RAISSE the Question: How might we teach reading across the content areas?

Abstract

Mark asks a good question. Why should we be teaching high school students how to read it in high school? Shouldn't students already know how to read by the time they come to us, wide eyed, pierced, and tattooed, on that first day of freshman year? I guess that all depends on how we choose to define reading. In order to read, a reader simultaneously utilizes four cue systems of language including graphophonemic (cues from letters and letter patterns which form sound symbol relationships), syntactic (cues from grammar like word order, function words, and word endings which form word-order relationships), pragmatic (cues from the context in which the language is used), and semantic (cues from word meanings, shaped through language and real-world experience). All cue systems work in unison to create meaning for the reader.