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The Transition to College Reading

The Transition to College Reading Commen tar y Robert Scholes I began my work on this assignment, as many students do, by e-mailing an expert for assistance. I wrote to a colleague who has been teaching one of our survey courses at Brown and asked her what she felt were the most important problems or deficiencies in the preparation of first-year students in her litera- ture courses. Her reply, though only a hasty e-mail rather than a considered statement, was so helpful that I quote it here, with her permission: I think that the new high school graduates I see (and sophomores with no previous lit classes) most lack close reading skills. Often they have generic concepts and occasionally they have some historical knowledge, though perhaps not as much as they should. I find that they are most inclined to substitute what they generally think a text should be saying for what it actually says, and lack a way to explore the intricacies and interests of the words on the page. Sometimes the historical knowledge and generic concepts actually become problems when students use them as tools for making texts say and do what students think they should, generalizing that all novels do X http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Pedagogy Duke University Press

The Transition to College Reading

Scholes, Robert
Pedagogy , Volume 2 (2) – Apr 1, 2002
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Copyright
© 2002 Duke University Press
ISSN
1531-4200
eISSN
1533-6255
DOI
10.1215/15314200-2-2-165
Publisher site
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Abstract

Commen tar y Robert Scholes I began my work on this assignment, as many students do, by e-mailing an expert for assistance. I wrote to a colleague who has been teaching one of our survey courses at Brown and asked her what she felt were the most important problems or deficiencies in the preparation of first-year students in her litera- ture courses. Her reply, though only a hasty e-mail rather than a considered statement, was so helpful that I quote it here, with her permission: I think that the new high school graduates I see (and sophomores with no previous lit classes) most lack close reading skills. Often they have generic concepts and occasionally they have some historical knowledge, though perhaps not as much as they should. I find that they are most inclined to substitute what they generally think a text should be saying for what it actually says, and lack a way to explore the intricacies and interests of the words on the page. Sometimes the historical knowledge and generic concepts actually become problems when students use them as tools for making texts say and do what students think they should, generalizing that all novels do X

Journal

Pedagogy – Duke University Press

Published: Apr 1, 2002

References