READING ACROSS DISCIPLINES FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITY RAD FLC

READING ACROSS DISCIPLINES FACULTY LEARNING COMMUNITY RAD FLC: Improving student reading

Reading Definition • “Reading comprehension is a process that involves the orchestration of the reader’s prior experience and knowledge about the world and about language. It involves such interrelated strategies as predicting, questioning, summarizing, determining meanings of vocabulary in context, monitoring one’s own comprehension, and reflecting. The process also involves such affective factors as motivation, ownership, purpose, and selfesteem. It takes place in and is governed by a specific context, and it is dependent on social interaction. It is the integration of all these processes that accounts for comprehension. They are not isolatable, measurable subfactors. They are holistic process for constructing meaning” (Bartoli and Botel 1988, p. 186).

Students’ Reading Ability • National Assessment of Educational progress (NAEP) found that high school students are scoring lower in reading than they did in 1992. • Fewer high school students are reading at grade level • ACT (American College Testing, 2006) reports the proportion of students on track for successful college work diminishes as students progress through high school.

Literacy Education • “Apparently, strong early reading skills do not automatically develop into more complex skills that enable students to deal with specialized and sophisticated reading of literature, science, history, and mathematics. • Most students need explicit teaching of sophisticated genres, specialized language conventions, disciplinary norms of precisions and accuracy, and higher-level interpretive processes” (Shanahan & Shanahan 2008 p. 43)