| SEARCH OnWEAC |
|---|
By Doug Buehl
How many times has this happened to you? You are in the company of another person – a spouse, perhaps, or friend. This individual is seated near you, increasingly preoccupied in the act of reading. A couple of attempts to initiate conversation go nowhere. You busy yourself with a solitary activity of your own. And when you look up again, your reading companion has vanished!
Well, not exactly physically departed, I’ll concede, but “gone” nevertheless. Certainly no longer sharing this space and time with you. Your companion has become completely “lost in a good book,” and has disappeared into the lines on the pages, at this moment living vicariously the events and experiences being spun by the words of an author.
Lost in a Good Book is also the title of a novel by bestselling author Jasper Fforde, who has created a series of whimsical works featuring the literary detective Thursday Next. Thursday has discovered that she holds special powers which permit her to “read herself” into books. Not figuratively, however. Thursday actually does disappear from her living room, and slips into the plotline of her book. She interacts with the characters first-hand and discovers what is going on behind the author’s words (backstage in the novel, as it were).
Fforde’s extension of what it means “to read yourself into a book” is an apt metaphor for my opening scenario. We have all experienced times when our imaginations were so stimulated by what we are reading that we are transported in our minds into the literary terrain we are holding in our hands. It almost feels like we are there, in person, ourselves.
Our imaginations are essential to our comprehension of written texts. Cued by the author’s language, we create our personalized versions of the people, the locations, and the events we encounter as readers. And because we are different people, tapping into different life experiences, our imaginations do not lead to identical interpretations of how things look, sound, taste, smell, or feel.
The strategy
The December 2006 Reading Room focused on strategies that develop student abilities to draw upon their powers of imagination to deepen their comprehension of the texts they read in our classrooms. This column elaborates two of these strategies: Eyewitness and First Impressions, which encourage students “to read themselves” into a text.
Step 1: Begin with a pre-planned live interaction with another person, which your students witness. For example, you might ask a colleague to walk into your classroom and initiate a short but spirited argument with you. After your “collaborator” leaves, turn to your students and ask them to quickly write down their “eyewitness” accounts of what they just observed. Caution them not to share their recollections, but to draw exclusively on their personal memories.
Next ask students to exchange their accounts with a partner, again without conversation. As they read their partner’s statement, ask students to be alert for specifics their partners included that they omitted, and for any discrepancies between these individual versions of the event. Finally, allow them an opportunity to clarify with each other what they agree they observed.
With the entire class, solicit the elements of a reliable eyewitness account. As they talk about their experiences with this activity, students will likely relate that some witnesses were more discerning and noticed more details. Acknowledge that eyewitnesses might disagree with their interpretations, but should agree on “the facts” of the event. And accounts that are inconsistent with “the facts” are deemed unreliable.
Step 2: After students have initially read a selection, distribute three-column “Eyewitness” charts. The first column (“I was there”) identifies the aspects of the selection that form the focus of the eyewitness testimony. The middle column (“The Author’s Words”) represents “the facts” that each testimony should be based on. The third column (“My Version”) is reserved for how each individual student imagined this part of the author’s message.
For example, students who have read the classic Edgar Allen Poe short story, The Cask of Amontillado, might asked to write their eyewitness accounts of the scene of the crime, drawing upon the author’s language to create in their imaginations the vaults of the Montresors (see Eyewitness example). Imagined personal details, like “it was so cold I was shivering” or “it was totally creepy with all those shadows of old skeletons flickering on the stone walls,” add uniqueness to these personal eyewitness accounts. Students should write their versions as they imagine it would have been had they been there in person. The “Author’s Words” column prompts students to attend closely to descriptive language and important details, so that their versions show fidelity to the written text.
Ask students to share their versions with partners, and also notice points of agreement on the “facts” of the text, the Author’s Words.
Step 3: First Impressions provides a variation of this activity, which again asks students to assume a first-person perspective to their reading. In this case, students record how their impressions of a person or event evolved as they read further into a selection. The first reactions represent their initial impressions, and subsequent entries show how their impressions progressed or changed.
For our Poe example, students could be ask to track their impressions of the victim, Fortunato, as if they were directly acquainted with the details of the story (see First Impressions example). Like the Eyewitness strategy, students are accountable for grounding their impressions in the “facts” of the selection.
Advantages
“First Person” comprehension strategies stimulate students to fire up their imaginations as if they were actually participating in the events described in a written text. In addition:
Doug Buehl, WEAC member, Madison
Wisconsin State Reading Association.
drbuehl@sbcglobal.net
Posted February 4, 2008