Reading Across the Curriculum Is Fundamental

Ali Lauer
Novice Teacher, English

If today is a typical day in Los Angeles, you opened the newspaper to find despairing reports of our public schools and varying opinions of what is needed to improve them. However diverse those viewpoints might be, it is likely reading scores and literacy came into the discussion. Reading skills have come to be recognized as a benchmark for academic success, as the growing emphasis on literacy demonstrates. Literacy, however, goes beyond the mechanics of translating letters on a page to words. While that is the first step, the student must then understand how to take meaning from the text. Otherwise, reading is only translation of sounds into language that still remains foreign. I may know that the speaker in front of me is forming words with those facial movements, perhaps I can even mimic him, but that does not make his Italian any more comprehensible.

In light of the importance of reading, many schools are implementing special reading programs. Beginning this week at the high school where I teach English, the entire campus, from the principal to the freshmen student, will stop and read for 20 uninterrupted minutes each morning. A wonderful way to model the importance of reading? A brilliant idea whose time has come? Not everyone thinks so.

Some teachers are resisting the idea. ‹I teach science, not English,Š some exclaim. ‹Why must I enforce a reading program?Š Yes, the comforting illusion of a false division of labor. Perhaps science teachers should not be expected to teach readingáif they no longer have use for science texts. Certainly, the history teacher should not have to cover discipline-specific reading skills, because students will no longer be expected to read primary sources or research materials. Let the non-English disciplines go merrily on their way, bestowing knowledge on America‰s youth like fairy godmothers, filling the students‰ heads with the fine points of the periodic table, the causes and effects of World War II, the Pythagorean Theorem. Meanwhile, English teachers will be held responsible if the students cannot understand the texts.

Yes, there are specific skills that the English teacher is especially equipped to address. Dangling participles, anyone? But to relegate the development of our young readers to one discipline alone is to abandon the students in a time of great need. This action would be a refusal to utilize all the resources available to us. And it would display a small-minded and misguided view of education.

We need to ask ourselves the question, ‹What is the true measure of our schools‰ success?Š Shall we foster an environment where our children can think critically and creatively about the world and apply their knowledge to their current circumstances? These are abilities that the right reading curriculum is able to develop.

Perhaps we have had too narrow a view of reading. We equate it with pleasure, reading books and magazines in our off hours, as if it doesn‰t matter, a task easily discarded. Reading should mean pleasure, even delight, but perhaps we should not view it so strictly as recreational. In truth, we read nearly all the time, all day long, reading traffic signs, maps, menus, office memos. We read between the lines, we infer, we conclude. All of that written input is used to adjust our relationship to the world as we constantly evaluate our needs and the present circumstances. In light of this fact, doesn‰t it make sense that we offer our students every opportunity to develop these skills, not only one period a day, but in every period, teaching them the specialized languages of each discipline, training them to make their way through the diverse media that will surround them for the rest of their lives?

Science has its lingo, of genomes and geology; math, its own terms of logic and proof; social sciences, a unique vocabulary for economics and conflicts. These disciplines can be case studies for a student‰s reading skills; a student who can negotiate these critical subjects with success has great hope to read and respond to all the challenges that lie ahead.