Hallstead, Tracy, and Glenda Pritchett. “Reading: The Bridge to Everywhere.” Double Helix, vol. 1, 2013, pp. 1-12

Summary of the article

In “Reading: The Bridge to Everwhere” Tracy Hallstead and Glenda Pritchett start with the premise that students and composition teachers alike see reading as a “waste of time” (1). They go on to argue that reading is in fact not a waste of time but is essential to improving student writing and learning in general. Hallstead and Pritchett propose that students are simply “misprepared” and have only learned “passive, linear reading” which leads to little to no development of any of the metacognitive skills necessary to succeed at the college level (1). The articles then highlights four primary problems that keep students from becoming the critical readers they are capable of being: Students Discount the Importance of Reading, Students Get Stuck in the Weeds, Students’ Over-Reliance on Memory Results in Commonplaces, and Students Fail to Complete Reading Assignments. Along with the problems they posit possible solutions to each issue.

To help emphasize the importance of reading the article recommends having students carefully annotate the texts they read through utilizing three different methods: Prioritizing the crucial concepts and why they are essential, translating the author’s language into their own, and constructing analogies between the primary texts and their own experience. For students who get stuck in the weeds the article first argues that getting stuck is perfectly normal experience for experienced and inexperienced readers alike. The difference with experienced readers is that they can navigate their way through said weeds by defining difficult terms, annotation, and so on. That being said though, students can have an overreliance on prior knowledge and try to overuse it to explain unfamiliar scenarios even when it does not fit. The article calls on the teacher to point how these commonplace assumptions fall short and where new thinking is a necessity. For students who struggle to complete reading assignments the article pushes the idea that frustration is to be expected when reading the unfamiliar and it is up to the teacher to help the students work through this frustration by posing queries that are moderately difficult which will help get the students moving again.

Bank of Quotes

“Because student writing—and in essence, student learning—cannot improve unless student reading improves, reading merits attention” (1)

“[T]oo many first-year college students assume that their surface-learning reading strategies, applied in college courses, will result in success” (1)

“Requiring annotations—a record of observations, reactions, connections, and conclusions that a student writes in the margins of her textbook while reading—is instrumental in motivating students to read actively” (2).

“Though the content of annotations will vary by discipline, instructors can elicit active and thoughtful reading by making the objectives for annotations clear within the syllabus and by periodically reinforcing those objectives in class” (4).

“[A] metacognitive reader will not skip by an unfamiliar vocabulary word. Instead, fully aware of the limits of her understanding and beneficially irritated by them, she will use surrounding words and sentences and a dictionary to define the word and connect it to its context, thus gaining understanding of a difficult passage before moving on to the next” (6).

“In all, it is important for instructors to stress to their students that reading comprehension is not based upon students being good readers or bad readers, but that successful readers strategize their way through difficulty. This point can be especially encouraging for readers with learning disabilities, for whom comprehension does not come naturally but can be achieved through annotation and metacognitive work” (7).

“Frustration is the very point where, if the student persists, he will turn from his reliance on memory and instead begin to reason his way through a problem” (9).

“The key is to pose problems that are moderately difficult—neither too easy nor too complex, as the first extreme tends to bore students, and the second tends to overwhelm them” (9)

“Success in moderate-level problem-solving not only creates pleasure for the student but also functions as scaffolding upon which the students can build new knowledge” (10).

“Through reading, students form a bridge—one concept at a time—that connects not only the ideas in their disciplines, but those between disciplines. Building a durable bridge takes time, yet powerful tools can help the process along: writing annotations that require interaction with the reading, asking metacognitive questions to monitor thinking, harnessing frustration as an opportunity for learning, and applying story as a scaffold for moderate-level problem solving” (11).

Analytical Reflection

“Reading: A Bridge to Everywhere” helped me as a teacher, but even more so as a student. Even after completing undergraduate work and half of my M.A. I still find myself struggling particular to get beyond “passive, linear memory.” I can point out thought-provoking passages but often do not know what to make of them or how to go about explaining their relevance to the overall class. As an undergraduate I do not recall ever hearing the word meta at all, let alone metacognition, so when I got to graduate school it was a little bit of a foreign concept.

For literature classes I would be teaching down the road the concept of metacognition would be something that I would teach the first week of class as a foundational idea. Aside from that the four solutions to students’ struggles with reading posed by the article will all be useful. I particularly like the idea of not only assigning annotation as homework, but also requiring the three different kinds of annotation to be present. I already push annotation with my students as a way of attaching and grounding themselves in the text but rarely is it ever actual homework and the three-part model offered by the article will be quite useful.

If I ever do teach a composition course after I get my M.A. I like the idea of it being more of a 50/50 split of reading and writing as I believe reading to be a nice way of learning about writing through observation, provided the students are given the tools, patience foremost among them, to successfully absorb the material.