Suppose someone tells you that the way to peel a fruit is to break the stem and pull away the skin. You find that this works well with bananas and you adjust it for oranges. Then you discover that it doesn't work with apples; you need a paring instrument, or perhaps you need not peel it at all. The skin is scrumptious, as it turns out. With melons, you hit a new obstacle. You can't peel them or bite into them; they must be cut open. But it's worth it— especially for cantaloupes! When you come to pomegranates, the original method slips your mind in your eagerness to try the fruit—look at those dark gems, those rivulets of red.
Eventually, you develop methods of getting into any fruit that depend on what you know and what you can intuit. The original strategy applied to a few fruits only—which is fine because it wasn't a grand theory, just a means to the fruit itself.
Now suppose you visit a place where people go through elaborate rituals every time they consume a fruit. Instead of just peeling or cutting the fruit, they have to name their strategy for fruit opening, turn and talk about the strategy, and (after eating the fruit) talk again about how the strategy served them well. You would likely feel that something was amiss.
Over the past few decades, a scenario like the latter has become a common way for many students to partake of literature. Elementary, middle, and even high schools have moved from literature instruction to an emphasis on strategies. Reading strategies, taught carefully, can help readers make sense of literature. But when literature is subordinated to strategies, many losses ensue—chief among them a detailed and deep reading of individual, high-quality works.
A study by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers concluded that high school English curriculums in the United States are inconsistent in their inclusion of traditional literary works and that teachers tend not to emphasize close analytical reading of literature (Stotsky, Traffas, & Woodworth, 2010). Thus, students do not learn what it means to grapple with literature that merits many readings over a lifetime. Mandated in many schools across the country, programs such as Balanced Literacy and America's Choice place more emphasis on how students should read than on what they should read. Such approaches don't preclude a literature-based curriculum, but they make little room for whole-class study of classic, complex works.
When Strategies Overwhelm Sense
Strategies commonly taught in the classroom include finding the main idea, visualizing, making predictions and inferences, making connections to one's own life, and summarizing. A strategy lesson typically begins with a minilesson, followed by an opportunity for students to try out the strategy with the teacher's help. Throughout the rest of the class, students apply the strategy to the books they're reading, and the teacher circulates to confer with them.
The idea itself is well founded. For the past several decades, scholars have studied the effects of metacognition (awareness of one's thought processes) on learning. Numerous studies suggest that targeted strategy instruction can boost students' comprehension and ability to solve problems (Crain, 1988). It seems to follow that students should learn specific processes of thinking and reasoning. Given that certain reading strategies apply to a variety of texts, students should learn and practice these strategies regularly.
Yet strategy instruction as a dominant practice has many problems. For one thing, people rarely use strategies in a generic form. Princeton professor Philip N. Johnson-Laird (2006) notes that even the "if-then" statement (a classic strategy for inference making) comes in many forms and requires different kinds of reasoning. It's very difficult to give a general lesson on inferences (or predictions or connections).
Also, a strategy emphasis downplays the role of content knowledge in comprehension, giving students the false idea that content isn't important. E. D. Hirsch Jr. and others have demonstrated the advantages of readers who know something about the subject at hand (Hirsch, 2006; Willingham, 2009). Strategy proponents speak of "activating" background knowledge, but it must be built first (Hirsch, 2010–11).
I see two additional problems. First, by giving disproportionate attention to strategies, schools may encourage faulty reasoning. Because strategy instruction treats texts as interchangeable, errors of literary interpretation may go unnoticed. Second, the tendency to encourage student-selected readings that often accompanies strategy instruction robs students of a curriculum in which they study specific works. Such a curriculum exposes students to beauty and precision at once and gives students something worth revisiting over the course of their lives.
Strategy instruction is most problematic when it replaces a literature curriculum. Because students within a class may use different texts to illustrate the strategies, there are not enough checks for rigor and accuracy of literary analysis. A teacher may not be well acquainted with the books students are reading and thus may not be able to challenge faulty thinking. Moreover, the workshop model and minilessons that usually accompany strategy instruction are not well suited to rich, complex literature. Both the literature and the strategy may receive short shrift. Many descriptions of strategy lessons point to these problems.
For instance, in Strategies That Work, Harvey and Goudvis (2007) describe a lesson on making a particular kind of inference: the kind that draws on background knowledge. They give a formula for this kind of inference: BK + TC = I (background knowledge + text clues = inference). The formula is clearly insufficient; background knowledge and text clues themselves do not equal an accurate inference. Inferences require judgment and insight; one can follow the formula faithfully and yet go astray.
What an individual student needs to know—and how teachers should guide that student toward making good inferences about a particular text—is not always so clear. Sometimes it's easy to determine what background knowledge will elucidate the text; sometimes it isn't. Sometimes a reader lacks the necessary knowledge and must seek it out. Readers might misinterpret the text clues or give too much weight to one detail or another.
Harvey and Goudvis describe a lesson to illustrate this formula, using Barbara Shook Hazen's children's book Tight Times (Puffin, 1983):We open to the first page where the boy asks the mom, who is very busy getting dressed for work in the morning, if he can please have a dog. The mom is short with him and says, "No, not now, not again," and tells him not to bother her when she's busy. (p. 142)
Although it gets the gist of what's happening, this summary of what the characters say is incorrect. The boy does not ask if he can please have a dog. The book begins, "This morning I asked Mom, Why can't I have a dog?" The next sentences read, "Not now, she said. Not again. And not to bother her when she's busy." The faulty summary within the sample lesson affects the entire argument. Harvey and Goudvis continue:As we model the inferring formula, we share with the kids how we use the equation to construct meaning. We know from personal experience that it is hard to give our children much time in the morning when we are rushing to work, and we also can tell from the mom's tone and words that she is losing patience with him. So we explain how we activate our background knowledge about times when we are rushing off to work and merge it with clues in the text that show how short the mom is with the boy. From our background knowledge and these text clues, we infer that this is not the first time the boy has asked for a dog (BK + TC = I). (p. 142)
This is exceedingly elaborate yet makes no logical sense. The "background knowledge" Harvey and Goudvis present doesn't lead to the inference; the mother may be short with her son because she's in a rush, but that in itself doesn't show that the boy has asked for a dog before. Harvey and Goudvis fail to note two clues that mother and son have discussed this before: the boy's question "Why can't I have a dog?" (implying a previous "no") and the mother's "not again" (implying this has come up before). The background knowledge may add to the overall picture, but it isn't necessary for the inference.
I bring up this example because I have seen many others like it, in books and in action. When the strategy becomes the main point of the lesson, it's easy to distort both strategy and text. And too often, jargon—such as "activating background knowledge"—overwhelms the lesson.
When Books Lead the Way
By contrast, close reading of literature can be both rigorous and enthralling. To make sense of a text, one must take in its structure, details, rhythms, sounds, and more. Certainly literature can be taught poorly, but when it's part of a school's curriculum, there is likely to be more support for teaching particular texts well. And there are rewards regardless of the teaching; the literature holds its own ground.
To see how a lesson can focus on a work of literature, consider Robert Louis Stevenson's poem "To Any Reader." The poem starts out with a striking comparison:<POEM><STANZA><POEMLINE>As from the house your mother sees</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>You playing round the garden trees,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>So you may see, if you will look</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Through the windows of this book,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Another child, far, far away,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>And in another garden, play.</POEMLINE></STANZA></POEM>
The first two lines depict a vivid, real scene (the mother does see the child). One can imagine a child playing in the shade of the trees ("round the garden trees" suggests movement and color) and the mother looking on. By contrast, the next scene is dreamy and speculative: the reader "may" see another child, if the reader "will" look through the "windows of this book." There is a wonderful pause before the word "play"; it seems to emphasize the distance between reader and child. The other child is "far, far away"; this makes the book's windows magical because they look out into a distant place. But there are bounds to this magic:<POEM><STANZA><POEMLINE>But do not think you can at all,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>By knocking on the window, call</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>That child to hear you. He intent</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Is all on his play-business bent.</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>He does not hear; he will not look,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>Nor yet be lured out of this book.</POEMLINE></STANZA></POEM>
A teacher might point out how Stevenson uses language in a way that reinforces the words' meaning: The faraway child goes about his play in his own way, and so does the poem. There's a stubbornness to the verse, and in its word order there's a certain determination, a bending of syntax ("He intent / Is all on his play-business bent"). The poem goes on:<POEM><STANZA><POEMLINE>For, long ago, the truth to say,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>He has grown up and gone away,</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>And it is but a child of air</POEMLINE><POEMLINE>That lingers in the garden there.</POEMLINE></STANZA></POEM>
This ending gives the windows an eerie quality—one sees through them not only to a faraway land, but also to a time long gone. The question of whether the "child of air" is really gone or can be seen playing (if the reader will only look) could be a spur to rich discussion with students.
"To Any Reader" could be taught to students anywhere from 2nd grade through high school. Young children could appreciate the idea of a book having windows and could imagine a "far away" child who is not a child any more. Older students could appreciate the sense of two worlds and times coming together. Through listening to the poem, thinking about its unusual ideas, and turning the words around, students would come to a richer understanding. Some strategies would come up along the way: reading the poem out loud; imagining the scene; thinking about the child (who is he and where has he gone); and more. But the poem would show the way.
When strategies illuminate a literary work, students become alert to unusual elements that puzzle and challenge them. They start to find their way around literature the way one finds one's way around an unfamiliar town—through looking at maps, but also exploring, spending time in its rainy park or in its alleys under the streetlights.
Literature-Focused Instruction
What should literature instruction look like? First of all, the literature should be at the center. The selections make all the difference. Students should not only read works of increasing complexity, but they should also return to works now and then to see how much more they can find in them. Readability levels should be taken with a grain of salt. When planning a curriculum, educators should consider many factors: the richness of the works, their meanings, their importance, their difficulty, and their relation to other parts of the curriculum and other assigned texts.
Students should also read historical and scientific works (in history and science classes). They should study spelling, etymology, and grammar. Teachers could teach straightforward strategies briefly, as Daniel Willingham (2006–07) has recommended, and teach complex strategies in the context of literary works themselves.
Concerns and questions will arise: What if a certain work isn't right for all students? What if it doesn't speak to their experience or background? What if students are at widely different reading levels? Why should there be an established curriculum at all—why can't the teacher choose the works? Certainly, these questions have to be addressed carefully, but too often these kinds of concerns have led to a noncurriculum. There are better ways to handle the doubts.
One of the great things about enduring literature is that it can be read at many levels, and all students should learn to persist with things they don't immediately understand. Students may not like or comprehend certain books at first, but they may seek them out later, recalling phrases and ideas that slowly sank in. A work may seem irrelevant to a student, yet trigger a new interest or understanding. As educators, we must be mindful of our students, but take them beyond where they happen to be. We must dare to teach works that we consider valuable—works that stay when other things come and go.
