Get Students to Read by Making the Process Social & Nonlinear
Much teeth gnashing has developed in recent months within education and literary realms, involving reports about declining literacy abilities in students. The November 2024 Atlantic article “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” seemed to validate what many educators are seeing firsthand — students do not, will not, and cannot read. This panic within education realms mirrors the larger reality that literary in the United States is declining. Americans broadly, and the younger generations especially, do not seem interested in reading linear, longform text. They may not even be able to.
In fact, a student has informed me with a shrug, “Well, writing is dying.”
Last spring semester, I had my students read a roughly 1,000-word nonfiction article about privilege, to spark a discussion in a media law class. The students complained it was too long. “If the writer had summed this up in just a sentence or two, I would have understood it easier,” one student said. This text was at a grade nine reading level. The students in the media law class were mostly seniors about to graduate college at the end of that very semester.
This semester, I have encountered the learned helplessness of students trying to interpret a creative phrase they couldn’t look up a definition for: “a squirrel in his stomach” to describe an excited nervousness about football games, used by sports journalist Dan Jenkins in his famous article “The Disciples of St. Darrell On A Wild Weekend.” More learned helplessness when they attempted to generate APA citations via online automatic generators — but did not know how to plug in the necessary information correctly. Over half the class did not know how to find the publisher information on a physical book. In another class, one student shyly called me over and pointed out a word. “Egregious,” I said. She stared at me blankly. “Ridiculous, crazy,” I said, trying to give her simple synonyms. The word appeared in a column that I assigned them. The column is at a grade five reading level.
There is definitely a depressing shift in literacy rates over the last five to ten years. I have only been teaching five years, and in that time I have already noticed a marked difference in reading and writing abilities of my students. Yes, first year students have always needed some extra help, some sharpening of standards toward more professional, polished writing. But by the time they were ready to graduate college, students used to display distinctive creative voices in their writing, an eagerness to move on to more difficult techniques such as unique storytelling structures and incorporating symbolism.
Now, I’m happy to get them writing clear and complete sentences that are based in concrete fact. I believe their writing is a direct extension of the challenges they face reading, and their hesitancy to tackle any big blocks of text.
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However, there is good news — there are ways to engage students with reading text. This semester, I have incorporated the online tool Perusall into my sports media class. I have noticed an increased wiliness, with this tool, for them to at least take a stab at reading articles — even very long, scholarly works.
Some tips I have noticed, using this tool, that may help with getting students reading:
· Challenge the students. Don’t pander or lower standards. If you assign readings that are too straightforward, students can simply use Google or ChatGPT or a similar tool to outsource their independent learning from the reading. I have actually found that challenging readings that have ideas that must be understood in their written context grip students more. No, the students don’t always “like” these readings. But they do argue about them the most and spend the most time on them.
· Make the experience social. In Perusall, students can see who is reading the text with them at the same time, and they can see the comments and questions that others post about the text. Each week, I require each student to post 3–5 “substantial” comments/questions on the week’s readings. We talked early in the course about what a good comment looks like, and that a response to someone else’s comment will count toward their required amount. I have witnessed comment chains becoming very personal and insightful interactions sparked by the reading. I have also seen students asking questions that are either agreed with or answered by other students. This has led students to feel “oh, I’m not alone feeling like this is unclear,” rather than just giving up with the text.
· Teach strong paragraph structure. In the sports media course, we are mostly reading argumentative columns and scholarly articles about sports topics. Both argumentative and scholarly writing is best when it includes paragraphs with strong “topic sentences.” In other words, sentences that directly state the main point of a paragraph, with the rest of the paragraph providing evidence to back up that main point. I taught this to students early in the course, which has helped them “skim” and jump around nonlinear through the text without losing the main ideas they need to get from the readings.
· Emphasize personal reaction first, comprehension second. The thing is — students know they suck at reading. They seem really insecure on the page, like some person cast out alone on a desolate sea. So, I’ve tried to emphasize that THEIR ideas about the reading, even if it is just “I am super, super confused by this,” are more valuable than some bot-produced template response, technically “right” but completely empty. Emphasizing the personal also cuts back on the students simply asking an AI tool to generate comments based on the readings without having looked at the text at all.
I think the fact that the readings relate to sports in this class also helps, as at the very least they are able to talk about their personal experiences with various sports, teams, and athletes when doubtful about the complex ideas.
Still, I have been mildly encouraged. Yes, I think TikTok brain rot, genAI, COVID-19, and other cultural issues of the modern age have harmed literacy. But, there is still something pulling these students toward grappling with complex ideas, even if they don’t quite have the skillset to tackle those ideas with the same depth as some students in the past. As an educator, I’ve had to kind of manage my expectations, teach the students where they are, and yet stick to my guns with knowing what skills they need to work on developing — even if it is challenging to them.
