Rereading the Reading Problem in English Studies

Writing researchers and teachers have long grappled with the intersections of reading and writing, including early empirical research in the 1960s by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer (1963). More recent research has sought to understand the connections between reading and writing in linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural terms (Shanahan 2016). Despite the ongoing study of reading and writing as interrelated practices, there remain gaps in how English teachers understand the roles of reading in writing pedagogy and curriculum. In fact, teachers, curriculum, and the public often characterize students as antireaders: students don't and won't read—or, worse, they can't. Tensions between the study of reading and general perceptions on student underscore that, really, we don't know how to teach reading because our theories of reading are too narrow and simple. There is, in other words, an urgent need to theorize how best to teach reading in the writing classroom as well as how to design assignments and assessments that are responsive to the ways we actually read.

The essays in Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom build on reading-writing scholars such as Ellen Carillo and Alice Horning to provide research, theory, and practice to better employ reading pedagogies in the writing classroom. To argue for a more robust and nuanced theory and practice of reading, the editors cite Ellen Carillo (2016) to demonstrate that dominant understandings of reading in the writing classroom have not embraced the fact that "the reader plays a role in the construction of meaning" (xiii). Deep Reading advocates for understanding readers' role in the construction of a meaning. Doing so helps reframe the work of the writing classroom away from deficit thinking around student performance (e.g., "no one reads") and more toward a theory of writing aligned with key learnings from the process-pedagogy movement: employing reading as integral to knowledge-making and production. The collection not only revisits what constitutes reading from broad-ranging experiences of teachers from a variety of institutional contexts but also works to outline a theory of reading to inform the teaching of writing in ways that can benefit students in our classrooms and ultimately contribute to democratic education.

Deep Reading includes eighteen essays at the intersections of reading, learning, and teaching from a wide range of institutional contexts, including important contributions from community college teachers, high school teachers, and university students and their teachers. The collection's essays are grouped into sections titled "The Nature of the Problem," "Listening to Students," "Practical Strategies," and "Letters to Students on Reading" to consider reading from multiple perspectives and methods. Contributors unpack the so-called reading problem, issues of reading in relation to standardized assessments, reading in digital environments, and the movement away from literature in writing curricula. The collection also includes three case studies of the experiences of college students reading and responses from their teachers. From a robust view of the problem, we learn about reading in the lives of college students from the students themselves. In each of the three student accounts, we see how reading, and specifically reading of literary texts, shapes how students construct their sense of self, their participation in their discipline, and the wide-ranging roles reading plays in everyday life. Paired with their teachers' responses, the case studies demonstrate the role of reading through students' experiences in and out of school. In addition to important contributions from students and their teachers, and scholars from secondary school, community college, and other postsecondary teacher-scholars, Deep Reading represents an important move to theorize reading and its teaching across a wide range of institutional contexts to foster more responsive reading pedagogies responsive to the complex needs of students.

Deep Reading provides helpful frameworks to understand the roles of reading in processes of writing for writing teachers and researchers. In his chapter "'Deep Reading' as a Threshold Concept in Composition Studies," Patrick Sullivan theorizes deep...