Bean’s chapter on helping students in reading contains a lot of useful information. I liked types of assignments offered by the author. During the semester, it makes sense to monitor students’ reading skills and teach them reading before giving them challenging assignments such as comparative analysis of two texts or something like this. It is good to introduce them to academic discourse.
An assignment of this kind I am thinking about is reading texts in class and working with them. I could hand out two articles dealing with the same problem, an “academic” one and another written in a style of a popular magazine. The topic can be general, for example, environment. The detailed reading and analysis of differences and similarities in two pieces can help students in finding ways to comprehend complex style.
I liked marginal notes approach and writing “translations”. Reading assignments can help each student to work in his/her field. A task can be to choose an article in a field of their majors (or supposed majors) and try to 1) explain its meaning and 2) give the opinion on this piece in a written response.
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I completely agree with your synopsis that it’s key to monitor the progression of a student’s reading ability throughout the semester. I also think that it’s important to expose students to critical texts early as they will most likely be presented with that level of analysis regardless of their year or discipline. Though I do think this important, I am also very apprehensive because every student is at a different level in their reading comprehension and finding a middle ground for everyone does seem impossible… If you have any suggestions on how to resolve this imaginary problem, please let me know :)
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