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A high school teacher explores his concerns that annotation, prediction, vocabulary study, and other metacognitive reading strategies interfere with proficient readers' enjoyment and engagement with literary texts.
Until seventh grade, my son was a voracious reader. Before he began kindergarten, I would read to him from Lemony Snicket books, and when he began to read himself, he burned though Mo Willems, Lane Smith, Darren Shan, Rick Riordan, and Suzanne Collins. Now his bed is surrounded on both sides by six-foot-tall bookshelves filled with titles he devoured-out of sheer pleasure.
Unfortunately, the shelves don't get much action these days. He just finished eighth grade and managed to go the entire year without reading one book voluntarily. His grades are holding up; he's still a good student. He's not tired of reading; he hasn't grown out of it. As he tells it, he "just doesn't like to read anymore."
Over-Teaching
As a high school English teacher, it breaks my heart to see this gradual shedding of pleasure reading and its academic benefits. Yet, it's a trend I've grown familiar with among my best students, who, as they grow older, are taught that their natural and successful approach to reading isn't good enough, and that only when they have taken to reading with a pencil in their hands will they be the kinds of readers valued in middle school and high school English classes. Graphic organizers, reflection journals, and annotation requirements today accompany literature as if they were shrink-wrapped and bundled with the original publications, and students are explicitly told that good readers don't just read; they read actively.
Kelly Gallagher, who has written extensively on this subject, sees this phenomenon (which he has coined Readicide) in large measure as a reaction to an increased focus on standardized testing (12). Certainly standardized tests have shifted our focus dramatically, but it has not been my experience that teachers, when discussing reading instruction, see test preparation as their primary objective. Most English teachers that I've encountered sincerely want to improve their students' reading for its own sake. But sincere motives have not always resulted in best practices, and the over-teaching of reading, despite its best intentions, has alienated many students from the act of reading entirely.
One motivation leading...