Reconceptualizing the Role of Reading in Composition Studies.

Abstract

This dissertation identifies several reasons that the field of composition studies has largely neglected the issue of reading, and builds upon conceptions of reading and writing as connected activities to argue that it is insufficient to teach writing without also attending to reading. The dissertation presents the first-available topography of reading approaches—systematic ways of engaging with a text that encourage readers to attend to certain textual features while reading with very particular goals in mind—that instructors might teach students to adopt as they read assigned texts.

Drawing on surveys and interviews of writing instructors at the University of Michigan, this project compares how these instructors define and describe various reading approaches with the definitions and descriptions found in scholarship, thus offering a more complete picture of how reading is theorized and taught in first-year writing courses. Instructor data reinforces how inexact the definitions for these reading approaches are and how this imprecision can make it difficult to teach reading effectively in first-year writing.

Instructor and student data suggests that being explicit with students about how course reading assignments connect to course writing assignments can increase student motivation to complete assigned course reading, and this dissertation highlights two distinct strategies that can be used to connect reading and writing: teaching students to “steal” or imitate writing strategies, and assigning model texts to serve as exemplars. The dissertation outlines several additional benefits of teaching reading and writing as connected activities.

This dissertation also recasts writing workshop as a pedagogical strategy for teaching reading-writing connections. By asking students to read with an eye toward improving their own writing, workshop integrates reading and writing in ways that can help students to recognize important connections between the two meaning-making processes. The dissertation proposes a new, fuller conception of workshop in which students analyze both published texts and student-produced texts to identify what could be improved upon and what is already working well. Students return to their own writing better prepared to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of their work and to implement specific new writing strategies and techniques.