Active Reading: Short Stories

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

Active Reading: Short Stories

I had to use a different approach to previewing short stories.

But first, some background. I’m a great fan of The New Yorker. It has great nonfiction and always publishes a short story. I used to read the short stories from beginning to end. But too many times at the end, I had to ask myself, “Why on earth did I read that?” Sometimes the stories were without plots, sometime they were character sketches about people I couldn’t care less about and sometimes they were “slices of life” that had little to do with my life experiences. In short, they were a waste of my time. I needed some way to preview them in order to determine if they were worth my time.

Out of nowhere, I tried something. I tried reading just a paragraph a page. It worked! Reading a paragraph a page [or, in the case of The New Yorker, a column] I found that I gained the essence of the story and understood just enough of it to know whether I wanted to read any more. The paragraph a page took relatively little time.

When I was teaching in a community college, however, I had a different problem. The students simply would not read the short story I assigned them. Now, I could fail them or I could try to entice them into reading the story almost without their knowing it. Here’s what I did. All the reading took place in class:

1. The students read a single sentence on each page or in each column throughout the story. I asked them what they had learned about the story and if they had any questions. Reading a sentence a page or column took very little time. And the students gained a surprising amount of information about the characters, plot and setting. I recorded any questions they had in key words on the board.

2. The students next read a paragraph a page or in each column. Now the students knew a considerable amount about the story’s characters, setting, plot and even theme. And they had some very interesting questions. These were good short stories.

3. I finished it off by having the students read in class the first paragraph, the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph and the last paragraph. Since the stories were good, we had excellent questions to discuss and when we needed additional information, students could quickly locate what they needed—and, if they could not locate it in the text, we needed to interpret with what information we had.

Gotcha!