Skipping the boring bits

The English curriculum needs to devote more attention to helping students develop the skills needed to become good readers and less attention to the acquisition of inert textual knowledge, argues Rod Quin.

'Good readers skip the boring bits!' This was the answer Miriam, a year 8 student, gave on her end of year course evaluation to the question, 'What is the most important thing you have learned in English this year?' My initial response to Miriam's answer was a mixture of amusement and surprise. After all, teaching students to skip the boring bits had hardly formed a major part of the formal English program that year. In fact, it had not formed any part.

My program, like most others throughout Australia, had been structured around novels, poems and other texts. Skipping the boring bits was something I had taught Miriam only in passing back in March when she approached me about the trouble she was having in finishing a novel: 'It takes so long. I have to wade through all these boring parts before I get to the interesting parts.'
  'So skip the boring bits and go straight to the interesting parts,' I replied
  'What do you mean?'
  'Flick through the book until you find the parts that look interesting and ignore those that don't.'
  'But I thought I had to read every word.'
  'Of course you don't. Good readers don't always read every word.'
  'Don't they? Wow!'

Clearly that wow feeling had stayed with her until the end of year. Being allowed to skip the boring bits had been for Miriam a moment of enlightenment and liberation.

Miriam's moment of enlightenment eventually became my moment of enlightenment. Despite my initial amusement at her answer, the more I thought about the most important thing Miriam had learned that year, the more I became convinced that the practices which good readers, and good writers for that matter, take for granted should form the heart of the secondary English program. We can't afford to leave them to chance, like I had been doing. What about those students who hadn't sought help but continued to struggle on in silence, persisting in practices that were hindering their learning?

Considerable research has been undertaken into the habits of good readers. We know, for example, that good readers often do not read a text straight through but jump between different parts. They formulate questions and seek answers as they read, focussing on those parts which answer their questions and ignoring those which do not. They form and revise hypotheses about the meaning of what they are reading. They make comparisons between texts and other texts, their own experience and the world around them. Good readers make extensive use of inference, drawing on knowledge from outside the text to fill in gaps or resolve confusions in the text. Good readers don't look for answers to their questions in the text alone; they draw extensively on resources outside the text. Most importantly, as Miriam discovered, good readers focus on making sense of, and gaining pleasure from, the text as a whole rather than on word-by-word decoding.

In short, good readers make texts serve their needs, rather than submitting meekly to them. This is particularly important to keep in mind in the teaching of literature where one of our main aims is to teach students how to gain pleasure from reading. Literary pleasure can be found through a variety of means, including interest in the course of action and its outcomes, emotional identification with characters and their development, finding ideas of significance to the world around us, visualisation of scenery or an appreciation of the author's use of language. Different readers seek different pleasures at different times. There is no single correct way to read a text. The parts we focus on and those we skip over will depend on the pleasures we seek. I routinely skip over the detailed descriptions of clothing, furniture, architecture, automobiles and environment which have become fashionable in recent American crime fiction. I am looking elsewhere for my enjoyment.

Despite the extensive knowledge we have of the practices used by good readers, they currently receive far too little attention in secondary English programs, which focus by and large on developing and assessing students' understanding of specific texts. Textual knowledge is valued more highly than reading skill. The priority given to textual knowledge can be seen in the content of popular course books, the nature of the year 12 examination questions students are required to answer, the continuing massive sales of text study guides and the fact that the single most common question English teachers ask of each other is still, 'What texts are you doing with your classes this year?'

It is true that some of the skills needed to become a good reader are mentioned in formal curriculum documents such as the National English Profile and its various State-based descendants, but they tend to be marginalised, buried under a weight of other material or expressed in barely comprehensible language. They are not given centre stage as they deserve.

In any case, an English curriculum does not exist on paper. It exists in the minds of English teachers, their teaching practices and the culture of English departments. When curriculum documents are not accessible to teachers and unaccom-panied by appropriate professional development, teachers revert to the default model of teaching. And the default model for English teaching in Australia is the transmission of knowledge about texts.

Furthermore, the textual knowledge sought in Australian classrooms is predominantly knowledge of supposedly worthy texts chosen by teachers, despite the fact that study after study has shown that students find the vast majority of books teachers require them to read boring, irrelevant and/or too difficult. Thus the focus on textual knowledge actually works against students acquiring the skills needed to be good readers.

Aspects of the covert curriculum also work against students developing the necessary skills. Classroom practices which teach powerful but misleading ideas about the nature of reading include comprehension exercises that require students to focus on specific words rather than the passage as a whole; requiring students to read aloud around the class; and an emphasis on finding 'correct' answers to questions asked by someone else. Practices such as these work to systematically miseducate students about the nature of reading.

It takes time for students to develop the habits which good readers take for granted. At the moment too much of students' time is taken up with acquiring inert textual knowledge or participating in activities which actually work against their acquisition of the necessary skills. Another attempt to determine a nationally agreed English curriculum has just begun. Let's hope that those responsible for its development encourage teachers and students to skip the boring bits of English and focus on what is really important for students to learn.

Rod Quin is an education consultant and writer. He has taught English for over 25 years and has been closely involved in curriculum development in Western Australia for many years

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