I would consider myself an avid reader, someone who, while I don't often have the time, truly enjoys reading of all types. I devour novels in hours, I read autobiographies to get a glimpse of someone else's life, I look up histories and political data because they interest me. My love for reading has only grown since I have entered college, although I can admit to at times being one of the students that skips or skimps on assigned readings only to try and get by answering questions in class over subject matter I didn't read. That being said, when it comes to information or stories or subject matter that interests me, I will happily spend hours at a time reading. Yet I find that this is not often the case among my peers; many of them complain about having to read The Great Divorce in their THEO 101 classes. What? I love C.S. Lewis and would more than happily read any of his books as an assignment for class--certainly, out of all the readings we have to do in our college experience, I wouldn't complain about that one.
Why is it that many of my friends, students, peers just don't enjoy reading? And why is it that I do? I can take a guess as to the answer of the latter question; I grew up with a mother and an older sister that both loved reading, and took after them in my habits and interests. I never really got into sports or other clubs as a kid, and I was not the one to have a lot of friends, either. My most common pastime was reading, and that was something that I prided myself on, well into my middle and high school years. In high school I would wait for my sister to be finished with basketball practice at the library, reading architectural encyclopedias and fantasy novels. I exchanged books with my friends and signed up for the advanced English course that focused on reading and analyzing.
Beuhl suggests in the first chapter of this reading that learning to read often happens in three particular stages: basic literacy, intermediate literacy, and disciplinary literacy. Disciplinary literacy involves the ability to understand, interpret, and synthesize texts from specific subject matter. It's the going deeper that may be difficult to teach, yet is the real goal of secondary and post-secondary education. Reading and writing become contextualized and students must learn to read many different types of tests from many different fields. This is where mentoring comes in, because a student that has a knack for reading about history may struggle and feel discouraged in a physics or art class and feel "well, I'm just never going to get it." To me, it is our job as teachers to give our students the tools to learn and unlock literacy even when they feel poorly equipped.
I realize now that in my middle and high school years I was very well equipped by my teachers, peers, and family. I had people that challenged me, I had AP classes, I was driven to be better by a competitive nature among myself and several classmates. Many people did not have this type of upbringing, what Beuhl would perhaps even refer to as literacy mentoring. My interests and passions were driven and encouraged by the classes I enjoyed, the interests of my friends, the encouragement of my family. Yet this is not the experience of every student, quite lamentably. For many of my friends and even many of my own students, a love for reading and learning has not been fostered in them.
What does this mean for me as a teacher? Certainly I plan and desire to help my students become disciplinarily literate, to demonstrate and encourage in them my own love for reading. To contextualize this information, I think about the ACTFL's "Can do" statements for the various levels of foreign language proficiency. Being a teacher of foreign language is kind of a struggle; teaching a language up to a certain point is fairly straightforward, yet there is a point at which a student of Spanish (or any other language) has to learn to go beyond the basics of the language. Yes, literacy in Spanish involves learning grammar rules and vocabulary and conversation skills but at a certain point they have to learn higher-order thinking and language abilities.
Teaching this type of higher-order thinking is very similar to the concept of disciplinary literacy that is outlined in the reading. It can be very easy to become distracted by teaching grammar and other building blocks, but as language teachers we need to remember that our goal is to push them, to mentor them, beyond that into the truly advanced portions of the language.
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