and read every chapter as if it is to be memorized. In How to Study in College, Walter Pauk (Houghton Mifflin, 1984) says that there is only one way. Take it one paragraph at a time and summarize each paragraph.

Comment: Readers can stimulate interest in what they read by previewing. They can break down the difficulty of difficult books by previewing. But if they have to read a book as if it is to be memorized, the best method of study is to summarize every paragraph in the chapter—after having previewed it by reading the first paragraph, the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph and the last paragraph. RayS.

Topic: Boredom and Difficulty in Reading (3).

10-second review: RayS.’s ideas for helping students deal with boredom and difficulty in reading books and other reading materials.

Previews will stimulate interest and reduce the difficulty of material.

Previewing Novels: Sampling.

Probably you are going to be interested and want to read everything when you first open a novel. However, if you have some doubts about whether the novel is worth your time, try sampling. Read for five minutes near the beginning of the novel. Then read for five minute in the middle of the novel. Next, read for five minutes about three-fourths through the novel. Finally, read for five minutes near the end. This sampling should raise a number of questions in your mind and you will want to go back and read.

Knowing the plot will give the novel away? I think you will find the opposite. The sampling will usually raise questions about what is going on, giving you a reason for wanting to read it. If the sampling does give away the plot entirely, then you won’t want to spend time reading it because you will already know all you want to know about it.

Previewing Novels: What To Do About the Boring Parts?

Novels are usually long. They tend to become less interesting in certain parts. They have highs in which you are absorbed by the scenes and lows in which you start turning pages to see how much you have to read before reaching the end of the chapter.

Try an experiment. Start reading one paragraph a page. You won’t lose your sense of the plot; you will find that you are moving rapidly to the next scene that captures your interest. And then you are back to reading everything. Try it. It works.

To be continued: Previewing Short Stories.

Topic: Boredom and Difficulty in Reading (2)

10-second review: RayS.’s ideas for helping students deal with boredom and difficulty in reading books and other reading materials.

Previews will stimulate interest and reduce the difficulty of material.

Previewing Articles in Professional Materials and Magazines.

Read the title, sub-title, first paragraph and last paragraph. Know enough? Summarize briefly and go on to the next article.

Have questions? Read the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph. Know enough? Summarize briefly and go on to the next article.

Still have questions? Read the entire article—which will happen rarely. This technique takes you almost immediately to the ideas that will be of interest to you. It will also cut out almost all of the boring detail that you don’t need.

To be continued: Previewing Novels.

Topic: Boredom and Difficulty in Reading (1)

10-second review: RayS.’s ideas for helping students deal with boredom and difficulty in reading books and other reading materials.

Previews will stimulate interest and reduce the difficulty of material.

Nonfiction Preview: First, read the first and last paragraph of each chapter. The first paragraph introduces the topic, the last chapter summarizes it.

Second, read the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph. If you’re “caught,” keep reading. If you become bored, go back to reading the first sentence of each paragraph. The majority of first sentences of paragraphs are usually topic sentences, so you will be gaining the main ideas and supporting details. And you will almost certainly be “caught” and want to continue reading at some point in the chapter.

When chapters seem particularly important, you will need to read the entire chapter, but the first and last paragraphs and the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph will ease the difficulty.

To be continued: Professional Materials and Magazines.

Topic: Readability and Legibility

10-second review: Readability means “understandability.” Legibility refers to comfort level in reading: illumination, type size, spacing, etc.

Title: “Basic Reading Skills: Comprehension and Rate Skills.” Psychology in Teaching Reading. HP Smith and EV Deschant. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1961.

Comment: In addition to requiring that materials have built-in interest for all readers, some people in the field of reading feel that readability formulas must dictate whether materials are appropriate for the reading grade level of each student. If the book is too difficult, students should not read it because they will become frustrated. I have even seen reading specialists who have re-written entire chapters so that children will read materials at their reading level. As a result the students are robbed of the challenge of reading difficult material and, in the case of literature, appreciating the beauty of the language.

The typical readability formula counts words, syllables and length of line to determine the grade level of the material. I’m unaware of any judgments on readability that include difficulty in ideas. The assumption is that average number of syllables per word will demonstrate difficulty if many multi-syllable words are used. What about the poems of Emily Dickinson? The words are simple. The ideas are complex.

I think we have to recognize that materials are not always of interest to every reader, and that difficulty level in most materials fluctuates. Students need to learn what to do when the material becomes boring and what to do when the material becomes difficult

My solution to maintaining interest and dealing with difficult materials will appear in my next blogs. RayS.

Topic: Interest and Reading

10-second review: “The more interesting the materials to the reader, the better his comprehension tends to be.” p. 236.

Title: “Basic Reading Skills: Comprehension and Rate Skills.” Psychology in Teaching Reading. HP Smith and EV Deschant. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1961.

Comment: I think some people in the field of reading believe that material itself  must be of interest to the reader in order for the reader to be successful. Therefore, the fault is in the material, not in the reader. The world is not like that. In fact, much of what we read in school is of little interest to most readers. And, in addition, as with a long book, interest rises and falls during the course of reading it. Rarely is a book of absorbing interest from beginning to end.

Students can be motivated to find interest in materials that they do not know is of interest to them. The more they know about a topic, the more they will understand and be interested in what they read about it. In the Directed Reading Assignment (DRA), the teacher builds background information on a topic with which the student has little familiarity. The teacher also pre-teaches key words that otherwise students might ignore if the words were not called to their attention. Finally, either the teacher or the student sets a purpose for reading. This means that not always is it necessary to read every word on every page as some readers assume and soon become distracted, and bored.

With a textbook chapter, for example, the teacher finds out what the students already know about the topic. Pictures and information are added to the students’ background. Secondly, the students read the title, sub-headings, bold-face print and pictures and diagrams in the text and then read the first paragraph, the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph and the last paragraph, more background information. And then students identify questions about the topic they want to answer from the text.

The more the students know about the topic, the greater the students’ interest will be in reading about the topic.

What do you do about novels in which the topic is not clear? I have an answer for that, too. Write to RayS at my e-mail address: raystop2@comcast.net.

Topic: Reading Flexibility

One-minute review: “Flexibility is an important criterion of reading excellence. Good comprehenders adjust the rate of reading by slowing down as the material increases in difficulty, whereas poor comprehenders read both easy and difficult materials at much the same rate.” p. 235.

“Slower reading generally is positively associated with achievement in science, in medicine, in mathematics and in Latin.” p. 236.

“Rapid reading is positively associated with achievement in English and in languages.” p. 236.

Title: “Basic Reading Skills: Comprehension and Rate Skills.” Psychology in Teaching Reading. HP Smith and EV Deschant. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1961.

Comment: Knowing when to speed up and slow down is one of the characteristics of the skilled reader. RayS.