Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success

Across the Disciplines wac.colostate.edu/atd

A Journal of Language, Learning and Academic Writing ISSN 554-8244

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2007.4.1.08

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Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success

Alice S. Horning, Oakland University

Abstract: Hand-in-hand with the current renewed emphasis on student success and

a resurgence of Writing Across the Curriculum, instructors in all disciplines need to

refocus on Reading Across the Curriculum to address students' needs, to achieve

instructional goals, and to prepare citizens for full participation in our democracy. It

seems clear that a refocused emphasis on reading as the process of getting meaning

from print to be used for analysis, synthesis and evaluation, in the context of critical

literacy across the curriculum could potentially address the difficulties of students,

the goals of teachers and the needs of the nation for an educated, informed, fully

participatory democratic population. These goals can be achieved through four

specific strategies that can make faster, better reading possible for everyone,

including, first, an understanding of the nature of the reading process; second, a

consistent focus on direct classroom teaching of critical reading skills that go

beyond comprehension; third, opportunities for modeling and practice of these

critical reading skills; and fourth, the development of an understanding of the

conventions of disciplines and the genres used in an array of academic areas.

As an undergraduate, I took most of my courses with a professor who was a specialist in medieval

literature. In one of those courses, he described a method of annotation used in medieval texts.

Readers (mostly priests or other trained religious leaders) would mark important parts of a text by

drawing a picture of a small hand in the margin, with the index finger of the hand pointing to

significant passages. I was intrigued by this strategy and began using it to mark textbooks I was

reading for all my courses, not just my English classes. To draw those little hands, though, I had to be

a good reader; I had to be able to read not just to understand the texts I was reading but also to know

which were the important parts to mark with the little hands and to know how to use those important

parts to analyze, synthesize and evaluate the text. Recent research shows that about half of current

college students lack these skills (American College Testing, 2006). Hand-in-hand with the current

renewed emphasis on student success and a resurgence of Writing Across the Curriculum, instructors

in all disciplines need to refocus on Reading Across the Curriculum to address students' needs, to

achieve instructional goals, and to prepare citizens for full participation in our democracy.

Focused instruction in clearly defined critical reading is urgent and essential, and even more

important as digital texts and electronic searching increasingly dominate the reading landscape

(Battelle, 2005; Kelly, 2006). Recent studies also show that only half the students who start college

manage to complete a degree (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2005). The inability to read well is surely tied

to this abysmal level of degree completion, so to improve student success, the reading problem must

be addressed. Teachers all across the curriculum, and from K to college, need to renew their focus on

Horning 2

reading to improve student performance in all courses as well as in writing, as the Alliance for

Excellent Education, a Washington, DC non-profit has recently pointed out. The Alliance suggests that

there is a crisis in the public schools, particularly at the middle and high school levels:

Approximately 25 percent of all high school students read at "below basic" levels.

Affecting more than their achievement in English and language arts classes, low literacy

levels also prevent students from mastering content in other subjects. The problem is

exacerbated by the fact that many teachers in schools serving large numbers of low-

performing students are neither trained to teach reading nor well-qualified in the subject

they teach. Due, at least in part, to lack of success in school, students become disengaged

from school, which results in failure to work hard, seek assistance, and take appropriate

courses. (Alliance, 2006)

If students can move beyond simple comprehension to analyze, synthesize and evaluate not only

printed texts but also visual displays on paper and in electronic form effectively and efficiently in

every discipline, they will be better readers, writers, students, and citizens of the democratic and

electronically connected global society they will join when they graduate.

Defining Reading

A clear definition of reading in terms of the critical literacy needed for college success and full

participation in our society is in order. Reading is variously defined, usually as getting meaning from

print. In other words, just being able to pronounce aloud the words that appear on a page is not

reading according to this definition. At the very least, readers must get the meaning in order for their

activity to qualify as reading. But to be successful in college, and beyond, on paper and screen,

students must be able to go well beyond just getting meaning and well beyond just being able to work

with printed texts. Reading is a psycholinguistic process, involving the interaction of readers'

thinking with the language of the text. It must involve getting meaning, but in addition, it must also

entail moving beyond meaning to analysis, synthesis and evaluation. That is, as I and a number of

other scholars have proposed, reading must function as part of critical literacy.

Here's the definition of reading as integrated with critical literacy that I have proposed elsewhere:

Critical literacy is best defined as the psycholinguistic processes of getting meaning from

or putting meaning into print and/or sound, images, and movement, on a page or screen,

used for the purposes of analysis, synthesis and evaluation; these processes develop

through formal schooling and beyond it, at home and at work, in childhood and across the

lifespan and are essential to human functioning in a democratic society. (Horning in

preparation)

There are two points to be made for present purposes from this definition. First, notice that this

definition includes perception and production as well as text and visual elements, and that it focuses

on the key skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. My proposed definition suggests that readers

must be able to go significantly beyond getting meaning from print to using that meaning in very

specific ways. My proposal furthermore suggests that reading is the same fundamental activity

whether it is carried out with paper or digital texts, whether it entails topics like theoretical physics

or trash novels, and by implication, that reading must be closely integrated with writing in critical

literacy.

Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success 3

The side-by-side integration of reading and writing has been firmly established by research reported

by Linda Flower and her colleagues in the 1990s. Their study of reading-to-write as the cognitive

work of college students makes clear that new college students face the challenge of moving beyond

simple comprehension of texts and response to them in writing (1990, p. 245-49). The study reported

in 1990 had two parts: the first was an exploratory study in which students were asked to do think-

aloud protocols as they read materials for class and then to analyze their own reading processes and

strategies. The second part was a "teaching" study in which seventy-two first year students at

Carnegie Mellon took a special writing course called "Reading-to-Write" in which they were given

assignments and lectures to test underlying assumptions about what is required in college reading

and writing tasks. The underlying expectations being tested are two particular features of academic

discourse that apply to all disciplines: first, being able to integrate the writer's own ideas with the

ideas of source materials and second, using and applying source materials for the writer's own

rhetorical purpose (Flower et al., 1990, p. 22). Both of these expectations require expert reading to

serve as the basis for the development of academically appropriate writing in every discipline.

Flower's findings show that students need to move beyond simple comprehension and beyond

simple response to "adapt, restructure, or synthesize knowledge in order to answer complex

questions..." (1990, p. 249). The kinds of reading that students need to do for college and professional

writing and work are much more complex, as Flower says:

The goals of self-directed critical inquiry, of using writing to think through genuine

problems and issues, and of writing to an imagined community of peers with a personal

rhetorical purposeâ€”these distinguish academic writing from a more limited

comprehension and response....Without awareness of these goals it is also hard to make

sense of many of the discourse conventions of academic papers, such as examining

counterpositions to achieve a balanced appraisal or using a literature review to define

issues and establish credibility rather than to survey information. (Flower et al., 1990, p.

251)

It is also difficult for students to read well enough to achieve these goals if they are not stated

explicitly, taught directly, and required in students' work.

Prior research has not only made clear that reading and writing must go hand-in-hand, but also, other

studies validate the need to incorporate new technologies, seeing them as basic to reading in all

venues. For example, University of Connecticut reading scholar Donald Leu and his colleagues offer

a definition of new literacies very close to the one I have proposed:

The new literacies of the Internet and other ICTs [information and communication

technologies] include the skills, strategies, and dispositions necessary to successfully use

and adapt to the rapidly changing information and communication technologies and

contexts that continuously emerge in our world and influence all areas of our personal

and professional lives. These new literacies allow us to use the Internet and other ICTs to

identify important questions, locate information, critically evaluate the usefulness of that

information, synthesize information to answer those questions, and then communicate

the answers to others. (2004, p. 1572)

Notice that this definition addresses both reading and writing and addresses them both in the context

of not only printed displays but also various digital forms.

Horning 4

Leu and his colleagues (2004) make this point about integration of reading and writing in digital

forms developing from print-based abilities as they discuss "foundational literacies" and their role in

helping students develop skills in the digital age:

It is essential, however, to keep in mind that the new literacies... almost always build on

foundational literacies rather than replace them. Foundational literacies include those

traditional elements of literacy that have defined almost all our previous efforts in both

research and practice. These include skill sets such as phonemic awareness, word

recognition, decoding knowledge, vocabulary knowledge, comprehension, inferential

reasoning, the writing process, spelling, response to literature, and others required for

the literacies of the book and other printed material. Foundational literacies will continue

to be important within the new literacies of the Internet and other ICTs. In fact, it could

be argued that they will become even more essential because reading and writing

become more important in an information age. (Leu et al., 2004, 1590-91)

Print-based reading, integrated with writing is the basis for any and all work in our increasingly

digital world.

Similarly, faculty librarians John Buschman and Dorothy Warner of Rider University, a mid-sized

private liberal arts institution in New Jersey, note that the concept of information literacy relies on

and requires print literacy as its starting point (2006). They claim that there is a fundamental need

within information literacy for the kind of "critical reflexivity" that derives from literacy in a print

environment. They draw on the work of reading scholars such as Brian Street, Jack Goody and Ian

Watt, as well as the standards for information literacy promulgated by the Association of College and

Research Libraries and the American Library Association to show that in order for students or library

users to develop information literacy skills, they must also have essential literacy skills that derive

from working with printed texts.

My definition makes clear the fundamental reasons why many students lack the skills they need to

be successful. Their difficulty arises in part from a lack of instruction and motivation. Their difficulty

arises in part from the idea that reading is some fundamental skill taught early in school and that

little or no instruction is needed once the basic idea is mastered, usually in first grade. Their difficulty

arises in part from the view that there is less need for reading now that everything is on the computer.

Their difficulty arises in part because while they engage with texts and visual displays to an

increasing degree (in games, blogs, IMs and text messages on cell phones), they are less aware of the

ways in which their attention and responses are shaped by the media. Their difficulty arises in part

because the tacit goals of critical literacy including integration of ideas in a larger context and

applying reading material to the writer's own rhetorical purpose are neither stated explicitly nor

taught in a reading and writing context. It seems clear that a refocused emphasis on reading as the

process of getting meaning from print to be used for analysis, synthesis and evaluation, in the context

of critical literacy across the curriculum could potentially address the difficulties of students, the

goals of teachers and the needs of the nation for an educated, informed, fully participatory democratic

population.

Student Problems

Ask teachers about the problems students have with reading, and they will invariably say that

students can't read and don't read. And where does this inability to read complex texts with full

understanding come from? It seems clear that there are at least three sources of this problem: lack

of instruction, lack of practice, and a mythic view that reading is less important because of computers.

Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success 5

In terms of lack of instruction, I know from my own experience as a parent of two children who

attended public school in one of the best districts the nation that there is little or no instruction in

the critical reading of nonfiction prose after about 6

grade. My guess (and that's all it is) is that if my

children did not receive such instruction in a "model" school district, that the vast majority of

students don't receive this kind of instruction. Since the ACT study (American, 2006) shows that

about half the students who take that test (they examined test results and performance in college for

a sample of 563,000 students over three years) are not successful in college, I'm pretty confident that

my guess is correct. About half the students in the ACT study did not earn a score of 21 or better on

the reading section of the test, and those with lower scores were not successful in college. So, lack of

instruction and preparation is one source of the problem.

What I see among students at my institution who are advised to take our course in Critical Thinking

and Reading, whose ACT Reading score is at 19 or below, is weaknesses in understanding and being

able to work with these key features of complex texts identified by the ACT test writers:

Relationships: Interactions among ideas or characters in the text are subtle, involved or

deeply embedded.

Richness: The text possesses a sizable amount of highly sophisticated information conveyed

through data or literary devices.

Structure: The text is organized in ways that are elaborate and sometimes unconventional.

Style: The author's tone and use of language are often intricate.

Vocabulary: The author's choice of words is demanding and highly context dependent.

Purpose: The author's intent in writing the text is implicit and sometimes ambiguous.

(American, 2006, p. 17)

These key features come together into a neat mnemonic device, RSVP. What I think my colleagues

and most teachers mean when they say students are "illiterate" is that they can't deal with these RSVP

features of complex texts.

There is other research on academic reading to support this analysis of students' difficulties.

Replicating Haas and Flower's (1988) often-cited study of rhetorical reading strategies, Haswell et

al. (1999) examined both undergraduate and graduate students' abilities to use rhetorical strategies

to get meaning from print. In all of this work, very small numbers of students were asked to complete

think-aloud protocols while reading and interpreting academic texts: ten altogether in Haas and

Flower's work (1988) and six in Haswell et al's. The main finding of Haas and Flower's original study

is that undergraduates make little use of rhetorical reading strategies including audience, topic,

purpose, reader response or the contextual background of the text; Haswell et al. got essentially the

same result although their student population, drawn from Texas A&M-Corpus Christi was quite

different from the population at Carnegie Mellon used by Haas and Flower.

When Haswell et al. repeated the study using a different and more accessible passage from a

newspaper, they found much less difference between graduate and undergraduate students in the

use of rhetorical reading strategies when the text is on a more familiar topic (1999, p. 17). They go

on to make a number of observations about their results. They note that the context in which the

reading task is completed and the familiarity of the text have an important effect on readers' ability

to use more sophisticated reading strategies and to understand an author's major claims (1999, p.

20-24). They suggest that students can benefit, as I have been suggesting, from direct instruction in

the use of personal and rhetorical reading strategies, especially when they are expected to read on

unfamiliar topics. Finally, they suggest using a think-aloud procedure as one way to help students

Horning 6

understand the nature of the reading process (1999, p. 24). These ideas can help address students'

inability to read complex texts effectively.

Beyond this and other specific instructional strategies such as those I will offer at the end of this

discussion, practice naturally plays a big role in the development of reading, like any other skill. Thus,

a second source of the problem students have with reading is a lack of practice. In her ethnographic

exploration of contemporary college students and their approach to course work and class

preparation, anthropology professor Rebekah Nathan summarizes several key studies of students'

reading in support of her own observations and behavior in her field work as a college student

(2005). She points out that both the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) which surveys a

sample of students at 437 colleges and universities around the country and the Higher Education

Research Institute study of 30,000 first-year students (2005, p. 121) found that students spend very

little time preparing for class in any way, and a majority do not spend the 25 hours a week in class

preparation most instructors think they should.

On the matter of her own reading, particularly, Nathan writes:

In the beginning of my first semester, I did all my readings when they were assigned. By

the end of my first semester, I picked and chose, often relegating textbook reading to

cram sessions during exam time, sometimes skipping readings altogether. ...Most

commonly, students simply don't do the required readings for class. I'm not kidding. In

certain classes the professor would be lucky if one-third of the students read the

materials at a level of basic comprehension. (2005, p. 121-22)

Moreover, according to Nathan, the NSSE finds that by time students are seniors, more than 80%

report attending class without reading or preparation (2005, p. 122). These findings make clear that

part of the reason students don't read well enough is that they don't get sufficient practice, even when

reading is assigned and expected in college courses. With more help on doing the reading, students

might actually do it.

Finally, the third source of the problem with students' inability to read critically is their view that

reading is less important due to the pervasive use of computers. Students believe that they don't need

reading abilities because everything is on the computer now. Their view is not entirely wrong, either.

According to Wiredmagazine writer Kevin Kelly (2006), books and other materials are becoming

increasingly available online, as Google and others digitize more and more of the published material,

including all the books in some major libraries around the country. More and more, everything IS on

the computer and searchable through Google, Yahoo and so on. But just because material is available

digitally doesn't mean less reading. And just because material can be found more easily through

search doesn't mean less reading either.

Indeed, the availability of search and access to more and more material demands considerably more

and better reading skills of all of us. Students need to understand what is happening to information

and materials and they need to develop the motivation to learn to read critically and effectively, on

pages and screens. One kind of text that addresses these needs is Odell & Katz's Writing in a Visual

Age (2006), a text and reader for college writing courses. In their presentation, Odell & Katz discuss

the reading and analysis of these web page elements: layout, including columns and spaces; page

design, including tension and alignment; pictorial graphics including photos and drawings;

representational graphics such as pie charts and bar graphs, and other features like color and font

(2006, p. 23). Their text provides multiple opportunities for students to read for writing using both

print and digital materials. Similarly, Kathleen Blake Yancey, a leader in college composition, pointed

out in her Chair's address to the national convention of writing teachers in 2004 that students are

Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success 7

increasingly working with texts of various kinds outside of school settings, and increasingly online.

A full discussion of these implications of present and coming search strategies and other aspects of

multi-modal online reading and writing appears in the work of John Battelle (2005) and in Thomas

Friedman's The World is Flat(2006).

A very tech savvy colleague of mine points out that students are reading, but not the kinds of

extended printed texts that most of my colleagues think of when they are complaining about

students' illiteracy. He wrote the following comments in response to a draft of this paper:

I do not think that students are illiterate generally. Students read a great deal but they are

engaging texts whose little hands are presented in ways that the academy doesn't

recognize, for the most part. The texts students engage most often are not subjects in

centers of instruction. If the average 12 year-old spends 20 hours a week watching

television the average 12 year-old then is quite literate in the grammar of television if you

will....

While not everything in print is also available online, students are online and they are

reading texts that are various combinations of alphabetic print, image, sound and

movement. However, students do not read or compose multi-modal texts critically.

Rather, they compose pages in Facebook and MySpace without considering their

rhetorical choices; students are flailing about in digital waters while we ask them to gain

critical thinking skills by only reading printed text....

What should concern us in academia is how easily the reader of multi-modal texts can

move from being a reader to being indoctrinated. People in general are highly

susceptible to multi-modal persuasion in part because they are not provided skills in

thinking critically about web sites ...etc. (Les Loncharich, personal communication, July 9,

2006).

The points he makes are well-taken: literacy is the subject of much debate, some of it over what

constitutes reading and writing in the digital age. The need for critical reading ability is crucial,

regardless of venue. Moreover, his views are supported by Yancey's claims in her Chair's address to

the Conference on College Composition and Communication mentioned previously (2004) and also

by the work of James Paul Gee (2003), a linguist who has examined the ways in which computer

games entail literacy. However, whether students are working with the shorter and multi-modal

kinds of digital texts found online or plain old books, their need for the fundamental skills captured

by my definition and by the RSVP analysis of the ACT remains the same.

So students and all members of a democratic society need more, better, faster, more efficient, more

effective reading skills. And students don't have them and aren't getting them because they are not

taught in public schools, colleges or universities. They don't have good reading skills because they

don't read sustained, nonfiction prose to provide sufficient practice and they aren't thoughtful,

rhetorically aware consumers of multi-modal texts either. They don't have good reading skills

because they don't think they need them, since everything is on the computer and can be found easily

with search techniques. But teachers know that just being able to find material is not enough any

more just as being able to get main ideas is not enough to make one critically literate. So there is also

much to be done from the teachers' perspective.

Horning 8

Teacher Perspectives

As noted earlier, many college teachers will say, if asked, that students are "illiterate." What they

seem to mean by this claim is both that they can't read and that they don't read. That is, first, they

lack the ability to read in the critically literate sense of being able to go beyond summary of main

ideas to analysis, synthesis and evaluation. In addition, though, they are uneducated in reading,

lacking experience working with extended texts and the world of ideas from which they arise. In this

way, they mean that students are uneducated in ways that derive from reading a wide variety of

materials and seeing varied points of view, research, and information relating to ideas or issues.

The implications of students' illiteracy are clear in their writing. In college writing courses, teachers

require/demand/expect that students will produce clear academic prose. This result is certainly the

goal of most college composition courses. For example, the Council of Writing Program

Administrators, a national professional organization of college faculty members who direct writing

programs at colleges and universities has developed a common set of outcomes for first-year writing

courses (2000; http://www.english.ilstu.edu/Hesse/outcomes.html; see Appendix A). The

Outcomes document has been in existence for about five years and has been widely used as the basis

for individual college writing programs to create their own statements of program goals. Only one

section addresses the reading needs of students, and it does so in a fairly limited fashion:

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing

By the end of first year composition, students should

• Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating

• Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding,

evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary

sources

• Integrate their own ideas with those of others

• Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power

(Council, 2000)

Only the first two bullet points directly address the kinds of reading skills students urgently need to

develop to achieve full critical literacy in contemporary society.

And a newly proposed "technology plank" for the Outcomes statement also addresses reading from

a similarly oblique angle. The proposed text for the new section includes this bullet: "Conduct web-

based research and evaluate online sources" (Kathleen Blake Yancey, personal communication, July

15, 2006), the only mention of reading in the section. Such passing references to reading are not going

to give it the focus and attention that is necessary. It seems clear that the WPA organization needs to

add a full section to its Outcomes statement in which it focuses on the development of critical literacy

in full detail. Such a section might well draw on those RSVP skills identified by the American College

Testing program discussed above.

The goals for students in first year writing courses might well look like this:

Critical literacy

By the end of first year composition, students should:

• Understand interactions among ideas or characters in the text which are subtle,

involved or deeply embedded.

Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success 9

• Appreciate the richness of highly sophisticated information conveyed through data,

visual arrays or literary devices.

• Perceive structure, following texts or visual materials organized in ways that are

elaborate and sometimes unconventional.

• Notice the style, tone and use of language, visual or digital elements, which may be

intricate.

• Comprehend vocabulary, even when the author's choice of words is demanding and

highly context dependent.

• Attend to an author's intent in writing the text, even if it is implicit and sometimes

ambiguous. (adapted from American, 2006, p. 17)

And to these goals, I would add two more:

• Be able to summarize main ideas and key details from a text or electronic display.

• Analyze, synthesize and evaluate written and/or visual material and integrate that

material into their own writing for their own purposes.

In short, the Outcomes document and all teaching in all subjects needs to move students along toward

these goals.

Adding to the WPA Outcomes document is one way for college teachers to renew their focus on

reading. Doing so would give teachers the rationale to provide students with more reading

experience. It is clear that reading a substantial amount of nonfiction prose can provide writers with

what language acquisition scholar Stephen Krashen (1983) calls the "din" of languageâ€”in this case,

academic written language. Though Krashen was writing about second language learning and the

need for exposure in order to have the sounds and syntactic patterns of the target language taken in

by the learner, the concept applies also to learning to write. I have argued elsewhere that learning to

write academic prose is for some, or perhaps an increasingly large number of students, like learning

a foreign language (Horning, 1987). Whether in language learning or in learning to write, then,

students need to have the sound patterns and sentence structures of the language they are trying to

learn in their heads, through listening and especially through reading. The absence of reading has a

direct impact on students' writing. If teachers want students to produce solid academic prose, they

must read such prose extensively and carefully in order for the "din" of that language to get into their

heads.

Finally, I want to suggest that the proper development of reading ability could help to address the

great current plague of plagiarism in student writing. I believe that true plagiarism is fundamentally

a reading problem, not a writing problem or a problem of morals or ethics. The kind of plagiarism I

mean in this claim is not the situation where students go to a term paper mill site on the Internet,

plunk down their dollars and buy a paper to hand in as their own. I also don't mean the situation

where students borrow papers from others in the same course or from others who took the course

in a prior term and so on. I mean the kind of plagiarism where students take the work of others and

copy word-for-word or do an approximate paraphrase that is essentially the same as the original,

without citation, sometimes referred to as "patchwriting" (Howard, 1995, p. 708-36). Even though

teachers have told them repeatedly that they must cite such quotes and paraphrases, shown them

examples, corrected their exercises and taught them how to do it, the problem persists. Underlying

this behavior is an inability to read well enough to understand, analyze, synthesize and evaluate

sources and then use those sources in support of an argument. Plagiarism is essentially a by-product

of students' inability to read.

Horning 10

So from the perspective of writing teachers and all teachers, there are a number of reasons why an

emphasis on Reading Across the Curriculum would help them achieve their own goals. Developing

students' writing skills requires developing their reading skills. If they haven't read and worked with

nonfiction prose models in the genres of their major discipline, it will be much harder for them to

produce such prose. Helping students join the conversation in their professional fields through upper

division writing intensive courses in their majors will be difficult to achieve if they don't have the

"din" of the prose style of their disciplines in their heads. And to help stem the tide of true plagiarism,

teachers must help students develop the reading skills that will allow them to understand source

materials and use them appropriately in support of their arguments. So teachers' goals in every

discipline could all be furthered by Reading Across the Curriculum.

National and International Needs

From the discussion thus far of students' problems with sustained critical reading of nonfiction prose

and teachers' perspectives on the use and importance of reading, readers of this article might well

conclude that critical literacy is chiefly an educational problem that should be addressed in public

education (K-12) as well as in colleges and universities. However, additional research on adult

reading abilities suggests that the absence of strong reading skills is a much broader problem. The

United States Congress was sufficiently concerned about the reading ability of the population at large

that it commissioned a national survey of adult literacy, first completed and reported in 1992 as the

National Adult Literacy Survey (Kirsch, et al., 1992), and a second similar survey, the National

Assessment of Adult Literacy completed in 2003 (U.S. Department of Education, 2006). Yet another

similar study has also been done internationally, among the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-

operation and Development) countries, a group of nations that represent more than half of the gross

domestic product in the world, i.e. most of the developed countries on the planet (Murray, et al.,

1998).

These studies (referred to hereafter as NALS, NAAL and IALS) are particularly interesting and

important for a number of different reasons. First, the studies are noteworthy because of their shared

methodology of direct testing: they ask respondents to perform a series of increasingly complex

literacy tasks using a variety of materials drawn from prose, documents and quantitative sources.

The survey population was constructed to reflect the population at large in each case, using national

census data as the base for constructing the sample. Because of their shared methods and

demographics, these surveys provide a clear overall picture of the state of human literacy, and their

findings are not good. Less than half the population functions at the highest levels of literacy on any

of these surveys. Writing in the International Review of Education in 2000, Dr. Jean-Paul Hautecoeur,

a senior researcher for UNESCO and adult literacy scholar, notes that across all the countries in the

IALS study, somewhere between a quarter and half of the population does not have sufficient literacy

skills to function in society.

The economic and social implications of these results bear on countries' long-term sustainable

development, prosperity, and social cohesion, not to mention their ability to participate in the global,

increasingly digital marketplace (Hautecoeur, 2000, p. 357-59). In response to these and other

findings, the United Nations declared a "literacy decade" in the years 2003-2012 and designated

UNESCO to lead its efforts to address literacy problems around the world (Muller & Murtagh, 2002).

So, not just in the United States and not just in public schools, but around the world, in school settings,

colleges and universities, community literacy programs and everywhere else, reading needs to be the

center of attention. Such a goal does not diminish the importance of writing, communicating and so

on, but it does mean that in addition to Writing Across the Curriculum, Reading Across the

Curriculum must move to the center of all educational efforts.

Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success 11

The survey data reported in NALS, NAAL and IALS is not the only place that shows the need for a

much greater focus on reading. Other studies such as the study of literary reading called Reading at

Risk (United States, National Endowment for the Arts, 2004) show a decline in reading in the

population at large based on a representative survey of 17,000 adults drawn from census data.

Within the United States, national organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English

(NCTE, 2006), the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the International

Reading Association (IRA, 2006) are not paying nearly enough attention to reading, despite various

commissions and special groups. Thomas Friedman (2006) also makes this point in his critique of

education in the U.S. The recent report of the Spellings Commission on the future of higher education

makes note of the findings of NAAL, pointing specifically to a decline in prose literacy among college

graduates (United States, Test, 2006, p. 3). The point of all this discussion is that the national

organizations that provide leadership to teachers and literacy professionals of all kinds are not

providing sufficient advocacy for and attention to the need for superb reading skills among all

citizens, in school and out, at the public school level, in higher education, community education and

literacy programs. These broad surveys demonstrate the clear need for a renewed focus on reading.

Strategies for Reading Across the Curriculum

I am arguing that Reading Across the Curriculum should be the real goal of all courses in colleges and

universities, in the public schools and in community programs. The need for reading and critical

literacy is clear and it is growing as the world becomes increasingly digital and all forms of

communication are moved to electronic venues. People need to read faster, just because the amount

of material is growing exponentially. People need to read better, too, because it's no good to read fast

if readers can't recall and use the information. That is, readers must be able to go beyond main ideas

to analysis, synthesis and evaluation. These goals can be achieved through four specific strategies

that can make faster, better reading possible for everyone, including, first, an understanding of the

nature of the reading process; second, a consistent focus on direct classroom teaching of critical

reading skills that go beyond comprehension; third, opportunities for modeling and practice of these

critical reading skills; and fourth, the development of an understanding of the conventions of

disciplines and the genres used in an array of academic areas.

Strategy 1: Understanding reading. As a first strategy, readers need to understand the nature of

reading in both print and digital contexts. Effective reading is fast, not precise and not strictly or even

mostly a visual activity. These characteristics of reading are quite interesting and easily

demonstrated with a few simple psycholinguistic exercises. Kenneth Goodman's work contains many

examples of the right kinds of exercises (1996), as does the work of Frank Smith (2004), Stephen

Kucer (2005) and Steven Pinker (1994), such as this one from The Language Instinct that illustrates

something of how redundancy works in language: "Thanks to the redundancy of language, yxx cxn

xndxrstxnd whxt x xm wrxtxng xvxn xf x rxplxcx xll thx vxwxls wxth xn "x" (t gts lttl hrdr f y dn't vn

kn whr th vwls r)" (p. 181). These psycholinguists can help readers understand the nature of the

reading process in ways that will allow them to read faster and better. Reading Across the Curriculum

should mean that readers come to understand the reading process in ways that improve their reading

activity.

Strategy 2: Overt teaching of critical reading skills. Readers must be taught specifically and overtly

how to do critical reading so that they can develop the key skills of critical literacy in all the reading

that they do. They must be able to analyze, including summary of key points, main ideas and the point

of view of a writer. They must be able to synthesize, that is, draw ideas together from several sources

to support their own views and ideas. And finally, readers should be able to evaluate what they are

reading, judging authority, accuracy, relevance, timeliness, and bias. When readers can do all these

Horning 12

things, they will be able to read more efficiently and effectively, the ultimate goal of Reading Across

the Curriculum.

There are a number of good guides to classroom activities that lead readers in this direction,

including Keene and Zimmermann's Mosaic of Thought. Although the book is addressed to K-12

teachers, the strategies and approaches described, such as a reader's workshop that includes silent

reading, a mini lesson, some workshop time for students to exchange responses and whole-class

exchange, can easily be used in the college classroom or community literacy setting. Keene and

Zimmermann advocate the focused teaching of reading comprehension strategies, which can help

move readers to the critical literacy essential to successful reading in college and beyond. This

approach can and should be expanded to include critical evaluation skills, speed, search capabilities,

web page design, video conferencing skills and other strategies, which will be essential for high levels

of literacy according to Leu et al. (2004, p. 1589).

Strategy 3: Providing opportunities for practice. Studies not only of students but also of the

population at large show that people are reading less and less, as discussed above, so there is a clear

need for more reading and more practice with focused critical reading. In my own teaching, I have

been moving to create more reading practice with my outside reading assignment. My assignment

requires that students read two books outside of class from a short list of choices of current books

on topics related to those discussed in the course. They must also write about these books in a review

that not only summarizes key ideas but also ties them to concepts in the course, making cheating

difficult. I grade these reviews and they count in students' course grades with sufficient weight that

they must do this work. The most interesting thing is that although I do not ever discuss the reading

task in class beyond casual questions about what they are reading and their reactions to the books,

this work has changed students' behavior, responsiveness and level of engagement in every one of

my classes, from developmental reading to Master's level psycholinguistics.

The work of Carnegie Mellon reading scholar Nancy Spivey (1997) suggests additional particular

types of reading and writing tasks that can support students' development as active readers and

writers. Her studies of what she calls discourse synthesis offer opportunities for students to develop

expert reading and writing abilities. Spivey defines discourse synthesis as "the process in which

writers are engaged when they read multiple texts and produce their own related texts" particularly

for the purpose of the writing task and in which they use the texts they have read in some direct way

(1997, p. 146). Spivey conducted four studies of the discourse synthesis process, three of which

involved undergraduates as subjects and one of which examined developing skills among younger

students. These studies entailed having participants generate their own texts based on materials they

were given to read. The participants were given a variety of rhetorical situations and audiences, such

as preparing a research proposal or an informative article about a local event for newcomers to the

area. The findings show that

writers shape their meanings with organizational patterns, make selections on the basis

of some criterion or criteria of relevance, and generate inferences that integrate material

that might seem inconsistent or even contradictory. (Spivey, 1997, p. 191)

In addition, Spivey points out that writers read the source texts intertextually, making connections

among them with reference to the context in which they occur (1997, p. 191). Discourse synthesis, a

kind of task common not only in college composition but also in disciplinary writing assignments,

offers clear opportunities for students to practice reading more actively within their respective

disciplines.

Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success 13

Teachers can also provide focused practice in reading in every assignment that they give, building

readers' skills over the course of every semester through the use of a carefully constructed set of

reading guides. Some examples are provided in Syracuse University education professor Harold

Herber's Teaching Reading in the Content Areas (1978), an old but thoughtful approach to moving

students from reading the lines of a text to reading between and beyond those lines (1978, p. 56).

Herber's procedures would fit will with standard assessment techniques currently in widespread

use: determining learning outcomes and creating reading guides that help students achieve those

outcomes. He advocates reading guides that at first help students get literal meaning, to develop basic

comprehension and vocabulary, suitable perhaps for the introductory chapters of a textbook. Then,

he suggests reading guides that move students to an interpretive level, where they must read to

create, support or respond to generalizations made by their texts. In this work, the kind of think-

aloud approach suggested by Haswell et al. (1999) as discussed earlier might be helpful. Finally,

Herber recommends reading guides that help students apply concepts from the reading to the

broader issues and problems under discussion in the course, using both material from the reading

and other knowledge readers may have, from class discussion, now from Internet sources, and other

materials. In my own experience using reading guides of this kind, I have found that students do

become stronger readers over time, and in addition, the reading guides serve as a basis of lively

classroom discussion, small group work, and a source of peer pressure to make sure students actually

DO the reading.

Strategy 4: Learning to read in specific disciplines. To be an expert reader in a particular subject

area, students need to come to understand the genres and conventions of that discipline. So in the

natural and social sciences, for instance, understanding research reports that use the typical APA

form (Statement of Problem, Review of the Literature, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusion)

is one way to facilitate reading in these areas. More detailed understanding of where an article fits in

a body of work on a topic may also be helpful to students and other readers. While teachers in any

discipline will already have an intuitive understanding of the discourse conventions of their

discipline, several studies of reading practices within subject areas can provide helpful background

for discussion.

Literacy scholar Charles Bazerman's study of physicists reading (1988), for example, reports the

reading approaches of seven practicing physicists in several different research fields within that

science. In this study, Bazerman, who chairs the Department of Education at the University of

California Santa Barbara, conducted detailed interviews with these scientists about their reading and

then observed them actually searching for and reading materials in their fields. Bazerman found a

number of distinctive features of these scientists' reading: they have a clear purpose for their reading

and rely on a schema, defined by Bazerman as "structured background knowledge" (1988, p. 236).

While these scientists' search strategies would surely be somewhat different now since this work

was done prior to widely available computerized data bases, their fundamental ways of looking at

material would probably be unchanged.

The decision to read a particular article is based on three factors: mention of "objects or phenomena"

(p. 239), "names of approaches or techniques" (p. 239) or "names of individuals or research groups"

(p. 240). If this information is missing or not clear from the title or authors, these readers look at the

abstract to decide whether to read the whole article. Reading the body of an article, according to this

study, is a selective and purpose-driven process, supporting the overall psycholinguistic view

discussed earlier that every kind of reading is fast, selective and not mostly or strictly visual.

Bazerman's study shows that these scientists "generally do not read articles sequentially ...looked at

the introduction and conclusions...scanning figures...the detailed mathematics are skipped over" (p.

243). Readers moving through an article rely on their own experience with experiments and on their

Horning 14

knowledge of other studies in the area to evaluate content. Thus, skilled readers and researchers

offer a model for how readers choose their texts and what they do with those chosen that can be

useful for helping readers understand the process within a particular discipline.

There is also useful research on the nature of communication patterns in different disciplines that

can be helpful to those teaching reading across the curriculum. Sussex University professor Tony

Becher's investigation of twelve different academic disciplines, for instance, examines the nature of

both written and oral exchange of ideas in the pure sciences, applied sciences, social sciences,

humanities and several other areas that don't fit into one of these recognized academic categories,

including law, geography and mathematics (1989, p. 2). Through detailed interviews with practicing

academics, Becher examines the kinds of publications commonly produced in these various

disciplines, style and citation conventions and other features of their written language. While not

focused on teaching reading, writing or working with students directly, the findings of Becher's study

reveal the key features of citation and publication in disciplines he studied (1989, p. 77-104). It is

easy to see how some comparison and contrast work using Becher's findings as a base for discussion

of disciplinary areas would be useful for students learning to read and write in any specific subject.

Use of these four strategies can help teachers improve students' critical literacy in significant ways

across the disciplines. From the point of view of students, RAC has the potential to make all of their

educational experience much more rewarding and successful. Reading is clearly the key to work in

all courses and in every discipline. The ACT study discussed here shows clearly that half of the current

population of students who earn the benchmark score of 21 on the reading portion of this test go on

to be successful in higher education while those who score below that level (half of the students

college professors are looking at in their classrooms) do not. If students want to be successful in

college and in their professional lives, more and better reading is essential, a strong argument for

RAC. Teachers are also invested in student success in broad terms. More importantly, though, all

teachers want students to learn what they are teaching. Again, achieving this goal is within reach if

students can and do read the material assigned in their courses. Too often, this is not happening. A

widespread RAC movement would support faster and better reading in every subject, across the

curriculum. Teachers could show students the conventions of texts and websites and pages in their

disciplines. If we raise the level of expectation, more and better reading will follow and teachers will

be more successful through RAC. Nationally and internationally, RAC fits well with the UN's Literacy

Decade program and other attempts to address the widespread illiteracy in both developed and

developing nations. For economic and social reasons, too, a renewed focus on reading across the

curriculum both in and out of school is definitely in order. Thoughtful application of the four

strategies of RAC will provide the basis for student success across the curriculum.

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Appendix: Writing Program Administrators' First Year Writing

Outcomes document

Rhetorical Knowledge

By the end of first year composition, students should

• Focus on a purpose

• Respond to the needs of different audiences

• Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations

• Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation

• Adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality

• Understand how genres shape reading and writing

• Write in several genres

Faculty in all programs and departments can build on this preparation by helping students learn

• The main features of writing in their fields

• The main uses of writing in their fields

• The expectations of readers in their fields

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing

By the end of first year composition, students should

• Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating

• Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing,

and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources

• Integrate their own ideas with those of others

• Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power

Faculty in all programs and departments can build on this preparation by helping students learn

• The uses of writing as a critical thinking method

Reading Across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success 17

• The interactions among critical thinking, critical reading, and writing

• The relationships among language, knowledge, and power in their fields

Processes

By the end of first year composition, students should

• Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text

• Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading

• Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and re-

thinking to revise their work

• Understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes

• Learn to critique their own and others' works

• Learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part

• Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences

Faculty in all programs and departments can build on this preparation by helping students learn

• To build final results in stages

• To review work-in-progress in collaborative peer groups for purposes other than editing

• To save extensive editing for later parts of the writing process

• To apply the technologies commonly used to research and communicate within their fields

Knowledge of Conventions

By the end of first year composition, students should

• Learn common formats for different kinds of texts

• Develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure and paragraphing to tone and

mechanics

• Practice appropriate means of documenting their work

• Control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

Faculty in all programs and departments can build on this preparation by helping students learn

• The conventions of usage, specialized vocabulary, format, and documentation in their fields

• Strategies through which better control of conventions can be achieved

Note

The author would like to thank Michael Pemberton for his editorial guidance and patience as she worked on

this article. "Nothing I've written has failed to benefit from thoughtful editing," writes Alice Horning, "and

that's particularly true in this case."

Horning 18

Contact Information

Alice S. Horning

Department of Rhetoric, Communication and Journalism

Oakland University

Rochester, MI

Email: horning@oakland.edu

Complete APA Citation

Horning, Alice S. (2007, May 14). Reading across the curriculum as the key to student

success. Across the Disciplines, 4. Retrieved from

https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/atd/articles/horning2007.pdf