Topic: Reading in Secondary Schools

Question: What is the attitude of secondary teachers in subjects other than English about helping their students read?

10-second review: Secondary teacher: "I'm not a reading teacher; students should already know how to read when they get to middle school. My job is to teach them social studies content." The author responds by suggesting the steps in the directed reading assignment.

Source: DD Massey & TL Heafner. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (September 2004), pp. 26-40. A publication of the International Reading Association (IRA).

Comment: The social studies teacher is right. Her job is to teach the ideas in social studies. But for students the topic of the reading assignment is probably unfamiliar. Some of the vocabulary is probably also unfamiliar. And students need to know what to look for as they read. The social studies teacher can help students read what is unfamiliar and difficult.

The author calls using the directed reading assignment "teaching reading." I disagree. Teaching reading to me is teaching reading skills directly, finding main ideas, details, inferring, etc. For me, using the directed reading assignment in content areas is not teaching reading, but helping students succeed with specific reading assignments that are difficult to read.

The directed reading assignment consists of four steps: building the students’ background knowledge of the topic to be read about because the more students know about the topic, the better they will understand what they read about it; pre-teaching unfamiliar vocabulary; setting purpose for reading (questions developed by the students after reading the first paragraph, the first sentence of each intermediate paragraph and the last, summary paragraph) and having students apply or extend the ideas that they have read. RayS.

Jargon Watch:
“Content area teachers”: Teachers of subjects other than English, social studies, science, etc.

“Pre-teaching vocabulary”: Teaching unfamiliar words before students read the chapter.