Beyond Highlighters and Sticky Notes: Teaching Academic Reading

This blog post was written by PSU Professor Kenneth Logan to accompany his Fall 2024 fast blast on this topic.

I probably should have titled the session “Before Highlighters and Sticky Notes,” since the recommendations I offer target students who struggle to read academic texts at the word and sentence level. Highlighters and sticky notes aren’t much help to students who are guessing at words and trying to make sense of complex sentences. While some of these readers are dyslexic, many of them simply received inadequate reading instruction. Embarrassed by their reading difficulties, they likely found ways to avoid reading all the way through middle school and high school – and now they’re in college. How can we teach them to read at this point?

I’m not pretending that the recommendations below are magic fixes, but they might make a difference for some of your students.

1. Teach students to attack multisyllabic words by breaking them into parts. Get them out of the bad habit of guessing at unfamiliar words. Many students guess at words based on the prominent consonants. Show them how to tap out syllables. Each syllable has one vowel sound. If the word contains a prefix and suffix, they can break the word down into these meaningful parts, which are called morphemes. That’s even better than breaking the word down by syllable, since the parts are bigger and have meaning. Here is an example of breaking a word down by syllables: de-in-dust-ri-al-i za-tion. And, roughly, by morphemes: de-industrial-ization. Note that we don’t need to worry about breaking the word into parts exactly as the dictionary does it. It’s the habit of breaking words into parts that we want students to establish, even if they do it a little sloppily.
   
2. Model sentence reading. Spend two or three minutes reading aloud a short paragraph and showing students what goes on in your head as you read. Break complex sentences into parts. Reword convoluted constructions. Show them how to trace pronouns back to their antecedents. Demonstrate how you monitor your own comprehension as you read: “Did I get that? Maybe I need to reread that bit.”
   
3. Support students’ independent word learning by (a) teaching them prefixes, roots, and suffixes and (b) drawing attention to multiple-meaning words. Your old school tenth grade English teacher was right: Knowing some Latin and Greek helps you learn vocabulary. But we often overlook short words that change meaning in different contexts. Think of words like set, point, force, position, turn, and weigh. When students encounter a familiar word in an unfamiliar context, they often latch onto the meaning they do know, and that misunderstanding of a single word’s meaning can end up undermining their comprehension of a paragraph.
   
4. Build knowledge. This suggestion might seem obvious, but many students need to be persuaded that they actually do have to know a lot about the world. Their belief that they can “just look stuff up on google” contributes to their reading difficulties. Without broad knowledge, they can’t make sense of incoming information. Maps and timelines are crucial tools for helping students position new information in relation to what they already know. Popular books and podcasts that tell a good story about your field of study are gold here. Information is easier to learn when it’s folded into a good story than when it’s presented as disconnected facts.
   
5. Teach students how to read in your discipline. If students approach reading scientific articles and psychology or history textbooks the same way they read manga or Young Adult literature, they’re going to run into trouble. What do they need to know about the way texts are structured in your discipline? How should they read graphs and other data displays? How do you read the different kinds of texts in your field?

Below is a short list of reading studies that informed the above recommendations. If you have questions or you would like to talk about reading research and adolescent literacy instruction, my email is kenneth.logan@plymouth.edu.

Kearns, D. M. (2020). Does English have useful syllable division patterns? Reading Research Quarterly, 55, S145-S160.

Logan, J. K., & Kieffer, M. J. (2017). Academic vocabulary instruction: Building knowledge about the world and how words work. In Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (pp. 162-182). Routledge.

Magliano, J. P., Talwar, A., Feller, D. P., Wang, Z., O’Reilly, T., & Sabatini, J. (2023). Exploring thresholds in the foundational skills for reading and comprehension outcomes in the context of postsecondary readers. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 56(1), 43-57.

O’Reilly, T., Wang, Z., & Sabatini, J. (2019). How much knowledge is too little? When a lack of knowledge becomes a barrier to comprehension. Psychological science, 30(9), 1344-1351.Wang, Z., Sabatini, J., O’reilly, T., & Weeks, J. (2019). Decoding and reading comprehension: A test of the decoding threshold hypothesis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 111(3), 387.