Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer

by Ellen C. Carillo

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition addresses the dissonance between the need to prepare students to read, not just write, complex texts and the lack of recent scholarship on reading-writing connections. Author Ellen C. Carillo argues that including attention-to-reading practices is crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy pedagogies. Students who can read actively and reflectively will be able to work successfully with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their post-secondary academic careers and beyond. Considering the role of reading within composition from both historical and contemporary perspectives, Carillo makes recommendations for the productive integration of reading instruction into first-year writing courses. She details a “mindful reading” framework wherein instructors help students cultivate a repertoire of approaches upon which they consistently reflect as they apply them to various texts. This metacognitive frame allows students to become knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read and gives them the opportunity to develop the skills useful for moving among reading approaches in mindful ways, thus preparing them to actively and productively read in courses and contexts outside first-year composition.

Securing a Place for Reading in Composition also explores how the field of composition might begin to effectively address reading, including conducting research on reading, revising outcome statements, and revisiting the core courses in graduate programs. It will be of great interest to writing program administrators and other compositionists and their graduate students.

209 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2014

Reviews

[Monica (is working the heck out of · Rating 5 out of 5]

Composition instructor and pedagogy theorist Ellen C. Carillo problematizes the relegation of reading to the margins of rhetoric and composition scholarship. When conducting interviews with various composition instructors regarding the reading strategies they promote in their classrooms, Carillo observed a troubling preoccupation with text selection. As she explains, “I hoped that the question would get instructors speaking not about their text selections (i.e., "kinds of texts"), but about how they attended to reading as a practice (i.e., "kinds of reading') in their classrooms” (n. pg). Students, Carillo explains, need to be taught to read with their own contexts in mind. Reading should be a metacognitive process, one during which students are “mindful” of their reading and analytical strategies and of when certain ones are to be employed. To this end, instructors must craft and assign writing tasks that demand close reading skills. One such assignment is the “Passage Based Paper,” or “PBP,” which asks students to select and perform close analyses of salient passages of a text. Until very recently, reports Carillo, there has been “very little formally articulated interest in the place of reading in writing instruction” (142). Within the last six years, composition scholarship has undergone a shift, and the role of reading has reemerged as a critical subject of inquiry.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too bad I'm not teaching this year. (Or maybe it's good that I'm not so that I can take time to consider this and plan.) This book is inspiring me toward more purposed reading instruction in composition courses. I'm starting to think of implementation methods. I think a reason I haven't been as intentional about this is because of my own insecurities about my reading strategies. (That is, I don't know that I'm an expert reader yet, so I'm also inspired to improve in that area as well!).

[Karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful examination of the placement of reading pedagogy in today's composition classroom. The author doesn't have a solid solution to the literacy issues that seem to plague our students today, but she does give an excellent historical background of the intersections of comp theory and reading pedagogy. Wonderfully researched, the annotated bibliography is especially helpful.