What’s the difference between a good reader and a bad reader?
I asked that question today as a 4th grade teacher and I prepared to teach a lesson on extracting information from an online encyclopedia article. The responses were so terrific I wish I’d been recording what they had to say. I may have to ask the same question of a different group of students to see if they would make the same statements.
Most of the students said that good readers do stuff like read a lot, read long books, read the whole book (not just the first two pages), read the hard books, read fast, are good spellers, remember what they read, try different ways to read, and other similar comments. They said that bad readers don’t read, read books that are too hard so they don’t finish them, read only the first page or two, read only one kind of book, read only books that are baby books, etc.
Their teacher said that she didn’t think there was any such thing as a “bad” reader, but that all readers have different skills and that anyone could become a good reader by learning these new skills. I talked about good readers having more stuff to hang their ideas off and more techniques to reading. I demonstrated how I taught myself to speed read during junior high and how I chunk words on some pages and simply read whole lines on others. We compared this to how my hubby dear reads and mentally states every syllable while memorizing the entire book.
Then we showed students how they could learn one new technigue today - skimming & scanning. When they kept getting faster and faster, we praised their new abilities and encouraged them to try more. I printed a 4 page article from Grolier’s NBK on Christmas and numbered the paragraphs to facilitate discussion and study of the article. We began with whole group searching, pair searching, then individual searching. We culminated with using Cloze techniques to solicit student citation of sources. But the highlight of the lesson was the very thoughtful discussion of good readers. Everyone was participating. Since these students were the low to average readers, I appreciated the opportunity to debunk their myths on reading. Everyone can become a good reader.
