Reading the Lines: Conventions

Readers must learn to recognize and identify the conventions that create meaning and expectations in the text.  For beginning readers, “decoding conventions” means deciphering the words, symbols, punctuation, and grammar in a text.  When readers decode these conventions, they are also able to read aloud with fluency and expression.  Conventions also means recognizing genre conventions and the organizational framework of a text—the conventions of a poem, story, novel, newspaper, or textbook.  Thus when readers decode conventions, they create “thinking frames”—expectations based on recognizable word, punctuation, genre, or organization clues—that aid their reading of a text (Perkins, 1986).

Comprehension

When readers establish comprehension, they create meaning from a text.  Comprehension occurs when readers make predictions, identify plot elements such as major and minor characters, and select main ideas and significant and supporting details.  Good readers should also be able to summarize and paraphrase with purpose.  An essential component of comprehension is the reader's ability to self-monitor or recognize when the text is not making sense and to develop strategies to overcome problems.  The trait of comprehension means more than just the literal retelling of texts.  Comprehension should be purposeful—for example, passive readers pull random details from the text, while active readers distinguish between significant and supporting details that back up a main idea.

Reading Between the Lines: Context

Context involves reading between the lines to identify the setting, the vocabulary reflective of the setting, and the tone and voice of the author.  Readers realize context when they describe historical time periods, find evidence of social issues, and recognize cultural overtones in the text.  Context also includes placing ideas and concepts in a “bigger picture” to help students see the practical application of mathematical or scientific concepts.  Because readers must read between the lines to infer contextual meanings, context is hierarchically more difficult than conventions and comprehension.

Interpretation

When readers interpret, they “fill in gaps” in the text, using clues and evidence from the text to analyze problems and draw conclusions.  Readers develop interpretations when they make plausible explanation of ideas or arguments by recognizing and dealing with ambiguities in the text, reconciling those ambiguities through interpretation.  Interpretation is an essential critical-thinking skill, but one that often intimidates students because of the “risk-taking” involved.  Readers often need to reach a “comfort zone” for developing interpretations before they gain confidence and branch out into more sophisticated interpretation.

Reading Beyond the Lines: Synthesis

Synthesis involves reading beyond the lines, as students must apply and synthesize knowledge from outside the text.  Readers synthesize when they combine information in new ways to order, sort, or outline information from the text.  Readers must compare and contrast information from multiple sources or determine cause and effect.  When readers synthesize, they apply personal experience or background knowledge to the text and use multiple sources to create an integrated analysis.  Synthesis extends a text's literal boundaries by creating a new picture greater than the sum of its parts.

Critiquing for Evaluation

Evaluation occurs when readers are able to enter into a dialogue with the text and make the text their own.  Readers evaluate by expressing opinions, raising questions, challenging the text, challenging the author, and noting bias and distortion.  During evaluation, readers judge the effectiveness of literary and informational devices, and they contrast the accuracy of information from a written text with other sources of information and personal knowledge. Evaluation represents the highest level of critical thinking and reading.

The traits are hierarchical in the sense that synthesis and evaluation are more complex thinking skills than conventions and comprehension.  But we should not limit beginning readers to activities that only stress conventions and comprehension.  Even beginning readers need the opportunity to interpret and evaluate texts to make them their own.  One first grade teacher from Alaska summarized the value of the traits for younger readers: “Sometimes I forget that my students can think at a much higher level than they can read. I spend so much time working on their decoding and literal comprehension but rarely give them opportunities to interpret or evaluate what they read. By using the trait framework, I am constantly reminded to teach my students to read between and beyond the lines as well.”

The same holds true for older readers, especially struggling readers.  Too often, we limit struggling readers to “reading the lines” instruction, forgetting that they can think at a much higher level than they can read.  Such students often become much more frustrated and angry when limited to often dull and repetitious “reading the lines” activities.  In contrast, struggling readers become much more motivated and engaged when we allow them to think about and explore ideas, when we ask them to make connections with their own background experiences.

How Can I Use the Traits of an Effective Reader in My Classroom?

We want to use assessment models that help students become more active readers by setting clear targets for success.  The best way to do so is to integrate assessment with instruction, enabling teachers and students to work together to chart progress toward meeting—and exceeding—reading goals.  In her article “Why We Need Better Assessments,” Lorrie A. Shepard (1996) outlines her vision of quality assessment:

Assessments designed to support instruction are informal, teacher-mandated, adapted to local context, locally scored, sensitive to short-term change in students' knowledge, and meaningful to students. They provide immediate, detailed, and complex feedback; and they incorporate tasks that have instructional value in themselves.  (p. 1:2-5)

With the Traits of an Effective Reader, teachers are able to follow this vision of assessment. We encourage teachers at all grade levels to organize their curriculum and instruction according to the traits to make their teaching of reading more focused and explicit.  Because that immediate and detailed picture of their students' reading is always available when they use the traits, teachers can constantly provide more focused, purposeful instruction to meet student needs.  For examples, see our scoring guides and rubrics at http://www.nwrel.org/eval/reading/scoring.html/.

One of the most difficult aspects of reading assessment is the fact that often we assess reading through a product—in most cases a written or oral response such as an essay, report, or summary.  Many students—sometimes even good writers—have difficulty with explaining their reading through a written response.  We need to model good reading product for students, constantly asking them to support good comprehension, interpretation, evaluation, by justifying their responses and explaining not only what they know, but how and why they came to that conclusion.  The reading traits not only model good reading process but reading product as well.

Case Study

In the summer of 1999, every ninth grade language arts teacher in the Vancouver, WA, school district participated in reading training focused on the Traits of an Effective Reader. Teachers were asked to organize their teaching around the traits, incorporating their curriculum and reading activities into a trait framework.  In the fall of 1999, we gave the students a Traits of an Effective Reader Assessment to gauge their strengths and weaknesses in the area of critical reading.  The results coincided with the results of other assessments used by the district—many students were not proficient readers.  Using the trait assessment, however, we were able to give teachers some concrete information about their students' reading.  Two important findings emerged:  First, students were fairly successful when it came to literal comprehension, but struggled with critical reading.  They did not know when they were supposed to “read the lines,” “read between the lines,” or “read beyond the lines.” Secondly, students struggled with their ability to write about what they read. Their reading product needed work—their written responses lacked focus, support, and a clear understanding of what they were asked to do.

As a result of these findings, teachers decided to make an effort to model critical reading strategies and help students realize the importance of reading product.  Teachers began this effort by trying out a few of the strategies that are used to model the traits, then began to create their own trait-based activities and strategies as they gained confidence with the model.  On a number of occasions, we visited the classroom to help teachers focus on teaching reading intentionally and explicitly.  In one example, we sat in on a wonderful class where students acted out scenes from Romeo and Juliet, then voted on best actor and best actress.  The teacher's enthusiasm engaged the students in both the activity and the text, but the reading strategies were not clearly targeted.  To make the activity more focused on modeling specific reading skills, we asked the teacher to think about the trait of evaluation. Rather than merely asking students to vote on best actor and actress, we noted, why not first discuss the criteria for these categories, then ask students not only to vote for their favorites but explain why they made that choice.  The revised activity not only models good evaluation process for students, but helps them create reading product by asking them to justify their vote with reasons and evidence In her next class, the teacher tried out the revised activity and was pleased with its success.

We met with teachers and staff on a monthly basis to discuss reading strategies and listen to ideas about how we could help their effort.  The implementation of the traits was not always smooth—some teachers balked at what they thought was just a fad, and others struggled to teach their sometimes resistant students a new way of thinking about reading—but as the school year progressed, teachers and students grew more comfortable with the model.

In the spring, we again assessed the students using a trait-based assessment.  We were all encouraged to see significant improvement in the student's' responses.  Not only were they simply writing more and supporting that writing more effectively, their responses were much more focused on the reading skill being assessed.  Many more students used reading language, stating things like: “the main idea of the passage is . . .” or “my interpretation is . . ..”  Most importantly, the results of the assessment reflected the changes teachers observed in the classroom—many teachers were astonished at how their students began to “get it,” becoming more purposeful, engaged, active readers.  We anticipate that these results will continue during the 2000-01 school year as we expand our efforts to work with both tenth grade language arts and social studies teachers and middle school teachers across the content areas.

Summary

The Traits of an Effective Reader are not arbitrary divisions of the reading process.  The traits reflect the way readers naturally interact with text.  Good readers initiate this process unconsciously, creating expectations based on genre and organizational framework, bringing in background knowledge to help understand a text, and making and revising judgments and interpretations as they read.  The traits make this process explicit, modeling the skills shown by good readers for developing readers.  When we use the traits to build a basis for reading skills as well as reading content, we are teaching reading intentionally.

By using the Traits of an Effective Reader, we are teaching from an early age the importance of critical reading.  In Mosaic of Thought, Keene and Zimmermann (1998) stress the need to teach our students to become critical readers:

We wring our hands over children who seem to remember and reapply little of what they have read. Yet how often do we create the context for them to discuss, ponder, argue, restate, reflect, or otherwise work with the information we consider critical for them to recall? (p. 152)

In many instances, students have difficulty becoming critical readers because we tend to teach reading implicitly.  Rather than teaching students the skills of good reading—giving them strategies that apply to any text they read—we equate “reading” with reading content, the information in the books we teach in our class.  Often, we emphasize the content of the literature we teach rather than the skills and strategies students use to comprehend, process, and apply their knowledge of the text.  Obviously, that content is important; but if we explicitly teach reading skills, students will understand how they were able to comprehend, process, and apply that content.  When they use the Traits of an Effective Reader, students learn to develop “ways of knowing,” or inquiry approaches to the process of reading. An emphasis on critical reading develops in students in an engaged approach to reading—they become active readers, not passive ones.

References

Gray, W. S. (1960). The major aspects of reading. In H. Robinson (Ed.), Development of reading abilities. Supplementary Educational Monographs No. 90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Keene, E. O., & Zimmermann, S. (1997).  Mosaic of thought: Teaching comprehension in a reader's workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Pearson, P. D., & Johnson, D. (1978). Teaching reading comprehension.  Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Perkins, D. (1986) Thinking frames, Educational Leadership, May.

Shepard, L. A. (1996). "Why we need better assessments."  A handbook for student performance assessment in an era of restructuring.  Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Vacca, R. T., & Vacca, J. (1999). A. Content area reading: Literacy and learning across the curriculum, (6th ed.). New York: Longman.

Zemelman, S., Daniels, H., & Hyde, A. (1998).  Best practice: New standards for teaching and learning in America's schools. (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.