LOCATING READING INCOMPOSITION STUDIES

"[W]hat an instructor believes about reading is an essentialprecondition to organizing and teaching in a writing classroom."—Marguerite Helmers (2003, 4)

David and Diana could not have been more different as highschool students: David struggled in many of his classes, especiallywhen it came to reading. He passed with average grades,and he had to work to achieve those average grades. In classesthat involved reading, David was quiet and lacked confidence.As David put it, "I'm bad at reading. I don't know if I need morevocabulary or a speed reading course, but I don't like it, andI'm not good at it. Others [read] faster and get more out of itthan I do." Diana, on the other hand, excelled at reading andin her classes in general. She often participated in class, confidentthat she knew the material and knew the right things to say.According to Diana, "School's not that hard. I'm busy, and I'vegot a lot of homework, but I do fine. I have a lot to read, but Ijust do it." For Diana, school was not a matter of struggling toget by but of striving to maintain a level of excellence.

In college, David struggled even more with reading, andDiana found that her usual ways of reading did not work anymore,noting that "they [teachers] expect us to do differentthings in different classes with reading." Although Dianaremained a good student, she felt frustrated by these unclearexpectations and her lack of preparation; she didn't struggle,but she didn't know how to excel. These two students suggestthe range of students that come into our first-year composition(FYC) courses: the struggling students, uncertain and quiet asthe class discusses a reading, stumbling over a word or evendrifting off as they try to make a point; and the above averagestudents, those who seem confident but end up skimming thesurface of a reading for "the point" and do not see it as a complex,layered event. The students in this study went to a highschool that performed exceptionally well on state tests; it washeld in high esteem by parents, teachers, and students. If thesestudents experienced difficulty with reading in college, thenwhat does that suggest about the place and purpose of readingpedagogy? For far too long, reading pedagogy has beenaimed at students like David, those who struggle, those whomight need remedial education. But what about Diana andher overachieving peers? What about the students who seemto read well, but lack flexible strategies or an appropriate criticalstance? How might we pursue research and pedagogy thatwould benefit a range of students? And, most importantly, whatpedagogical possibilities are we overlooking by not investigatingreading at a time when reading has so many rich manifestations?In their statements that opened this chapter, David andDiana referred to their proficiencies with traditional print literaciesin high school and college. As we will see throughoutthe book, the participants generally viewed digital literacies asnon-school practices. Might David have been more confident asan academic reader if his experience with digital texts had beendrawn upon? How might have Diana and David engaged theirreading and writing practices in richer, more connected ways inschool through exposure to a range of literacies?

This chapter examines composition's relationship to reading.Although literacy studies has shaped compositionists'approach to writing instruction, it has made less of an impact onour thinking about reading in the writing classroom. Readingpedagogy, however, is crucial to the work of writing instruction.As Marguerite Helmers (2003) observes, "what an instructorbelieves about reading is an essential precondition to organizingand teaching in a writing classroom" (4). The beliefs wehave about reading, and the view we have of our discipline'srelationship to reading, shape what we do with reading (andwriting) in the classroom. As reading and writing take on moreshapes and purposes—as they accumulate—in the twenty-firstcentury, how prepared are we to engage new literacies if weleave reading in its largely invisible state?

READING'S PRESENCE AND ABSENCE

Consider the curious double life of reading in compositionclassrooms. All at once, reading is both invisible and constantlypresent. It seems to constitute so much of what we do in theclassroom, yet it may also be one of the least theorized partsof classroom practice. We see reading most when it goes awry:when students stumble over words, when they offer up an interpretationthat makes us wonder if we're all reading the samething, when they read for the quick answer instead of the deepconnection, when they simplify an author's position. But, forthe most part, reading leaves no trace—no drafts, no revisions,no peer review, no individual conferences. When it seems to gowell—or at least when it doesn't derail the goal of teaching writing—itdrifts into the background, a ghost of a concern.

Reading's simultaneous presence and absence can be seenin Pat Hoy's (2009) description of how he used to teach readingand why that changed. Hoy states that he had "developed apedagogy that would not require [him] to teach students howto read" (305). That is, students learned particular ways of readingthrough assignments and exercises, not from a more directform of instruction. When that pedagogy was successful, he was"left free to teach writing, not reading" (305). But in recentyears, Hoy's students were not reading the way he expected, andhe found he was not alone: other teachers in his program allagreed on the "pervasive" reading problem and its characteristics(305). I think Hoy's initial view echoes what many compositionteachers desire: students should either "already know howto read" or learn how to read for college as a byproduct of otherassignments through a kind of pedagogical osmosis. We expectcertain kinds of reading in our classes, and we want that readingto be invisible, automatic, and ready to serve writing. Whenreading becomes visible, when it requires new scaffolding, thenthe reading-writing balance of the classroom is upset.

Hoy and his colleagues are certainly not alone in feelingdissatisfied and even frustrated with student reading. In theiranalysis of students' writing from sources, Rebecca MooreHoward, Tricia Serviss, and Tanya K. Rodrigue (2010) foundthat students seemed to engage minimally with sources. Basedon the students' lack of summary and their focus on individualsentences from sources, the researchers raise questions aboutstudents' reading practices and "ask not only whether the writersunderstood the source itself but also whether they even readit" (186). As they note, their "preliminary inquiry suggests thatwe have much more to learn" about how students read and usesources (189). The research by Howard, Serviss, and Rodrigueis an early stage of The Citation Project, a large-scale empiricalstudy of how students at multiple schools use sources intheir writing. The Project recognizes that we do not have muchempirical data about how students actually engage with sources.At my institution, which is comprised of a selective-admissionmain campus with open-admission regional campuses, an assessmentof FYC research papers from every campus found a commonproblem of minimal and incorrect source use. Writingfrom sources is a complicated act with many interrelated parts,but how much of the minimal source engagement stemmedfrom unsophisticated reading, and by extension, from underdevelopedreading pedagogies?

Because the teaching of reading in college composition classroomshas received little attention in recent years, teachers lackthe pedagogical theory and practice with which to assist studentswith their reading. First-year composition students thenlack the reading strategies and the metacognitive awareness thatcould help them adapt to the reading and writing situationsthey will encounter in college and beyond. Being immersed incomposition scholarship and having taught students at differentuniversities and at different levels of college preparedness,I have a wealth of resources to draw upon when teaching writing.Reading is a different story. For many years while teachingreading, I turned to a textbook and assigned reading questions,journal entries, and reader responses. In the absence of a theoreticalbasis, however, these acts felt like an imitation of realteaching, and I struggled as a teacher when students struggledas readers. In addition to having little theory and little languagefor reading pedagogy, I also had little idea who the studentswere as readers. What do they read at home? What kindsof reading did they do in high school? How do they read withtechnology? The questions generated by those difficult teachingdays led to this research. My call for a renewed interest in readingwould be well deserved, even in a print-dominated world.However, it is even more urgent with the challenges and opportunitiesposed by rapid technological change.

Reading and writing have changed. We see this every day.Computers and the web have profoundly influenced how weapproach texts, shifting between the position of reader onemoment and writer the next (Brandt 2009; Lessig 2008).Alongside this shift, dynamic and rapidly changing literacy practicescontinue to expand the range of genres and media thatwe encounter and manipulate. Contributing to and navigatingamong this wealth of texts means we learn and adopt differentways of reading and writing. We are no longer passive consumers,if such creatures ever existed: more than ever, we are participantsin how media are produced, distributed, and accessed.Composition has responded to such changes by expanding whatit means to write, yet the corresponding literacy practices—howwe read digital texts—have received less attention.

One notable call to attend to new forms of composingappeared in Kathleen Blake Yancey's (2004) address at theConference on College Composition and Communication(CCCC), in which she asserted that composition needs to recognizethat the writing we teach in school is becoming moredistanced from what students do outside of school: "Neverbefore has the proliferation of writings outside the academy socounterpointed the compositions inside" (298). Yancey's recommendationsfor change include bringing "together the writingoutside of school and that inside" (308). She emphasizes the"circulation of texts" aspect of the new curriculum, which hasstudents writing outside of the student-to-teacher model andtransforming pieces of writing across genre and media: "As theymove from medium to medium, they consider what they moveforward, what they leave out, what they add, and for each ofthese write a reflection in which they consider how the mediumitself shapes what they create. The class culminates with text inwhich they write a reflective theory about what writing is andhow it is influenced or shaped or determined by media andtechnology" (314).

Yancey's proposal is important because it sets a new agendafor composition, but it is also interesting in the fact that theagenda is not so new (as Yancey herself acknowledges). Thebasis of this agenda was formed by the work of literacy scholars,particularly the New London Group (Cope and Kalantzis 2000),who argue for a semiotic view of communication: rhetorical andmaterial contexts influence how people choose from a range ofmodalities—text, sound, image, etc.—as they design and deliversigns; in making signs, they reciprocally draw from and contributeto the semiotic resources available. Similarly, Yancey's "circulationof texts" model asks students to consider how to writewith different media, thinking about and using appropriatemodal resources in particular situations. Yancey and the NewLondon Group ultimately want students who are more than justtechnically proficient with technologies: they want students tocultivate an aware, dexterous mindset that can respond to differentsituations with critical, creative literacies. Given the fast-changingnature of literacy, should we not aim to cultivate thesame from students' reading practices?

Composition is right to respond to new literacies with researchand pedagogy adapted to new ways of composing. However, thefield's response should also include attention to new ways ofreading. In turning to visual rhetoric and multimodal composition,we must make a concerted effort to consider how readinghappens across semiotic domains, with print text remaining aninvaluable part of contemporary literacy practices. The role ofreading is crucial for articulating a more robust understandingof new literacies. Kip Strasma (2010) argues that we need a"new epistemology of reading new media that avoids the pitfallsof now-forgotten inquiries into hypertext and its relatedfield of theory" (183). So far, early hypertext scholarship andearly new media scholarship "parallel one another in that thoseearly works focused on theoretical concerns rather than empiricaland epistemic research, and, similarly, that work neglectedclassroom specifics and empirical research on individuals orgroups of readers" (192). Strasma's warning is well taken, andthis book aims to fill the gap with research and a pedagogicalframework that considers an expanded sense of how readinghappens, how reading can be taught, and how reading can beexplicitly connected to writing in productive ways that reflectthe dynamic range of contexts and media in which students willread and write.

READING'S STATUS IN COMPOSITION

As writing teachers we have a pedagogy based on a model ofgrowth: we start from where the students are and use appropriateexercises and assignments to help them develop as writers,asking students to write in different genres and for various audiencesto reinforce the situated, contextual nature of writing. Wehave a wealth of tools, practical guides, and theoretical scholarshipthat prepare us to help students become self-sufficientwriters. We actively see students as writers, and we encouragestudents to see themselves as writers: to develop processes,to cultivate voices, to draw in and engage with audiences. Weteach writing as a way of thinking. These are the values we haveattached to writing and that we emphasize in our pedagogy.We have a tradition, a disciplinary identity formed around thepower of writing and the potential of writing to effect change.I find little evidence of a similarly well-developed approach toreading pedagogy.

The title of David Jolliffe's (2003) "Who is Teaching CompositionStudents to Read and How Are They Doing It?" posesan appropriate question, given the lack of attention to readingpedagogy in the major journals, books on composition pedagogy,and the field's flagship conference, CCCC. Jolliffe's examinationof the 2003 CCCC reveals that in "the 574 concurrentsessions, workshops, and special-interest group meetings [...]the word reading appears only twice" (128). The 2005–2008programs for CCCC feature as many (i.e., as few) presentationson reading pedagogy as they do on grammar instruction,a subject our discourse generally regards as only tangentiallyimportant to the teaching of writing. Mariolina Salvatori andPatricia Donahue (2012) investigated the lack of reading theory/pedagogy panels at CCCC and found that reading disappearedfor 17 years from the categories of interest on CCCCproposals. Salvatori and Donahue celebrate the 2008 returnof reading as a category, but they are also troubled by the longdisappearance: "Although it is encouraging (and downrightexciting) to see that since 2008, the words theories, reading, andwriting appear in association, it remains puzzling that for seventeenyears the word reading was completely invisible. A hiatusof seventeen years?" (210). Reading's absence as a category, ofcourse, does not mean reading was completely absent from theconference. To present their work over the years, Salvatori andDonahue found ways to "work around, manipulate, or 'psychout' the areas of interest legitimized by the CFP form" (211).Even though reading may not have been completely removedfrom CCCC for those years, it was less visible as a topic that matteredto the field: "Why should one engage in inquiry that hasbeen waved to the disciplinary borderlands or erased from themap altogether?" (210).