The Practice of Reading

I teach a number of bilingual students who, as first generation Americans, face additional hurdles in English because the adults in their families are not fluent in English. Several did not begin speaking English until kindergarten, and others don’t speak it at home on a daily basis. As a result, they are less familiar with English phrasing and rhythms than students who have been surrounded by English speakers from birth. If their early schooling doesn’t include a strong foundation in phonics, they may never learn how to pronounce certain combinations of letters, and this inability to decode can impair their comprehension of what they read.

The long-term consequences of this deficit can be devastating. One of my first private tutoring students, “Lucy,” hired me because she was failing out of community college. She’d been told she read at a second grade level. She was, however, a high school graduate. When I asked how she could have been allowed to slip through the cracks, she told me that many of her teachers had been unresponsive to her requests for help. She also said that they knew she was shy, so they never called on her.

If a child who has trouble reading is not required to read aloud, how will that child ever improve? In addition to not being able to pronounce words, Lucy had never absorbed the basics of English grammar. Verb endings were difficult for her, and her writing was initially so garbled that it seemed as if she had simply thrown the words willy-nilly onto the page.

We began by reading books aimed at middle readers. She read aloud to me, and I listened, corrected, explained, and encouraged. Within just a few months, she began reading independently, borrowing more and more difficult books from me. However, despite her clear intelligence and rapidly developing critical thinking skills, it took most of her twenties for her to complete her four-year degree. Now, in her thirties, she is finally in graduate school, earning a master’s in early education. Reading and literacy have become her passions, and I have no doubt that she will excel at helping many students with backgrounds similar to her own. I also feel sad that her learning deficits were so difficult for her to overcome because it has meant such a late start to her chosen career.

I have another student now, a ninth grader, with similar challenges. “Tanya” struggles with both English vocabulary and English grammar, and this naturally makes her schoolwork much more difficult than it needs to be. I assign vocabulary exercises and help her study for tests and complete written school assignments, but when we aren’t working on a specific task, we read aloud, switching off paragraph by paragraph.

I’ve picked the books we read carefully, mindful that a teenager who struggles with reading will only be interested in age-appropriate books, but that those books will need to contain less challenging vocabulary and shorter sentences than those for older teens. Our first book last summer was a Newberry Award winner, It’s Like This, Cat, by Emily Neville. I loved it in middle school, and thought its story about a fourteen-year-old boy would appeal to her. Tanya found it engaging and had no difficulty expressing her opinions about the protagonist’s difficulties with his father or his struggles to make friends.

However, since Tanya is already in high school, I knew we needed to step it up a notch before she’s assigned to read something like To Kill a Mockingbird or Great Expectations, so I turned, as I often do when searching for lexically challenging texts, to Victorian children’s literature. In November, we read A Christmas Carol, and we are currently on chapter two of Little Women.

I chose these books carefully: Tanya is Eastern Orthodox, so her Christmas tradition is different from that of most American Christians. A Christmas Carol is a foundational text in English literature, perenially referenced, reproduced, and performed. Reading it introduced her to life in nineteenth-century London, with its cold, damp weather, coal fires, and income inequality as well as to Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Marley, the Cratchitts, and Tiny Tim, iconic characters that “all educated adults'' are presumed to know and love. In other words, she’ll get the references now.

The same goes for Little Women. It’s a book that “all girls” have read for generations; I still have my mother’s copy. Chapter one led us to discuss the American Civil War, the difference between “libel” and “label,” and the fact that girls often didn’t get to go to high school in the 1860s.

However, it’s important not to assume that students necessarily understand what they read. The ability to pronounce words correctly may not indicate comprehension. I often ask Tanya to paraphrase what she’s read to ensure that she’s following the plot. If new objects, such as toasting forks or cast iron stoves are mentioned, we pause for a quick visit to Google images to help her visualize the scene. Interestingly, Jo’s “boyishness” and “gentlemanly ways” needed contextualizing in a way I’d never expected: Jo isn’t transsexual because gender reassignment therapies and surgery were not available at the time. Instead, her desire to be a boy is rooted in the historical frustrations that girls faced because they were denied so many of the opportunities and privileges that boys enjoyed.

Reading aloud with students may seem like a waste of time because it’s more efficient to send students home to read independently. However, when I read aloud with my students, I model correct English pronunciation and phrasing that they can then emulate. They have a chance to practice in a safe space, without fear of being laughed out for mispronouncing something. They get to ask questions and initiate discussions about whatever the text suggests to them, and the result is often more in-depth than if I had assigned a chapter to read and answer questions about.

Tanya is steadily becoming more fluent when she reads. I correct her less often, and she’s getting better at understanding as she reads. She is becoming more confident. Best of all, she’s engaged and interested in books that will prepare her for the longer and more difficult books that she’ll eventually have to read in high school and college.