Active Reading: An Example of the Directed Reading Assignment

Essays on the Teaching of English
Raymond Stopper
Based on His Book, Teaching English, How To….

Active Reading: An Example of the Directed Reading Assignment

10-Second Review: Getting the most out of a textbook chapter.

As a language arts coordinator, I had challenged the teachers in one of my junior high schools to pick out the most frustrating chapter that never seemed to succeed and to let me give the lesson a try. A seventh-grade science teacher asked for some help. She said that the chapter on the circulatory system in her science textbook always bored the students. She told me that she had them answer one hundred questions at the end of the chapter after they read it.

“Wow!” I said. “That’s a lot of questions and a lot of writing. Do they really need to know the answers to all of those questions?” She laughed. “Truth be known,” she said, “they really need to answer only four questions by reading the chapter.” She wrote the four questions down for me.

She added that she had gone through years of finding articles on the circulatory system from Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report. That collection of articles intrigued me. The articles were usually no more than a page or two, with colorful illustrations and clear, concise explanations of how our knowledge of the circulatory system is applied in the world today. Two of the articles were as recent as the previous week.

The steps in the Directed Reading Assignment are as follows: 1. Build up background knowledge of the topic, the circulatory system. 2. Pre-teach important, possibly unfamiliar, vocabulary. 3. Survey the chapter by reading the first paragraph, first sentence of each intermediate paragraph and the final, summarizing paragraph. 4. Have the students raise any questions about what they still needed to know. They re-read to find the answers. 5. Apply the information gained from reading the chapter .

The first step, building background information I took care of by asking the question of the class, “What do you know about the circulatory system?” They knew a lot. Not only that, but they had studied the topic in a previous grade. I looked at the teacher in the back of the room. She was truly amazed at how much information the students already possessed about the circulatory system.

Pre-teaching vocabulary: I pointed out that the word “ventricle” came from “ventri-” meaning stomach and the left and right ventricles in the heart looked like the “stomachs” of the heart in the chapter’s illustration of the circulatory system. The auricles, on the other hand came from a root meaning “ear” and the auricles looked like the “ears” of the heart in the illustration. I also pointed out the word roots for technical words like “pulmonary.” I wanted the students to remember easily terms of the heart.

Survey of the chapter: next, the students read the first paragraph, first sentence of each intermediate paragraph and the final, summary paragraph of the chapter. When I asked the students what questions their teacher would ask them after they had read the chapter, they gave almost word-by-word the questions that she had given me before. The teacher was amazed. The students easily found the answers to the questions and it was time to move on to the payoff—her collection of articles.

Application of the knowledge gained from reading the chapter: I told the students to preview the articles—read the first paragraph, the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph and the final paragraph—to decide whether to read the article in more detail. They summarized briefly the main ideas of the article. In fifteen minutes, some students went through up to ten articles and the discussion of what they had learned about the application of our knowledge of the circulatory system in the world today was downright fascinating. The students were on fire, wanting to share what they had learned.

The teacher said to me, “Thank you.”

I keep saying that reading expert Olive Niles once said, “If every teacher in every class used the directed reading assignment, there would be no reading problems in America today.”