Introduction
Becoming a Confident Reader focuses on the essential skills and practices needed upon entering the first semester of college composition, either with or without a co-requisite support course. Students need to be able to do the following:
- Build and maintain resilience as a student.
- Apply an effective reading process to college texts.
- Summarize academic writing.
- Respond to academic writing.
- Make connections among texts and between academic writing and their ideas.
- Conduct basic research.
- Analyze the techniques authors use in their writing.
- Evaluate the use of sources in a text.
The text is grounded in the philosophy that students develop effective reading, writing, and thinking processes in the context of refined affective habits and dispositions. This is why the first section of the book, Building and Sustaining Resilience, focuses on affective components of learning. It encourages students to view challenges as part of the learning path and to face any fears they have about learning, such as making mistakes. By working toward a growth mindset and clearly defined goals, developing foresight to anticipate obstacles, using resources, and seeking learning assistance, students can focus on academic tasks with motivation and confidence. While students are still early in the process of building the affective mindset and learning practices that are the foundation for engagement, challenging reading tasks often become dissatisfying and frustrating. When students take their learning personally by connecting it to their mindset and goals, it becomes meaningful. When learning is meaningful, students become engaged. Engagement then breeds success and more motivation and perseverance with the next challenge.
This text also presents academic reading as a layered, complex, and deliberate process. This is the focus of the next three sections of the text, Using the Reading Process, Reading to Summarize, and Reading to Respond. Academic reading is a process that occurs hand-in-hand with thinking and writing amid whatever the student’s mindset and situation happen to be in the moment. Students must learn to be mindful of how they approach readings, considering what strategies they will use for different types of text. They must monitor their understanding and confusion, recognizing that confusion is okay because there are no perfect reading experiences. Some students have a misperception that being a “good” reader means being a perfect reader. There is no perfect reader or perfect reading experience. Reading is a process of problem solving and making adjustments. It requires flexibility and the will to persist through the moments of feeling stuck.
The final four sections of the text include thematically grouped readings focused on four themes: The Changing Ways We Read and Write, The Evolution of Education, Paths to Mental Health, and The Quest for a Sustainable World. Each group includes six readings and guidance on applying the reading process, summarizing the text, and responding to the text. An extension activity is included for each; extension activities may focus on practices such as conducting research, making personal connections to the text, or applying ideas presented in the readings. Following each group of readings are additional activities to make connections between the readings within the thematic group, analyze the writers’ techniques, and evaluate the use of sources.
