Researching and Teaching Reading

Developing pedagogy through critical enquiry

Gabrielle Cliff Hodges

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138816558
• eBook ISBN: 9781317597087
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Many agree that engaging in research is what makes a teacher's professional development sustainable, and Researching and Teaching Reading studies the ways in which research and teaching are entwined both within and beyond the classroom. Gabrielle Cliff Hodges encourages readers to deepen their understanding of reading through high-quality teaching and research activities designed to engage young learners and generate rich research data, in the expectation that teachers will wish to adapt or develop them further within their own contexts.

The author explores how teachers' research and critical reading can further develop their understanding of their students' reading practices and argues that innovative approaches to teaching integrated with research enable English teachers to re-construct ideas and change how reading is taught.

Key issues considered in this book include:

• Studying reading in terms of extending young people's ability to interpret and enjoy texts
• The idea of reading as a social practice
• The concept of culture in relation to reading
• Why historical and spatial theoretical perspectives matter when researching and teaching reading

This book is a valuable resource for any student teachers or practising English teachers wishing to learn more about the connection between researching and teaching reading, how to combine them in the classroom and the positive effect bringing the two together can have on their own professional development.

Chapter 1

Studying reading

Why reading matters

[R]eading, though it may be a kind of action, is not the whole action but a part of it, remaining incomplete unless and until it is absorbed and transformed in the thoughts and deeds of readers. I believe that reading should answer to social and ethical concerns.

(Scholes, 1989: x)

The American Professor of English, Robert Scholes, wrote these words in Protocols of Reading (1989). His notion that reading is dynamic, transformative, social and ethical is provocative: if reading is, indeed, all these things and more, then the implications for how and why we research and teach it are profound. The idea that reading is an active process with the potential to make a difference to readers’ lives is central to his book and also mine.

Being able to read is a skill to which most people aspire. It is highly prized because it offers very particular encounters with ideas beyond those in the immediate present and hence may extend readers’ thinking and affect their lives. Certain forms of oral, visual or musical language also enable us to encounter different ideas: storytelling, family histories, debates, pictures or songs. But the characteristics of the written word such as its durability and hence the chance to return to it again and again enable people to pay critical attention to ideas in especially powerful ways. Reading does not only afford the opportunity, as Paulo Freire famously argued, to set the word and the world in critical conjunction with one another (Freire and Macedo, 1987); it also allows us to interpret other people’s readings, too, as well as reflect critically on them. In the process, the skill of being able to decode is transformed into knowledge about reading, interpretation and criticism and hence its potential power. A central argument in this book is that teachers who not only teach but also undertake research into reading for themselves likewise gain deeper understanding about reading as a concept and hence extend their pedagogical reach.

The concept of reading

The concept of reading is complex since people’s ideas about what it comprises vary greatly. For those interested in very young children, the notion of reading is often contested and questions about it are frequently debated. Is it merely the ability to decode print or is it about much fuller and more responsive textual meaning-making? If so, what constitutes a text? Is a text just print or does it encompass pictures and visual images as well? What about moving images and multimodality?

The concept of reading is further complicated by broader questions about what it means to be a reader. As students grow older, many may no longer be perceived as readers because their reading is judged in purely educational terms. Those same students may, indeed, be reading a great deal but they are reading material of a very different kind from that which is usually encountered in school, as Michael Smith and Jeffrey Wilhelm (2002) so forcefully demonstrate in their research into literacy in young American men’s lives. Such students are sometimes referred to as aliterate, a term first believed to have been coined by former professor of literacy, culture and language education, Larry Mikulecky (1978), in a paper presented to the International Reading Association’s annual conference. He used the term to describe readers who can read but apparently choose not to read. However, categorising and labelling readers as aliterate does not help us understand them any better. Further investigation is required. This book will advocate small-scale critical enquiry or research as a valuable way to try to understand all kinds of readers so that our insight into the concept of reading can be clarified or even changed. A key reason for undertaking research in order to reconsider what it means to be a reader is that teachers’ approaches to reading can likewise be changed in both radical and sustainable ways.

Researching reading, developing pedagogy

There are many ways in which practising English teachers can deepen their understanding and refine their approaches to teaching reading. I will suggest in this book, however, that a particularly effective way to do so is by teachers systematically undertaking research into reading themselves. It could be argued that it is sufficient for them simply to find out more about the skills needed to become a reader or about what young people read so they can persuade them to become enthusiastic readers, as Steven Layne argues (Layne, 2009). Alternatively, they could extend their knowledge about why reading might be powerful from research other people have undertaken, for example exploring what happens when young people read because they want to (Krashen, 2004), or when library and information services staff use research to enable them to articulate explicitly for teachers and parents why libraries matter (Ross et al., 2005). I do not underestimate the value of the insights teachers thereby gain, but teachers’ learning from being research-active themselves is different from finding out information or extending knowledge based on other people’s findings. Doing research for oneself steers skill and knowledge towards understanding and thus has potentially an even more profound impact on teaching and learning.

Another idea running through this book is that researchers and teachers can also benefit from attending to the idea of readership as well as to readers and reading. The suffix -ship derives from the Old English verb sceppan to create, so the word readership carries with it linguistic connotations of deliberate shaping and crafting. In the context of a great deal of reading – newspapers or fan fiction for example – readership involves a reciprocity between authors, texts and readers, with readers often having substantial influence on how authors shape what they write. Knowledge of a particular readership – its spending power as well as its engagement with a narrative – affects the production of texts, as we know from accounts of serial writing by nineteenth-century novelists, publishers’ pursuit of popular contemporary series fiction, journalists’ decisions about what news to publish or the immediate impact of blog posts. In the context of individual readers, readership may mean something that is acquired through being worked on, in the same way as friendship is, for example. Whatever kinds of readership are formed within school classrooms through young people undertaking whole-class reading together or creating groups of like-minded reading companions in contexts beyond the classroom, the notion is worthy of researchers’ and teachers’ attention. The complexity of readers, reading and readership will therefore be explored in depth in this book with the aim of encouraging a reconsideration of what such well-worn terms may mean.

Because the focus of this book is researching reading within an educational context, it is necessary to remind ourselves how reading is perceived within English teaching in order to establish why doing research might be of such crucial importance to teachers’ practice. Although the book is intended to have wide relevance to anyone interested in researching or teaching reading within the English curriculum in classrooms where English is the medium of instruction and where many students will have English as an additional language, it is not aimed at those teaching English as a foreign language. Because of the book’s wide range, however, it will – for the most part – consider reading generically and will be pertinent to readers in many different countries and contexts. Local distinctions between language and literature curricula may be referred to from time to time, but the aim overall is to focus on reading more deeply than that, at the level of long-term principles rather than short-term practices. Where particular practices are referred to, the intention is for readers of this book to extrapolate ideas from them to apply to their own experiences of reading and engage actively with them rather than expecting to be told what works which, as Gert Biesta has firmly pointed out, probably won’t work (Biesta, 2007). As Biesta suggests, teachers benefit more from developing ideas themselves rather than simply relying on other people’s evidence of what apparently makes for effective education. The same pertains here.

The imperative for schools to develop as research-informed institutions is laudable. It offers all teachers the chance to engage in their own critical enquiries in the company of like-minded others so that they can take a critical perspective towards their pedagogy and make connections between their own and other people’s research and teaching. I would also emphasise the benefits of doing such work in conjunction with teachers in other schools, e.g. via a Masters programme within a higher education institution or via school and subject association networks. Teachers thus have the chance simultaneously to view their teaching as research, read critical literature through different lenses as researchers and as teachers, and realise that others may have formed different perspectives on the same problems through sharing and discussing their work more widely. These are, of course, some of the many traditional benefits of teachers working together from their initial teacher education onwards. Doing so through research at the same time as reflecting on teaching is a main strand of my argument.

Reading within English

The broad scope of this book is reading within English. However, much of the attention politicians or inspectors pay to reading (and hence, very often, researchers and teachers as well) revolves around test scores and the evidence they provide of progress and attainment rather than the much fuller importance of the reading process within English and beyond. Tests, though, can measure reading only within the specific parameters of a test’s content, timing and mark scheme. Teacher assessment and research, on the other hand, can explore reading more subtly and responsively. Therefore, since the focus of this book is reading over the long term, I will be exploring it from different angles than are feasible within short-term test constraints. If reading on a wide canvas is to form the shape of this book, a good way to begin exploring it is via long-term questions about its part within English as a discipline or school curriculum subject and how that connects with the wider reading students and teachers undertake beyond the classroom. In the process, further questions will also quickly come into the frame such as what is reading for and why does it matter?

Domains of English

When referring to English as an area of study, the word discipline is often used. The term refers to knowledge as it is organised into a particular domain. In the case of English as a discipline (but, to some extent, all disciplines), the domain has very uncertain boundaries which shift over time depending on who is trying to maintain or change them. For some people, the domain includes both literature and language; for others, it includes literature but not language, the latter being seen as permeating all other disciplines, not just English. If the domain comprises only literature, there are still significant debates about what is actually to be read. Should the emphasis be solely on canonical texts? If so, what is meant by the term canon and which texts are exclusively canonical? In the context of literature, the term canon is usually taken to mean a collection of texts which have acquired an almost sacred status because of their perceived literary qualities (Maybin, 2000). From there, it is only a short step in many people’s minds to thinking of those same texts as elite and powerful. On the other hand, if literary qualities are debatable and susceptible to changes in fashion or cultural contexts, choosing to teach literature through canonical texts would be short-sighted. However, if the emphasis in literature teaching is not on the canon, are students disadvantaged given its perceived status? Either way, the question remains: what texts should be taught and who should decide?

By contrast, if the domain of English is perceived as predominantly language study, what might a language curriculum comprise? Should grammar, for example, be taught to native speakers of a language if they are already capable of using it very well without explicit knowledge of how it works? If they are not good at using it well, will teaching about it be beneficial? Extensive research into these areas has been inconclusive (Andrews et al., 2006), possibly because, as researchers from the University of Exeter have recently argued, research has not been conducted holistically in ways which would enable us to see what happens when the teaching of grammar is researched in conjunction with, instead of separately from, the teaching of writing (Jones et al., 2013). Or, should the emphasis be on a broader range of language so that students can learn explicitly about socio-linguistic issues such as accent, dialect, taboo language or language and power? This latter argument is often unpalatable to government policy-makers, because – of course – it implies a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to teaching grammar, one which offers students powerful insights into how, among other things, the language of politics and the media is used, often in partial and deliberately manipulative ways. Indeed, in the 1990s such considerations allegedly led to the refusal by the English government of the time to publish Ron Carter’s work from the Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) project (Carter, 1993). Whatever material is studied within the broad range of language, it involves domain-specific approaches to appreciation, interpretation and analysis, as does literature. Such approaches, for example practical criticism or discourse analysis, are likewise contested and hence disputes are constant here, too.

Although English is usually perceived as a discipline, it has not always enjoyed that status. As Robert Eaglestone argues, its history as an area of study in universities is relatively recent (Eaglestone, 2009). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its position was achieved as an alternative to the study of Classics for a number of different reasons, including to enable a greater proportion of the population to become more fully literate and to support imperialist objectives throughout the world (ibid.). As Margaret Mathieson shows in Preachers of Culture (1975), religious or moral imperatives drove people’s thinking:

In the early elementary schools children from humble backgrounds were taught English so that they would be able to read the Bible for themselves and have access to useful knowledge. In the Mechanics’ Institutes some literature was included in the instruction, on the grounds that its study would protect young workers against the corrupting effects of seditious political material and the sensational products of the cheap press.

(Mathieson, 1975: 17)

Meanwhile, the introduction of English as a discipline into university study gave rise to very different ideas not only about why it should be included but also about its content. At Oxford University, the first degree course was language-orientated. As Eaglestone explains, the degree involved ‘studying subjects like German, Old English and the history of the language. Poetry was a source of examples, and novels were not worthy of study’ (Eaglestone, 2009: 13). It was not until several decades later that the study of literature as a discipline became more firmly embedded, largely thanks to the work of F. R. Leavis and Q. D. Leavis. They were both ‘early graduates of the new English degree course at Cambridge University and shared a number of very deeply held opinions about the state of modern culture and the role of English’ (ibid.: 14), ideas which, through their teaching and publications, profoundly affected the way English literature came to be understood in the twentieth century. Through many of the undergraduates who studied with F.R. Leavis at Cambridge and then went on to become English teachers themselves, in schools and workers’ education associations, Leavis’ perceptions of literature were perpetuated (Hilliard, 2012).

Even today, nothing remains fixed, although attitudes to literature study have changed substantially. A university degree in English does not mean the same thing to any two English graduates who may have undertaken a wide diversity of courses over their three years of study in the name of English. Increasingly, too, as Joe Moran (2002) has suggested, the concept of interdisciplinarity has gained status within universities and schools which raises questions about whether it is possible to work in interdisciplinary ways without first having any strong ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Studying reading
• 2 Reading research
• 3 Reading and pedagogy
• 4 Reading as a social practice
• 5 Reading as a cultural practice
• 6 Reading histories
• 7 Reading spaces
• Index