Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Salvatori--the Argument of Reading

Salvatori's theory and practice of the reading/writing interconnectedness is well worth considering, and implementing into the classroom, though I wonder if the class can be structured in such a way as to truly integrate her theory in full. Certainly some of the exercises she suggests could be used, depending on the type of reading the class is doing, and the type of writing they are being assigned. The suggestion of having a discussion about the difficulty of reading the text before actually discussing the meaning of the text can be useful depending on the text being looked at (I did a similar thing when I used to teach Greek plays).

I like the activity she suggested of taking a student who has written a hasty generalization in response to looking at a text's argument and then having them high-light the areas of the text they connected with in order to write their paper. Then have them look at the areas they glossed-over more closely. Such activities could be done as a class exercise that would lead to a freewriting involving those portions of the text that were not initially considered to be of importance.

If anything, I wanted her to provide even more activities. Some of the ones she did suggest, such as keeping journals, etc. are already widely used.

1 comment:

Claire Schmidt said...

You bring up an interesting point. Sometimes I feel like most of the activities and strategies that we're reading about area already integrated into the way English 1000 is taught at Mizzou. There's no way any one class can use every single theory or activity, so we've got to be selective. I'm wondering whether activities that are in wide use (like journals)are also the ones that are most effective?