Reply to College English Majors Can't Read

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "College English Majors Can't Read"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The key terms are “regional Kansas universities.”[/quote]

There are a lot of kids at regional universities, in Kansas or elsewhere. And these are definitely not the worst group of students moving through higher ed -- 74th percentile or thereabouts is nothing to sneeze at.

The paper also pairs nicely with stories from Harvard et al about students unable or unwilling to read. Would be interesting to replicate, and see to what extent the more selective schools have also been selecting on the basis of ability to process complex text.

[/quote]

My own kid would fall right around here. Her test scores aren't great. She has a host of disabilities, but I had her read the opening paragraph from Bleak House, and her understanding was excellent. She's a writer though and uses figurative language all the time so she understands how to use it and how to read it.

I really think that's part of the difference. Kids are not exposed these days. They have very little reading stamina (see the article on reading stamina and book assignments at Columbia) and very few kids engage in creative writing. Most of their exposure outside of tech is to non-fiction and short excerpts from fiction.[/quote]

Bingo

They don't have the ability to read long texts because everything is excerpts and they don't have the ability to understand figurative language because they mostly read non-fiction.  Even when there is an entire book that's read it's all repetitive first person identity based historical fiction.

This is what happens when fiction is devalued.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics