Reading Is Misreading: Reading Assignments and Basic Writing

Thomas Peele
Boise State University

At least since the publication of Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts, basic writing teachers and their students have been receiving suggestions about reading. As David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky write, we “don't use workbooks; we use real books. . . . We intend . . . to reclaim reading and writing from those (including our students) who would choose to limit these activities to the retrieval and transmission of information” (4). And the books they assign in their introductory seminar— I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Catcher in the Rye , Hunger of Memory, The Vanishing Adolescent, and Coming of Age in Samoa — attest to the rigorous nature and extensive reading list of the course they propose. Bartholomae and Petrosky claim, famously, that they are trying, through this reading list and the accompanying writing assignments, to teach students the conventions of the academic discourse community.

While the concept of the discourse community has generated much discussion, the above reading list also makes clear that as part of their project, Bartholomae and Petrosky are valuing different kinds of texts. They assign not only the scholarly study, but also the scholarly autobiography. They include not only the nonfiction memoir of Maya Angelou, but also the fictional diary of Holden Caulfield. In addition to (or as part of) inviting students to enter the academic discourse community that they have described, they are also asking students to “displace” the text, to “cast it into her terms, turn it into something that it is not. . . . She has to misread, and she has to take that misreading as a sign of her place as a reader and not as a sign of her failure. Reading is misreading. . . . For our hypothetical student to have something to say, she must replace Margaret Mead's words with her own (6).

Leaving aside the question of the reading practices that Bartholomae and Petrosky describe here and how these reading practices relate to the idea of discourse communities, I want to focus on how Bartholomae and Petrosky, in this conceptualization of reading, invite the student to take charge of the text, to make it her own. This formulation of reading—Strong Readers, Strong Texts—is a key component in their reader, Ways of Reading, now in its sixth edition. One way of thinking about their work is as a course in reading as opposed to writing. The assignments in their text assume a fairly high level of student understanding and involvement, but what happens when writers in our classes don't take reading seriously, or are unable to make sense of the texts? What responsibilities do we have to help them find ways into the texts?

My reasons for pursing the question of reading in the basic writing class in this discussion result, in part, from having asked students to read entire texts and having sometimes gotten results that suggest that students need more help than I've provided. While many students do quite well when required to read complete, complicated texts, the minority of students who are unable to meaningfully engage in the reading suggest the possibility that I might want to spend more time teaching specific reading strategies. What follows is a brief description of the kinds of misreadings I've gotten from students in response to assignments that asked them to read, then re-read, an entire text:

• Students fail to understand anything about the reading. Some students read the assigned essays, say Gloria Anzaldúa or Paulo Friere, and can make no sense at all of the text. They claim they've read the text, they've made notes, but they can't put the pieces together to make a coherent whole.

• Students who understand the material only partially. Some students read Freire, for example, and take offense to his suggestion that we pursue banking education.

• The summary response to the readings. In spite of explicit instructions, some students provide careful and detailed summaries of the books and articles that I assign; they never move toward making their reading personal.

Recently, some scholars have argued for the incorporation of reading strategies in the basic writing classroom. Mary Deming, for example, using the research that's been done on the relationships between reading and writing, describes pedagogical strategies such as planning, anticipation, drafting, aligning and revising. Still others, such as Janice Walker, describe reading in a hypertextual environment, in which text is augmented and enhanced by image and sound. Furthermore, the text is usually in small blocks and searchable. What sort of teaching does this format call for?

My belief in students' abilities to do a great deal of work on their own without step by step guidance, coupled with my experience with a minority of students who seem to require much more intensive instruction, lead me to the following questions:

What is the role of reading instruction in the basic writing classroom?

If we pursue reading instruction, what institutional boundaries are we crossing?

If we pursue reading instruction, what's being taken away from writing instruction?

In our increasingly hypertextual world, what kinds of reading do students need to know how to do?

How do cultural contexts affect reading practices?

Works Cited

Teaching Basic Writing

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