“I don’t know if it necessarily comes naturally to anyone, adult or young person, to take on a challenging or complex text on their own,” says Caroline Rose, an 8th grade English/language arts teacher in Boston, in an Education Week article.
Reading several full-length novels a year can be challenging for some students, but the effort is worth it, she says. She supports her students’ reading habits by creating additional time for reading and teaching comprehension strategies, like annotating.
Rose, along with other experts, says there are ways to capture and keep students’ focus. Here are three tips from educators and researchers for teaching using novels:
1) Carve out reading time
High school English teacher Jay Arellano’s students study several novels and plays throughout the year. He never asks them to read at home for class. They read together as part of the period. This works because most of the books he assigns are on the shorter side.
For Rose’s students, the English/language arts class period doesn’t offer enough time for the four or five full-length books her 8th graders read each year. Students must do some reading outside of class. Her school offers options that help students get it done. Time and space are available in the school building before the day starts and after it ends. Also, teachers work closely with families to make sure that students read what’s assigned.
2) Check for understanding before moving to analysis
Julia Sutherland, a professor of education, literacy, and language at the University of Sussex in England, and her colleagues tested a reading intervention with middle grades teachers. They were asked to read two novels back-to-back with their students over 12 weeks.
Teachers focused on getting through a whole book and making sure students comprehended it, Sutherland says. Teachers usually taught two full books over the course of a full year, with pauses for detailed study of excerpts.
Both teachers and students frequently paused to ask questions, clarify meaning, and ask for recaps of what had just happened. Students had a stronger understanding of the book because they read it first before analyzing it.
Understanding a story allows for deeper analysis of the literature, Sutherland says. Students were commenting on structure, narrative voice, “doing a lot of complex things with the novels that you wouldn’t expect children of that age to be doing,” she says.
The study found students made about 8.5 months of progress on a standardized assessment of reading comprehension after 12 weeks of the faster-paced novel reading.
Scout ahead for parts of a novel that might be difficult for kids to understand, and pre-plan how to address them, says Tim Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies reading. “I don’t think we pay enough attention to what it is that makes a particular text hard to understand,” he says.
3) Connect shorter texts to the novel to build background knowledge
In the Elmhurst 205 school district outside of Chicago, 4th and 5th graders read three full-length books a year, a mix of novels and nonfiction, says Katie Lyons, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.
The books are the capstones of larger text sets, topically aligned selections of poems, speeches, informational text, and other works designed to build students’ knowledge.
When students read a historical fiction novel, they also read speeches from real historical figures at the time, and informational text about the period. Being familiar with context and vocabulary helps to understand the novel. It also offers opportunities to practice close reading skills with shorter text, says Lyons.
Knowing more about the time period in which a novel was written, or the cultural context it explores, makes the book more accessible and engaging, she says.
This practice helps address the district’s English/language arts bottom line question: How do you get kids engaged around a topic that is worthy of their time and attention?
Education Week
