Teaching Undergraduates to read is one of the hardest jobs for lecturers and seminar leaders. As an English Literature Visiting Lecturer, I often assume that my students–who have, of course, completed an A-Level in English Literature and presumably received a good grade–are capable of reading and analysing a text and, Margy MacMillan suggests, ‘making connections’.[1] However, the jump from A-Level to Degree level is particularly large in this respect, and students do not seem to have the requisite skills to actually read, whether it be a novel or an academic article. Perhaps our expectations are too high; as MacMillan notes, ‘[a]cademic reading generally takes place in private, students rarely see how experts read, and the kind of strategies and knowledge we bring to what looks like a simple activity and that we expect them to deploy when we ask them to read’.[2] With this in mind, it is perhaps necessary to address in a far more specific way the problem of Undergraduate reading, for without this basis, it seems impossible to expect strong writing. In her phenomenological study, MacMillan argues that it may be time to reconsider the restrictive binary of ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ reading: ‘they appear as end points on a continuum of experience that parallels reading the words, through reading the text as a whole, to reading the meaning behind the text’.[3] Teaching students to read would be teaching an awareness of precisely this continuum, so that understanding a text is simultaneously a comprehension of its logic and a recognition of its broader resonances. This process of building connections–with the world, with other texts, with personal experience–is in itself the concept of reading that we as teachers are looking for.
[1] Margy MacMillan, ‘Student Connections with Academic Texts: A Phenomenology Study of Reading’, Teaching in Higher Education, 19 (2014), 943–54 (943) [2]Ibid., 951. [3]Ibid. 947.
Teaching Undergraduates to read is one of the hardest jobs for lecturers and seminar leaders. As an English Literature Visiting Lecturer, I often assume that my students–who have, of course, completed an A-Level in English Literature and presumably received a good grade–are capable of reading and analysing a text and, Margy MacMillan suggests, ‘making connections’.[1] However, the jump from A-Level to Degree level is particularly large in this respect, and students do not seem to have the requisite skills to actually read, whether it be a novel or an academic article. Perhaps our expectations are too high; as MacMillan notes, ‘[a]cademic reading generally takes place in private, students rarely see how experts read, and the kind of strategies and knowledge we bring to what looks like a simple activity and that we expect them to deploy when we ask them to read’.[2] With this in mind, it is perhaps necessary to address in a far more specific way the problem of Undergraduate reading, for without this basis, it seems impossible to expect strong writing. In her phenomenological study, MacMillan argues that it may be time to reconsider the restrictive binary of ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ reading: ‘they appear as end points on a continuum of experience that parallels reading the words, through reading the text as a whole, to reading the meaning behind the text’.[3] Teaching students to read would be teaching an awareness of precisely this continuum, so that understanding a text is simultaneously a comprehension of its logic and a recognition of its broader resonances. This process of building connections–with the world, with other texts, with personal experience–is in itself the concept of reading that we as teachers are looking for.
[1] Margy MacMillan, ‘Student Connections with Academic Texts: A Phenomenology Study of Reading’, Teaching in Higher Education, 19 (2014), 943–54 (943)
[2] Ibid., 951.
[3] Ibid. 947.