"Why Am I Reading This?"

The last chapter I read was titled "Why Am I Reading This?" Cris Tovani started off the chapter  like many of her chapters, with a story of  a prior encounter that occurred in the work place.  Tovani recalls a student named Lisa who was a senior honors english student taking Tovani's college prep course. Lisa came to Tovani one day with concerns that the prep course involved such difficult texts that it was causing her reading to get worse instead of improving.  Tovani couldn't understand how a readers skills could get "worse, so she began to discuss the issue with Lisa to find that she was equating reading quickly with reading well.  Tovani then goes on to make the point that if a reader is reading to finish as if the text is a race and not reading with a significant purpose, the reader is not reading well.
Tovani explains that it is not only important for readers to have a purpose for their text however it is also important for the teachers to have instructional purpose for the texts they are assigning.  Tovani says that too often teachers become experts of their content which creates difficulty in narrowing down which pieces of the information are important enough for their students to know.  Tovani introduces a instructional purpose guide sheet she gives to teachers to help them decide what it is specifically that they want their students to get as a result from a particular text.  The Instructional Purpose Guide sheet involves these five questions:
1. Instructional Purpose (what is essential for the students to know?)
2. What two places may cause students difficulty?
3. What will you model that will help students negotiate the difficult parts?
4. What do they need to do with the information they are reading?
5. How will they hold their thinking while they read?
The fifth question is my favorite because it can be approached several different ways.  To help the reader hold their thinking while reading you can give them strategies to use such as note taking, and writing questions in margins or before they begin to read you can give them specific questions, or ideas to keep in mind.  For example a math teacher could give the students a specific formula, or diagram that relates to a word problem they are about to attempt.  Another example could be for a an English teacher to ask his or her students to identify the what the main message or them of a text is.  The whole idea of helping students to hold their thinking is to help students comprehend what they are reading by giving the text a purpose.
Tovani admits that when she first began teaching she asked may things of her students in which she probably could not have done herself.  For example she points out that often teachers give their students a novel and after one read they expect them to recall several details and general ideas from the text without any prior direction of what they should be thinking about while their reading. Another example is that teachers often have such a broad curriculum with a short time frame that students do not have the time that is required to think about the texts they are given, however, while teachers themselves spend much more time learning the content and developing the curriculum.  Tovani claims that if students are not given a purpose when reading they often get lost in unimportant details, and that when students are overwhelmed with texts in a short time frame they read to get through it rather than even attempting to find meaning.  Tovani says we should not only decide what is important in the text and in the curriculum  before our students endure it, however we should either tell or guide them to the information is important in their text before they read.
Their is often a debate about this idea many teachers say this is teaching to the test or that this dumbs down the learner.  I do not agree, I believe if this is done in a way in which you are more so guiding your students (not handing them the information) then you are just limiting their view to help their reading process work as beneficially as possible.
Tovani goes on to explain what readers do when they aren't given a purpose.  She explains what she calls the "reciting voice" and the "conversation voice".  The reciting voice is usually on when a reader is reading a text that is difficult or unfamiliar, this voice usually recites only and does not question nor make much meaning of the text.  The conversation voice is what readers use when they are comprehending the text by asking questions, answering questions, making predictions etc (many of the thinking strategies talked about earlier in this book, refer to blog #2).  Tovani then explains if we as teachers can help our students to distinguish how to turn their different voices off and on in their head while reading, then we can help them to become more proficient readers.  To do this teachers can introduce the concept so that the students are aware of their voices, and also introduce purpose and questions that help the reader to form opinions about the text.  By giving the readers a purpose and questions to make sense of the text this helps to turn on their conversation voice thus making meaning of what they are reading. One way to form the questions so that they are most appropriate, is for the teacher to ask themselves "why do I read this particular text or a text of this nature?"
I think the idea of instructional purpose is a wonderful idea.  I think that it is necessity for teachers to give their students a purpose at all times, however there are many times in which it is crucial for the reader to develop meaning.  What I do believe is necessary at all times is for teachers to identify their purpose of the particular texts they are giving their students.