Reading across the Curriculum as the Key to Student Success.

Hand-in-hand with the current renewed emphasis on student success and a resurgence of Writing Across the Curriculum, instructors in all disciplines need to refocus on Reading Across the Curriculum to address students' needs, to achieve instructional goals, and to prepare citizens for full participation in our democracy. It seems clear that a refocused emphasis on reading as the process of getting meaning from print to be used for analysis, synthesis and evaluation, in the context of critical literacy across the curriculum could potentially address the difficulties of students, the goals of teachers and the needs of the nation for an educated, informed, fully participatory democratic population. These goals can be achieved through four specific strategies that can make faster, better reading possible for everyone, including, first, an understanding of the nature of the reading process; second, a consistent focus on direct classroom teaching of critical reading skills that go beyond comprehension; third, opportunities for modeling and practice of these critical reading skills; and fourth, the development of an understanding of the conventions of disciplines and the genres used in an array of academic areas. As an undergraduate, I took most of my courses with a professor who was a specialist in medieval literature. In one of those courses, he described a method of annotation used in medieval texts. Readers (mostly priests or other trained religious leaders) would mark important parts of a text by drawing a picture of a small hand in the margin, with the index finger of the hand pointing to significant passages. I was intrigued by this strategy and began using it to mark textbooks I was reading for all my courses, not just my English classes. To draw those little hands, though, I had to be a good reader; I had to be able to read not just to understand the texts I was reading but also to know which were the important parts to mark with the little hands and to know how to use those important parts to analyze, synthesize and evaluate the text. Recent research shows that about half of current college students lack these skills (American College Testing, 2006). Hand-in-hand with the current renewed emphasis on student success and a resurgence of Writing Across the Curriculum, instructors in all disciplines need to refocus on Reading Across the Curriculum to address students' needs, to achieve instructional goals, and to prepare citizens for full participation in our democracy. Focused instruction in clearly defined critical reading is urgent and essential, and even more important as digital texts and electronic searching increasingly dominate the reading landscape (Battelle, 2005; Kelly, 2006). Recent studies also show that only half the students who start college manage to complete a degree (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2005). The inability to read well is surely tied to this abysmal level of degree completion, so to improve student success, the reading problem must be addressed. Teachers all across the curriculum, and from K to college, need to renew their focus on