Customer Reviews

You Gotta Be the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents (Language and Literacy)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

At a time when countries like USA, Australia and Great Britain have registered their concern over literacy standards in schools by subjecting students to an ever increasing battery of standardised tests, it is refreshing to read a book by an experienced educator which emphasises a human and humane approach to putting the joy back into teaching reading. Jeffrey D Wilhelm's response to teaching students with reading difficulties is to make books "live" by using drama and art activities to enable readers to see and feel the text as well as to read it. He maintains that reluctant readers feel submissive to texts, seeing them as codes to be cracked rather than as containing meaningful stories and experiences. These students become so preoccupied with word identification and pronunciation that they never experience sentences and meanings. It is not until the teacher intervenes to reinforce reading with visualisation and actualisation activities that some students begin to "see" stories in their imaginations for the first time. Wilhelm's resistant students move from rejecting reading altogether as being irrelevant and boring to actively interrogating texts to check the validity of their artistic and dramatic performances - they learn to enjoy reading. It's worth wondering whether any basic skills test or comprehension activity could claim to have had that effect on even the most enthusiastic of readers. As an educator of beginning high school English teachers in Australia, I found this book to be both inspiring and topical, given the debate about literacy standards, particularly in relation to boys. One of the most frequently asked questions from student teachers returning from their practice teaching experiences is, "How do you get kids to read anything these days?" This book provides some helpful suggestions - firstly, get to know the students, without labelling them as failures, secondly don't be afraid to use texts they enjoy outside school, especially comics, and then present literature in conjunction with other forms of art so that students can see their experiences represented. Wilhelm is insistent that once students can "see" the worlds written about in literature, then they can enter the story world and from there encounter texts at gradually deepening levels of insight and enjoyment. It sounds like it might be worth a try.

This book is fantastic! It's fun and very enlightening to read about Mr. Wilhelm's experiences as a junior high literature teacher. He has a firm grasp of contemporary reader-response theories and provides dozens of great project ideas for teaching literature to adolescents. I do a lot of empirical research into young adult reading patterns, and this book is full of inspiration and ideas. It is a valuable resource for both university students and English/ ESL teachers, as well as a well-written sory about one teacher's life in the literature classroom. Excellent!

When I read this book last year, several months into working with an 8th grade remedial reading class consisting of all boys but two, I felt great relief to see that I was not the only teacher having such difficulties. Wilhelm used his difficult years of teaching remedial reading to kids who insisted on hating school and hating reading, and turned this experience into a practical approach to getting reluctant readers involved in a good story. His premise is generally that many struggling readers have difficulties because they are unable or unwilling to visualize what they read. He oulines practical ideas for helping readers visualize, generally by using process drama and tableaus in class. The book concentrates on a few different strategies, but he goes into some details on them, and just reading about these few strategies is enough to get you thinking about other ways to help your students. I'll never forget my macho boy students interpretating Charlotte from Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, sashaying around the front of the room. Once they got over their embarrassment, they enjoyed the drama and said such activities helped them remember and understand what they've read, as well as helping them connect with the characters.

Now I'm in graduate school, but I used to teach 8th graders in a low SES school. If I think his ideas are usable, which I do, they would probably work in almost any middle-school classroom from a management point of view, which is the problem with many similar teaching suggestions. If you're familiar with "learning styles" you will understand what he learned from his research, but he explains how to help students who need visualization (art) and kinesthetic (drama) to become better readers. I also recommend "Strategic Readers" and am planning to read his more recent books.

I recently went to a teacher conference here in Idaho that had Jeffrey D. Wilhelm as a guest speaker. He was phenomenal and provided great insight into teaching reading to children. I won this book as a door prize and continuously use it as a reference. This book really gives teachers some ideas into how to make reading more engaging and meaningful.

The book is really a great reference for education majors that want to find out how to run book clubs in their class. I have marked many passages to use as a reference when I have my own class.