Teaching Freshmen Non-Readers, the A-literate Majority [electronic resource] / Ron Tanner.
The majority of current college freshmen see no place in their lives for reading as an opportunity for intellectual or emotional enjoyment. They read only the most utilitarian texts--appliance instructions or road signs, for example. A teacher cannot "make" students read anything, but he o...
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| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse,
1987.
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| Summary: | The majority of current college freshmen see no place in their lives for reading as an opportunity for intellectual or emotional enjoyment. They read only the most utilitarian texts--appliance instructions or road signs, for example. A teacher cannot "make" students read anything, but he or she can help them find ways to like reading; one goal of a teacher should be to help students take responsibility for their own learning. Three general suggestions can be incorporated into writing classes to turn students into self-motivated readers: (1) help them recognize and question the speaker in the text; (2) persuade them to respond to books just as they respond to each other's writing--by commenting in the margins and by underlining words they find interesting or confusing to return to later; and (3) introduce them to non-traditional texts (such as Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"). No other class is as small and flexible as the composition class, where students have an opportunity to write at length about their reading reactions, questions, and discoveries. The teacher can help these non-readers discover that the world of books belongs to them too. (NKA) |
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| Item Description: | ERIC Document Number: ED280076. ERIC Note: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (38th, Atlanta, GA, March 19-21, 1987). Educational level discussed: Higher Education. |
| Physical Description: | 10 p. |