Tutoring High School English: Moving Students Beyond Basic Literacy

It is only through taking command of the interpretation of texts that a reader comes to have a real ability to discuss a work of literature or an essay. And it is only the ability to accurately interpret a text that can make discussion of a text potent, interesting, and useful in discourse.

Among the many goals of teaching English Literature to students in America is one of enabling students to discuss a text with focus and accuracy. Forming and expressing a compelling interpretation of a text will always rely on citing evidence in the text, a fact that is not always obvious to students.

Any teacher can tell you that it isn't always natural or automatic for a student to anchor his or her interpretation of a story or essay in evidence taken directly from that text.

Often students will "read in" ideas from their previous experience and draw upon any sources that seem relevant. Strong readers will maintain a focus on the text at hand, but even bright students have trouble learning to be strong readers.

This challenge arises in part because students are unprepared to do intrepretive work with a text. Students are taught to take a passive role in relation to the meaning of a text, so when they are asked to suddenly take command of a text and explain what it means they are at a loss as to how to do it. The student may cast about and grasp at anything that loosely relates his or her understanding of the text in question.

Guiding students toward the habits of accurate and focused interpretation of texts is the job of the English teacher - and sometimes the tutor - and the task can be greatly helped along by posing questions that model the behavior of good interpretive reading. These questions will emphasize and effectively model the process of arguing for a particular textual interpretation (and how to support that argument with evidence from the text).

Two Stage Questions

Certain reading habits become ingrained in American students as a result of textbook methods that work well up to a point. Students are taught to read for information, to identify certain elements in literature like character and setting, and to extract vocabulary definitions from context.

All this is well and good but it does not lead to an ability to interpret or discuss a text. The questions referred to can be answered often with single phrases and they often will not include anyideasper se, but will include only facts. We can call these one stage questions.

What is the setting of this short story?

Using context clues, define the term "haberdashery".

What did the protagonist do to his wife to make her so angry?

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It is important for students to be able to answer these questions. If a student can't answer these questions he or she has not achieved an honest, functional literacy. Literacy is the first goal in the instruction of English but it is certainly not the end of the line.

Using two stage questions we can lead students to do interpretative work with a text. Two stage questions require both ideas and facts. These questions can be modeled in a number of ways.

What is one theme of this short story? Give two examples of action, dialogue or setting that relate to this theme.

This story is suspenseful. Identify one strategy the author uses to create suspense and explain how it works.

Identify one recurrent image or motif from the story. Explain how this image or motif relates to either a character or theme from the story.

The result of posing two stage questions like these is the emerging habit in the student of posing an interpretive thesis and finding evidence in the text to support that thesis.

To answer the first question about theme, the student will need to pose an idea (his or her idea of the theme) then explore the text for support of this idea. Learning to connect the interpretation of a text directly to evidence in the text itself is the key lesson to be learned here. Once a student has internalized this notion of reading, he has gained power in relation to the text - the power of compelling interpretation. He can make a statement as to how he understands the text then go about proving exactly how and why his interpretation is accurate.

This is a big step for some readers. High school students are taught first to read for information as well as morals. Getting past the simple morals and the passive attitude that allows for no interpretation at all, the student becomes able to see a text as argument, as art, and as an object that can be viewed in multiple (equally valid) ways. The text becomes open to interpretation, no longer a closed box or puzzle that must be unlocked. It is up to the student, as the reader, to decide what the text means.

Using two stage questions, the tutor or teacher effectively models the interpretive process providing an opportunity for the student to move from passive puzzled reader to an empowered position where he can discuss a text with authority, citing evidence directly from a text.

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