writing our reading: threshold concepts for graduate-level

READING OUR WRITING | WRITING OUR READING: THRESHOLD CONCEPTS FOR GRADUATE-LEVEL READING IN COMPOSITION

Adam Lawrence Kuchta

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

December 2021

Committee:

Lee Nickoson, Advisor

Per Broman Graduate Faculty Representative

Neil Baird

Sue Carter Wood

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ABSTRACT

Lee Nickoson, Advisor

This project advocates for sustained, explicit, graduate-level reading instruction in the

discipline of writing studies. It posits that professional academic reading is a complex activity

that requires graduate students to develop contextually unique skills and habits of mind to

perform effectively. It posits also that graduate students struggle to learn this form of reading and

would benefit from direct instruction. Further, it positions threshold concepts for reading—oft-

“invisible” disciplinary assumptions or ways of thinking that are troublesome to learn but

important to internalize to fully enter an academic community—as an important pedagogical tool

in graduate-level reading curricula.

The project makes several moves in advocating for such reading instruction: (1) It makes

the case for why graduate-level reading instruction is needed; (2) it consolidates multiple strands

of reading theory that have influenced writing studies into a working definition of professional-

level reading in the discipline; (3) it constructs a list of threshold concepts for disciplinary

reading; (4) it outlines a framework—the reading sandwich cycle—for integrating threshold

concepts with reading instruction; (5) and it makes suggestions for integrating reading instruction

throughout course work and elsewhere in graduate curricula.

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For my parents, Donald and Shirley Kuchta, without whose love and support I never would have

completed this project.

For those who never finished, your labors and your struggles aren’t forgotten.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No accomplishment is ever solely one’s own. It is the fruition of many others’ acts of

love poured back into the world through an individual’s labor. I am lucky enough to have been

the recipient of many such acts, and so I have many people to thank.

To my family, especially my parents—Donald and Shirley Kuchta—whose love,

generosity, encouragement, and patience are boundless, I owe you more than I can ever repay.

To my siblings and their families—Alain, Juhi, Elizabeth, Lucas, Mazarine, and Little Man—the

times we’ve spent together have been oases of joy in an eon of gloom.

To my chair, Dr. Lee Nickoson, who stuck with me years beyond the normal length of

the dissertation process and reminded me of the importance of revision, thank you. Thank you

also to the members of my committee—both past and present—who shared enthusiasm for and

feedback on my work: Dr. Sue Carter Wood, Dr. Neil Baird, Dr. Per Broman, Dr. Daniel

Bommarito, and Dr. Kris Blair.

To the staff of the Piqua Public Library who provided a welcoming and serene place to

read and write, thank you for your cordiality.

To the friends and colleagues who “served in the trenches” of graduate school—Caleb

James, Nick Novosel, Stephen Bush, Shelly Danko, Soha Yusef, and many others—your

comradeship kept me going then, and it keeps me going now.

To the mentors who encouraged my journeying down (and warned me about) the long

road which this writing now completes—Dr. Alan Farmer, Dr. Christopher Jones, Dr. Daniel

Hobbins, Dr. David Seitz, Dr. Richard Bullock, and Dr. Nancy Mack—thank you for believing

in me.

Thank you all.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

CHAPTER 1. GRADUATE-LEVEL READING INSTRUCTION: CURRENT STATUS,

PROBLEMS, AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF THRESHOLD CONCEPTS.......................... 1

The Goal of this Project ................................................................................................ 1

Chapter Overview ......................................................................................................... 3

Isn’t Reading Already Taught to Graduate Students? .................................................. 3

Memory 1: Finding Theses in Academic Texts ................................................ 9

Memory 2: Focused Attention on Difficult Concepts....................................... 11

Memory 3: Reading Aloud to Step into a Text’s World Collaboratively ......... 13

Why Should Reading Be Taught to Graduate Students? .............................................. 18

Argument the First: Reading Is a Struggle, Even for Graduate Students and

Faculty............................................................................................................... 20

The “Solitary Genius” Is Alive and Kicking ........................................ 23

Writing Problems are Reading Problems .............................................. 27

We Can’t Let Go of Thinking We Can Know It All............................. 31

What We Learn About Graduate Reading When We Look Beyond

Scholarship ............................................................................................ 36

Argument the Second: Teaching Reading to Graduate Students Upholds

What We Say We Value ................................................................................... 42

1. It Enacts and Extends Writing Studies’ Commitment to Teaching

Reading ................................................................................................. 43

2. It Fills Gaps in Our Field’s Professional Development Mechanisms 48

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3. It Productively Deepens our Understanding of the Reading/Writing

Connection. ........................................................................................... 51

4. It Demystifies Academic Work by Making What We Know and Do

Explicit. ................................................................................................. 55

What’s at Stake in Teaching Graduate Reading ............................................... 57

Threshold Concepts as Tools for Graduate Reading Instruction .................................. 60

What Are Threshold Concepts? ........................................................................ 60

What Makes Threshold Concepts Difficult to Learn? ...................................... 63

How May Threshold Concepts Be Useful to Us? ............................................. 66

Previous Efforts to Link Reading with Threshold Concepts ............................ 69

Threshold Concepts: Limitations and Caveats ................................................. 73

Chapter Summaries ....................................................................................................... 74

CHAPTER 2. TOWARDS A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR GRADUATE

INSTRUCTION IN READING: FIVE PRINCIPLES ............................................................. 77


What is Reading? .......................................................................................................... 78

Professional Academic Reading: A Definition ................................................. 80

What Reading Is: Five Theoretical Principles .............................................................. 86

1. Reading Is Active Construction of Meaning from a Text ............................. 87

2. Reading is Cognition..................................................................................... 89

3. Reading Is Socially Situated ......................................................................... 99

4. Reading Is a Transaction Between Reader and Text .................................... 105

5. Reading Is Rhetorical .................................................................................... 114

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Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................... 121

CHAPTER 3. BUILDING THRESHOLD CONCEPTS FOR READING: METHODS AND

METHODOLOGIES ................................................................................................................ 123


Methodological Overview: Transparency in Theory-Making and Argumentation ...... 123

Overview of Methods: Strategies for Inventing Threshold Concepts .......................... 128

Limitations and Affordances of Theoretical Methods in Studying Graduate Reading 130

Threshold Concepts: Criticisms, Responses, and Impact ............................................. 133

1. Threshold Concepts Are Ambiguously Defined, Unreliably Identifiable,

and Theoretically Unsound. .............................................................................. 134

2. Threshold Concepts Undermine the Constructivist Epistemologies that

Guide Thinking in Writing Studies. .................................................................. 143

3. Threshold Concepts Reinforce Boundaries Between Communities of

Practice Rather than Promote Interdisciplinarity. ............................................. 147

4. Threshold Concepts (Re)Produce Dominant Disciplinary Ideologies that

Privilege Some and Oppress Others ................................................................. 149

Inventing Threshold Concepts: Three Developer Narratives ....................................... 153

Method Narrative 1: Adapting Existing Threshold Concepts ........................... 163

Example 1: Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words and the

Communities of Practice that Use Them. ............................................. 165

Method Narrative 2: Extracting Threshold Concepts from (Other)

Disciplinary Literature ...................................................................................... 171

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Example 2: Metaconcept: Reading is Not Natural: Difficulty with

Reading Is. ............................................................................................ 172

Method Narrative 3: Analyzing Personal Reading Difficulty for Threshold

Concepts ............................................................................................................ 179

Example 3: Comprehension Entails Building Mental Maps of What

Words Add up to Mean. ........................................................................ 183

Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................... 193

CHAPTER 4. THRESHOLD CONCEPTS FOR GRADUATE READING ........................... 194


Chapter Structure and Reminders ................................................................................. 194

M.0 Metaconcept: Reading Is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is ....................... 196

M.1 Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive .................................................................. 201

1.0 There Are Many Types of Reading: Types Vary According to the Reader’s

Context for Reading ...................................................................................................... 204

1.1 Reading Involves Many Ways of Thinking About and Through Texts that Are

Much More than Decoding Words ............................................................................... 209

1.2 Comprehension Is a Complex and Moving Target ................................................. 212

2.0 Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words and the Communities of Practice

that Use Them ............................................................................................................... 215

2.1 Academics Create New Words and New Meanings for Existing Words ............... 219

3.0 Comprehension Entails Building Mental Maps of What Words Add up to Mean . 223

3.1 Academic Syntax Names Abstract Relationships Between Complex, Abstract

Terms ............................................................................................................................ 227

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3.2 To Understand Difficult Texts, Readers Sometimes Must (Temporarily) Accept

Not Understanding ........................................................................................................ 230

4.0 Reading Like Academics Implies Thinking Like Academics ................................ 233

4.1 Academics Read to Learn, Think, and Write in Their Communities ..................... 236

4.2 Effective Academic Reading Includes Classifying Apparently Different Ideas

and Dividing Apparently Similar Ones......................................................................... 240

4.3 Learning to Read a Discipline Holds Potential to Liberate and Oppress ............... 245

Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................... 249

CHAPTER 5. PUTTING THRESHOLD CONCEPTS INTO PRACTICE: A

FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHING GRADUATE READING AND REFLECTIONS ON

THE ROAD AHEAD FOR INTEGRATING READING INTO WRITING STUDIES ......... 250


On the Need to Describe Pedagogical Practices in Scholarship ................................... 251

A Model for Graduate-Level Reading instruction: The Reading Cycle Sandwich ...... 256

Tools of the Reading Cycle Sandwich .............................................................. 257

Modeling of Reading Strategies............................................................ 257

Read-Aloud Protocols: A Vehicle for Modeling Reading Strategies .. 263

Threshold Concepts: Reflective Heuristics for Reading Difficulties ... 275

Reflective Reading Journals ................................................................. 278

Caveats and Limitations of Threshold Concepts as Teaching Tools .... 292

Tools in Motion: A Sequential Walkthrough of the Reading Cycle Sandwich 295

The Start of the Semester: Preparing for the Reading Cycle Sandwich 295

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Pre-Reading: Frontloading to Scaffold Meaningful Interactions with

Texts ...................................................................................................... 298

Reading: Into the Woods of Practice .................................................... 302

Post-Reading: Extending, Complicating, and Consolidating What Is

Learned ................................................................................................. 303

Final Note on the Reading Sandwich Cycle ..................................................... 306

Epilogue: The Road Ahead for Reading in Writing Studies......................................... 307

1. Writing Studies Knows More About Reading Than It Thinks. .................... 307

2. Fully Integrating Reading into Writing Studies Will Take the Work of

Many Over Time. .............................................................................................. 310

3. Reading’s Role in Graduate Education Must Continue to Grow and

Change. ............................................................................................................. 319

Chapter Summary and Conclusion ............................................................................... 335

WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................... 337

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure Page

1. Screenshot of daily research blog ................................................................................... 158

2. Screenshot of annotated bibliography (i.e., the "quote farm") ....................................... 158

3. Screenshot of subject tag key from the researcher's annotated bibliography ................. 159

4. Screenshot of a version of the working list of threshold concepts captured late in

development .................................................................................................................... 159

5. Screenshot of an example “definitional justification test” for threshold concept M.1,

“Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive" ........................................................................ 160

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CHAPTER 1. GRADUATE-LEVEL READING INSTRUCTION: CURRENT STATUS,

PROBLEMS, AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF THRESHOLD CONCEPTS

The Goal of this Project

This project advocates for explicit, sustained reading instruction in graduate programs in

composition and rhetoric. It proceeds from the premise that there is a serious need to assist

graduate students in learning to read in the ways that professionals in our field are expected. It

also premises that there is need to probe the field’s relationship to reading to recognize the

strengths and the problems inherent to that relationship—the perceptions we compositionists

hold collectively about what reading is, when and how it should be learned, the set of cultural

expectations for reading we place on ourselves and one another, and how all these things impact

both students and faculty. This project proposes faculty provide direct assistance—in classes and

elsewhere throughout graduate curricula—to help graduate students understand the field’s

research writings in discursively nuanced ways and to help them perform the thinking that will

allow them to put these texts in service to their own writing. Further, inspired by the efforts of

Linda Adler-Kassner, Elizabeth Wardle, and the scholars contributing to Naming What We

Know, the project names a set of threshold concepts—the oft-hidden, troublesome knowledge

that defines the ways of doing and being of a discourse community— specifically for reading in

our discipline as a tool for furthering development of graduate reading curricula. It also positions

these threshold concepts within a broader framework theorizing reading, weaving together

disparate strands of theory from composition’s past and from its allied fields so that writing

studies might cast in sharper relief the image of what reading is presumed to be and do.

The project moves from theory to practice in suggesting a model for implementing sustained

explicit reading pedagogy into the graduate curriculum: the “reading cycle sandwich.” This

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model imagines weekly course readings to be “sandwiched” between carefully scaffolded pre-

and post-reading activities that assist students in orienting to texts, engaging with their

difficulties in understanding, and consolidating what they have learned. Within this model,

threshold concepts form a reflective heuristic for examining potential reading difficulty. The

reading cycle sandwich is designed to be integrative with other practices for teaching reading and

“droppable” into existing graduate seminars and survey courses.

At the heart of this project are the goals of assisting graduate-students’ learning and

raising the possibility that such learning might benefit from direct instruction in areas that are

frequently overlooked. Too often and for too long, efforts to critically examine and reform

educational practices, when they extend beyond K-12 to the university, stop at the undergraduate

level. When it comes to reading, a historically dominant presumption among English faculty has

been that learning to read is a basic skill mastered by middle school and that college students

ought to arrive at university ready to perform the difficult and nuanced reading of their courses

without need for assistance (Jolliffe). Indeed, Ellen Carillo notes that reading is too often

misunderstood in terms of “mastery” of a decontextualized skill and that “once students learn or

‘master’ reading in elementary schools, they are expected to summon that skill for the rest of

their academic careers no matter the context or level” (“Preparing” 188). Though statements such

as this have typically described faculty expectations about undergraduate students’ reading

abilities, it is difficult to surmise that anything less than a greater degree of mastery has been

historically assumed of graduate students. To the extent that such perceptions about reading may

continue to permeate writing studies, they pose potential problems for graduate-student learners.

In addition to the unique context and practices encompassed by professional-level academic

reading, the complexity of learning increases at every stage of degree, and even prior success at

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university is not an automatic predictor of success in graduate work. In advocating for sustained

explicit graduate reading instruction embedded in disciplinary threshold concepts, this project

seeks to marshal what we in writing studies already collectively know about reading, prompt

reconsideration and revision of our field’s relationship to reading, and support faculty in

improving graduate curricula in ways that ultimately benefit all members of the field.

Chapter Overview

This chapter makes several movements in service to the project’s goal of advocating for

sustained, explicit graduate-level reading instruction. The first movement addresses the current

status of such instruction—what is currently known about the teaching of reading in graduate

contexts and the extent to which efforts to teach reading suffuse the field. The second movement

makes the case for why the discipline needs sustained reading instruction in its graduate

programs. This case employs two strategies: (1) recuperating stories of student and faculty

reading struggle from scholarship to identify problematic aspects of the field’s relationship with

reading which instruction might seek to address and (2) demonstrating how the proposed

teaching of graduate reading answers disciplinary commitments already espoused in the field.

Finally, the third movement introduces the featured pedagogical tool the project proposes for

scaffolding the teaching of graduate reading—threshold concepts—reviewing their literature and

explaining the benefits they offer.

Isn’t Reading Already Taught to Graduate Students?

The answer to this question is more complicated than it may seem. The short answer is

definitively yes: many faculty members teach reading as a component of their graduate courses.

There are, however, caveats to that answer, and the collective impact of these caveats, I argue, is

that reading is taught less often than it is thought to be and the lack of visibility of the teaching

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that does take place makes it appear that the discipline doesn’t teach reading to graduate students

even when it does.

As one caveat, some faculty may believe they are teaching reading as a matter of course,

but the teaching they are doing may not actually teach reading as much as they might think. For

example, many might cite that they regularly assign texts to be read, require short informal

response writings to those assignments, and/or facilitate class discussions of assigned texts as

evidence of their teaching reading. Ubiquitous and valuable as these practices are for teaching in

general, and as much as these activities surround acts of reading, their presence in a

practitioner’s pedagogy does not necessarily indicate that reading has been taught. Students can

be assigned to read texts, for example, without being given any instruction, demonstration, or

guidance of what to do with the text or how to go about doing so. While reading under these

conditions, students may even come to understand the difficult texts they have been assigned and

acquire effective and appropriate strategies for tackling similar kinds of texts in the future. But

whether they come to this learning osmotically, through their reliance upon a repertoire of

relevant prior experiences, trial and error, determination, or shear happenstance, that they may

learn under these conditions does not necessarily entail that they have been taught. Likewise,

assigning writings that respond to texts is not necessarily teaching reading. Whether it is or not

depends greatly on what the instructor is asking students to do with the text through that writing,

what scaffolding the instructor has provided to prepare students to perform the activities implied

within the assignment, and many other factors. Finally, holding class discussions about assigned

texts, while always a form of teaching, is not necessarily always a form of teaching reading. It is

possible for classroom conversations to discuss what was read, for instance, without addressing

how students read it—to focus on the content of the individual text rather than the strategies,

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practices, and activities that comprise academic reading in a wider array of instances. It is also

possible for such conversations to commence from the assumption that assigned texts were

meaningfully understood by all students, an assumption that might overlook significant struggles

of some students and thereby reduce the pedagogical value of the conversation itself.

Sadly, in my own experience as a graduate student—limited as it is to a single

perspective—many of the phenomena described above became reality more often than faculty

might like to acknowledge. I recall for example, a particularly jampacked course in which we

students were regularly asked to read excerpts from between five and ten different theoretical

works a week. There was never enough time to discuss more than two to three of these in class at

most, and yet somehow even these conversations always seemed tangential to the texts

themselves—as if we were being asked to form impressions of the texts from a distance. It seems

strange now to remember how rarely it was needed to “open the book” during these

conversations and refer to the actual words of the texts that had been assigned. At best, these

conversations discussed the text’s content, but never brought up how we students made sense of

or made use of that content. I recall, also, that these conversations tended to assume

comprehension of the assigned texts: their starting point was to elicit opinion and analysis, and

often within the confines of a particular theoretical framework. Such conversations felt

overwhelming, and sometimes irresponsible. I usually only understood a fraction of what I was

reading and rarely anything I could call the piece’s overarching argument. How was I to form a

responsible opinion—other than articulating my frustration—about what I had been reading if I

didn’t understand what it had been trying to say? Additionally, weekly reading responses were

assigned in this class, as they were in nearly every graduate seminar I’ve taken, but as is

frequently the case, there was no feedback given to them. Thus, my struggles and successes at

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understanding and interpreting the texts felt wholly alone. Finally, apart from one or two texts

that the instructor dubbed essential to the course, there was rarely any explanation of the

instructor’s reasons for assigning the readings, nor any support prior to reading—textual

summaries, articulated reading goals, etc.—in orienting to their content. Reading was certainly

present in this course, but I would be hard pressed to find anything I could describe as the

teaching of reading taking place therein.

While it is productive to question whether any pedagogical practice performs the activity

it is claimed or assumed to, as the preceding caveat has done with common activities surrounding

assigned readings in graduate courses, it is also possible to view that discussion as overlooking

certain kinds of reading instruction taking place. Thus, given the contentions just made about

what might not “count” as reading instruction, it is worth pausing for a moment to define the

kinds of explicit reading instruction this project is looking to foster—the kinds it is most able to

see—while acknowledging that other kinds of reading instruction which this project is ill-

equipped to see, but which are no less valuable, exist as well. For the purposes of this project,

explicit graduate reading instruction is defined as any pedagogical strategy or activity that is

designed to support students in making sense of and making use of disciplinary texts in the ways

that its membership does. In other words, direct, explicit reading instruction supports students in

learning to comprehend, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, apply to their own writings—use—texts

in the discursively specific ways that academics in writing studies do. It is an active form of

teaching on the part of instructors relying on demonstration, modeling, and explanation, and

requiring careful planning to design and align assignments and course activities with specific

reading-related goals. Such reading instruction not only focuses on helping students to

understand and apply the texts assigned, but it also positions these texts as models through which

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to suggest wider strategies which academics employ to read in their discipline. It asks instructors

to perform difficult balancing acts, oscillating from teaching that may require deeper

metacognitive explanation of acts of reading than they are accustomed, to that which stands a bit

further back and scaffolds students’ attempts to construct knowledge from texts for themselves.

It is instruction that asks teachers to develop careful judgment about when to intervene

authoritatively, when to facilitate, and when to recede into the background. It asks not only what

students can learn from the texts they read, but what they can learn about the experience of

having read them that might transfer or apply to the next texts to be read. This is the kind of

reading instruction that this project values, and therefore the kind that it is “most able to see”

(and the kind that will be described in greater detail in chapter five of this volume).

As a second caveat to the notion that reading is already taught to graduate students,

teaching reading—to undergraduates, let alone graduate students—is not currently a universal

and deeply embedded expectation of the field of writing studies in the way that teaching writing

is. All members of our field expect to teach writing in some form as part of our practice.

“Writing” is literally in most versions of the names of our discipline (“rhetoric and writing,”

“writing studies”). Most of us go through some form of training to teach writing, and various

courses within graduate programs address aspects of writing theory and pedagogy. Furthermore,

conversations about teaching writing abound in the formal and informal spaces of our

discipline—at our conferences, at the “water-cooler conversations” of the workplace, and in our

scholarship. Teaching reading, teaching graduate students, and teaching reading to graduate

students are topics far less visibly on the radars of most practitioners in writing studies and

therefore less a part of our internalized values and expectations. Taking again my own graduate

experience as example, across two graduate programs in rhetoric and writing at two different

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institutions, the only time the teaching of reading was brought up was in a seminar on basic

writing. The conversations taking place in that course, while useful, were confined only to that

space and seemed to perpetuate assumptions that the teaching of reading belonged only within

remedial education. No other course context ever brought up the teaching of reading as a subject,

and I have never felt that the teaching of reading was expected of me as a writing instructor. The

visibility of graduate-level pedagogy was even sparser. I can recall only one course conversation

acknowledging graduate-level instruction—a discussion centered on Micciche and Carr’s

“Toward Graduate-Level Writing Instruction”—and the extent of this discussion was simply to

acknowledge that, yes, the field at large doesn’t seem to consistently offer writing instruction for

graduate students. No one ever said anything about how or what might be done to teach

graduate-level courses in general, let alone ones that explicitly taught reading or writing. Thus,

while many members of our field may teach reading to graduate students, many others likely

don’t, if for no other reason than it has neither occurred to them to do so nor that there might be

need or value in doing it. Had I not come to this project, I too likely would have been among the

practitioners in the field who don’t teach reading.

As a third caveat, even though many instructors have individually come to recognize the

importance of teaching reading in graduate contexts and regularly do so as part of their

pedagogies, there has been no formal mechanism in the discipline for recognizing this teaching,

nor the efforts of the faculty members who undertake this vitally important work. To my

knowledge, there have been no articles or books published on graduate-level reading pedagogy

in our field. Nor are there designated discussion spaces for graduate reading at our conferences.

The result is that any discoveries individual instructors make about teaching reading in this

context remain just that: isolated individual instances. What these faculty learn about teaching

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reading in graduate contexts does not circulate the field at large, does not influence its collective

knowledge about reading pedagogy, and does not prompt questions nor pose challenges to

predominant existing patterns of instruction.

But if the answer to initial question above was, “yes,” faculty do already teach reading to

graduate students, how can the field come to “see” this teaching given the conditions just

described? One solution, I propose, is to begin by narrating memories of affirmative examples of

graduate-level reading instruction that have been personally experienced, whether as students or

as faculty. To begin to make efforts to teach reading more visible to our discipline, to honor the

work of instructors who have deeply impacted my own professional reading practices, and to

exemplify the kinds of explicit teaching for which this project advocates, I offer three such

narrations from my own graduate experiences.

Memory 1: Finding Theses in Academic Texts

In a composition theory course for my master’s degree at Wright State University, Dr.

Nancy Mack once hosted a class session in which she and students worked together to locate the

thesis statement in a challenging article, Raúl Sánchez’s “Outside the Text: Retheorizing

Empiricism and Identity,” as a model for locating theses in academic texts more generally. She

began the session by asking students to reread a print-out of the article’s introduction and to

highlight the portion(s) of text that we thought contained the thesis. When we students finished

reading and marking the text, we shared our candidate guesses and discussed our reasons for our

selections. Dr. Mack facilitated discussion, oscillating between offering insights about features

we observed and giving students the space and support to construct some of their own. This

conversation was a collaboration in which teacher and students co-constructed meaning from the

text as well as strategies for building that meaning. Importantly, Dr. Mack framed the language

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of the discussion to make it clear that our goal was not simply to identify this article’s thesis, but

to identify what we could learn from the article about finding and making sense of theses in

general. That discussion yielded several takeaway points regarding the location and formatting of

theses which still circulate with me as I read in the discipline today:

1. Not all academic pieces have explicitly articulated theses: some must be pieced

together implicitly by the reader.

2. Explicit thesis or no, the author is likely to express a controlling idea somewhere in

the introduction or, absent section headings, within the first few pages of an article or

the first chapter of a book.

3. What constitutes the main or controlling point (thesis) of a piece is ambiguous and

contestable for a variety of reasons.

4. Explicitly stated thesis statements often begin with a surprisingly direct tagline: “in

this article, I will _______,” “This project (argues, postulates, ponders, proposes,

poses, questions, reconceives, etc.) ___________,” or some variation on such

statements.

5. Some pieces opt for what Dr. Mack called a “listing thesis,” an outline of the major

sections, points, or rhetorical moves of the project rather than making a single

assertion that ties those moves together.

6. Pieces can opt for both an assertive thesis statement and an outline “listing thesis”

Again, the point of this discussion was not only to try to understand the main idea of the

article—although that alone would have been useful reading instruction—but also to explicate a

feature of academic genres (thesis statements) as well as to model some of the thinking that

academics perform to locate and make sense of that feature. The instruction was therefore

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simultaneously focused on the content of the specific text and cultivating an effective strategy for

performing academic reading in a wider array of contexts.

Memory 2: Focused Attention on Difficult Concepts

In a rhetorical theory course, also during my master’s program at Wright State, Dr. David

Seitz was fond of crafting class activities that asked students to focus attention on rereading

small excerpts of texts assigned. In one such activity, he distributed a handout from Kenneth

Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives, asked us to read it, answer the accompanying questions, discuss

those answers with a partner, and then report to the whole class (a version of what is often called

a “think-pair-share” lesson structure). The excerpt centered around defining a pair of Burke’s

important concepts: “identification” and “consubstantiation.” I don’t recall the exact set of

questions accompanying the text, but I remember them moving roughly through the types of

thinking articulated in Bloom’s Taxonomy: initial questions focused on recalling and

understanding the concepts embedded in the excerpt while later ones asked for analysis,

synthesis, and application of the concepts in relation to other texts we had read throughout the

semester. Follow up discussion moved through these questions in the same order, seeking to

build collective understanding of the terms prior to exploring their relationships to other concepts

encountered in the class.

For me, the focused attention on this pair of key concepts provided a Rosetta Stone to

begin to translate what was happening in the rest of Burke’s challenging text. The questions and

conversations the class held surrounding identification and consubstantiation began to transform

these theoretical terms from disciplinary jargon belonging solely to someone else into theoretical

tools that I was comfortable enough to begin to wield in my own writing. Also, as was usually

the case in his classes, Dr. Seitz did not begin the conversation with the assumption that students

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had a complete understanding of what they had read. Specific, targeted activities such as this one

anticipated and validated comprehension struggles by providing a forum to work through

incomplete understandings of the text prior to and alongside analyzing, synthesizing, or applying

it.

Furthermore, in asking students to focus their cognitive efforts on a few key terms, Dr.

Seitz was implicitly communicating the reasons and/or goals he had in mind in asking students to

read the text in the first place. The activity gave me a sense of what Dr. Seitz thought was

important enough to carry away from the text for future use: consubstantiation and identification.

In my experience as a graduate student, when faculty articulated their reasons or goals in

assigning texts, their reasons tended to be much broader. They often went something like, “I

want students to have familiarity with a broad variety of important texts from this subfield,” or “I

want students to invent their own reasons for reading these texts.” These kinds of goals, while

not without pedagogical merit, left me with questions I would have liked to ask my instructors,

but didn’t know how to articulate at the time: Why this text over the alternatives? What do you

find valuable about this text that you think would be useful for me to carry forward? What

specifically has the field found valuable about this text? How do I begin to build my own reasons

for reading a text that I wouldn’t have chosen to read on my own? Or that I don’t see the value

of? Or that are on topics that don’t particularly align with my research interests? How do I build

my own reasons when I don’t have an immediate or authentic need to read this text other than to

satisfy the conditions of the course? In terms of building motivation to read, knowing what the

instructor found useful or valuable in a particular piece—why it was important enough to the

field to need to show up on the reading list—would have helped me to build appreciation for

how a text has been impactful and how it has been used, even if it would never become one into

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which I would personally invest myself. Although Dr, Seitz likewise did not usually explicitly

articulate reasons for text selection, he seemed to have a discernable, specific agenda for the

reading he assigned that was evidenced in how he scaffolded course activities like the one

described above. Such activities made me feel like I had deeply engaged with a text in a way that

I could meaningfully make use of later, rather than running through the assembly line of assigned

texts that more frequently characterized my graduate reading experience and that seemed to be

discarded from memory as fast as they were read.

Memory 3: Reading Aloud to Step into a Text’s World Collaboratively

Dr. Sue Carter Wood, while teaching Plato’s dialogues (Gorgias and Phaedrus) in a

rhetorical history course during my Ph.D. at Bowling Green State University, helped students to

step into ancient texts by reading the first few pages of a week’s assignment aloud together as a

class. In spite of our reading these works in translation, the texts remained challenging for

students because of their non-standard English syntax, dense philosophical subject matter, and

use of mythology and metaphors from which modern readers are culturally distanced. Members

of the class took turns reading the roles of the speakers, with Dr. Wood pausing the reading at

key moments to offer historical and cultural context, answer questions, pose queries, and assist

with interpreting especially difficult passages.

These sessions offered several benefits. Firstly, in practicing reading together, these

“read-alouds” disrupted the common practice of students reading academic texts in isolation.

Reading aloud provided a collaborative venue for students to pool their knowledge and

perspectives into tackling a text. It also served as powerful example demonstrating the benefit of

Dr. Wood’s later advice that we might continue to hold collaborative reading groups on our own

throughout the semester. Perhaps more importantly, the sessions productively disrupted—if only

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for a little while—my problematic perception that graduate students are expected to understand

texts alone, without help. Secondly, the performance involved in reading aloud helped me to step

into the narrative, cadence, and tone of Plato’s characters as they spoke, granting deeper

experiential engagement, for example, with how Plato’s Socrates constructs arguments about

rhetoric and other topics through leading questions and metaphor. These benefits align with

advice for reading instruction offered by Alice Horning, who writes:

Whether in language learning or in learning to write, students need to have the sound

patterns and sentence structures of the language they are trying to learn in their heads,

through listening and especially through reading. […] If teachers want students to

produce solid academic prose, students must read such prose extensively and carefully

for the ‘din’ of that language to get into their heads” (“Writing and Reading” 73-74).

In reading aloud and listening to others do likewise, the “din” of Plato’s language was more

meaningfully worked into my head. The largely incomprehensible tangle of words of Plato’s

writing began to transform into patterns, strategies, habits of communication—an argument and a

performance—that I could make sense of, and more importantly, later make use of in writing.

Finally, Dr. Wood’s act of offering commentary between sections of text provided us students

with important real-time scaffolding in understanding the text by anticipating and responding to

likely points of confusion.

These three memories of reading instruction share certain characteristics in common with

each other while also exemplifying aspects of the definition of reading instruction this project

envisions. For one, such characteristic, all three instructors sought to address issues of student

comprehension alongside or prior to engaging students in higher order thinking about the texts

assigned. None of them took for granted that students would have formed a coherent, wholistic

15

understanding of texts solely from their private readings. Perhaps more importantly, these efforts

to foster comprehension involved instructors actively participating alongside students as expert

guides in the co-creation of meaning. The resulting class discussions provided ample opportunity

for students to develop comprehension communally and collaboratively. For two, there is

evidence of some consideration and direction from instructors about what might be “carried

away”—transferred—beyond the text itself to other disciplinary reading and writing contexts,

something that the instructor thought students would benefit from knowing or being able to do.

In Dr. Mack’s thesis identification and analysis activity particularly, there is an effort for

students to walk away with metacognitive tools and strategies for reading academic texts in

addition to acquiring knowledge of the individual textual content. As such, the attempt to teach

for transfer here is a little higher road. For three, the presence of tightly focused in-class

activities suggests that instructors had specific reasons in mind for assigning the texts/and or

specific goals for students in their reading them. While in most cases these reasons/goals were

not explicitly stated in the ways in which writing studies’ reading research has advocated for

some time (Horning, “Writing and Reading”; Horning and Kraemer, “Reconnecting”; Odom),

their implicit presence demonstrates an encouraging degree of purposefulness in instructional

planning regarding reading. For four, each teaching practice attempts to engage rather than

circumvent students’ anticipated reading difficulties in some way, whether through finding and

understanding theses, investigating important concepts, or simply translating difficult text into

something comprehensible to uninitiated readers.

The three memories I have just described are not the sole examples of explicit reading

instruction I encountered during my graduate education in writing studies, but they are notable

because they represented a deviation from the norm I experienced rather than the norm itself.

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The norm was, sadly, probably more accurately represented by students’ and instructors’ efforts

to dodge difficulties posed by reading rather than to engage with them. I remember how often

class discussions were punctuated by awkward silences or drawn-out conversations over

seemingly insignificant morsels of the texts or digressed along tangents away from the texts

altogether. I recall wondering how often these conversations were prompted by genuine interest

in those textual morsels versus students deflecting the conversation towards the small portions

over which they felt they had some understanding and agency, and thereby away from the larger

portions for which they did not. I know that I and several cohort-mates admitted privately to

engaging in just these tactics of deflection on several occasions, not only during discussion, but

also in writing the reading responses that were frequently assigned. I also remember being

assigned far too many texts than could be digested in the time allotted to read them, faculty

seeming to assume students understood more of the texts than they did, students being too afraid

or embarrassed to admit just how little they understood of what they’d read, and faculty—though

unfailingly well-meaning—often lacking strategies and tools for offering meaningful assistance

to those who did admit to significant reading difficulty. My graduate reading experience was

often characterized by hours spent reading that seemed to get me nowhere, by exhaustion from

marathon seminar sessions that didn’t seem to clarify anything or produce anything I could carry

forward, and by dread of the reading cycle that had begun again for the next week. I look fondly

back on the moments of explicit reading instruction like those above—moments for which I am

immensely grateful, moments that have lodged themselves in my memory for years—and I

wonder, why couldn’t these types of moments have been my norm for graduate-level reading

instruction?

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One answer to this question, at least for now, is that, in addition to graduate-level reading

instruction not being visible to all members of the field, the kind of teaching described in the

examples above is hard. I learned some time ago in my former life as a high school language arts

teacher, juggling six to seven courses a day and as many as five separate preps, just how time-

consuming and exhausting it can be to craft instruction that aligns assignments and course

activities to specific goals, engages students, and strikes the right balance between teacher and

student involvement. It’s hard even when teachers have a host of tools at their disposal, but when

it comes to teaching reading, because of composition’s history of neglecting that subject (see

Carillo, Securing), many graduate-level instructors’ kit bags are probably thinly stocked. Add to

this the fact that planning instruction like that described in the examples above competes for

graduate-level instructors’ time alongside a host of other duties they must perform as researchers,

advisors, committee members, program directors, etc., and the state of graduate-level reading

instruction, though far from ideal, is wholly understandable.

But, returning again finally to the question that began this discussion—“Don’t we already

teach reading to graduate students?”—the complex answer is that, yes, graduate faculty teach

reading, but there is much more that the field could do to support those efforts, to address the

reading difficulties that students (and faculty) experience, and to make the teaching and learning

of reading at the graduate level a more visible, more consistent, and more integrated element of

disciplinary practice. This project is then, among other things, an invitation and service. It is an

invitation for all members of writing studies to reflect upon our experiences of learning to read

professionally, on the reading practices we currently employ, and upon our discipline’s collective

relationships to reading. We might undertake this reflection to name both the good and the not-

so-good of our reading practices and to evolve them based on this newfound knowledge. We

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might also reflect upon the teaching strategies that we invent, find, and share with one another to

affect such evolution. The project is a service in that it provides a starting point for that reflection

and practical tools (by means of a list of threshold concepts in chapters two and four, and the

pedagogical suggestions in chapter five) to help begin to make meaningful changes to graduate

curricula.

Why Should Reading Be Taught to Graduate Students?

The short answer to this question is that I believe reading should sustainedly and

explicitly be taught to graduate students because it is the ethically right thing to do. I believe

graduate students—and faculty—struggle far more often and more seriously with their

professional reading than is acknowledged. As a discipline dedicated to the teaching and learning

of literacy, and as a community of humans first and foremost, I believe we owe to one another

our aid in helping each other to understand the collective enterprise we are undertaking, and I

believe that professional reading is one of the crucial activities through which all members of our

discipline enter that collective enterprise. Furthermore, I believe that the host of values for

teaching reading and writing already stated in our professional literature back me up in that

belief.

The rest of this section, then, is a long answer to this question. This answer is given

because, as has been intimated above, there is a history of writing instructors resisting the

teaching of reading. Reading researchers have indicated a deep lingering ambivalence in English

departments as to the place of teaching it in undergraduate writing courses, let alone at the

graduate level (which is never proposed at all). On the one hand, scholars in writing studies have

with some regularity addressed the importance of teaching undergraduate students how to deeply

understand the texts they read for their courses and of teaching students how to read “critically”

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to perform the higher order functions of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (Haas and Flower,

1988; Scholes, 2002; Jolliffe, 2003; Adams, 2015; Kalbfleisch, 2016, to name but a few). On the

other, these scholars have historically had to address their arguments defensively to audiences of

faculty expected to be resistant to teaching reading at all. One common resistant attitude, labeled

by David Jolliffe as “denial of responsibility” rests on the contradictory presumptions “that

students know how to read critically before they come to college” and “that if students are not

prepared to do the kinds of critical reading that a university education demands, then it is

someone else’s job besides the composition teacher’s to teach them” (131). While recent upticks

in the publication of reading scholarship in the last decade or so might indicate that attitudes are

shifting in favor of teaching reading to undergraduates, it seems reasonable, based on the lack of

scholarship on the subject, to guess that attitudes have been slower to change regarding teaching

reading to graduate students. Thus, a similar perception to that which Jolliffe describes may still

pervade a segment of graduate faculty, but its terms, I fear, are harsher: if graduate students don’t

come prepared to read professionally or to learn how to do so on their own, they are not worthy

of joining our ranks at all. Such a strand of thinking would pose an obstacle for creating graduate

education that seeks to support the real needs of students as they professionalize in the field. No

one is born equipped with everything needed to perform the complex, discursively nuanced, and

difficult cognitive tasks of academic jobs—of which reading is one crucial component. Likewise,

reading in an academic discipline is unlike reading in any other context, and thus no prior

experience can fully equip students for its challenges. And none of us acquire such equipment

totally without help.

To the extent that resistance to teaching reading might linger in the discipline, this section

is directed to practitioners who have never considered the prospect or harbor reservations to it.

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The section is also directed to those who see the need to teach reading to graduate students but

are looking for cases to make to skeptical colleagues, administrators, or other stakeholder groups

in advocating for institutional change. But even if resistance to teaching reading has entirely

disappeared from our field, it would still behoove us to know with certainty the reasons such

teaching is important, especially given the magnitude and complexity of such an undertaking.

The section makes two kinds of arguments. The first is a human case, and the one that

touches me most deeply: it attempts to expose what I see as the more problematic aspects of our

discipline’s relationship with its professional reading practices by recuperating stories of reading

difficulty expressed by members of our field. I make this case in hopes of illustrating the depth

of pain and struggle those aspects can cause. The second case is an appeal to disciplinary values,

demonstrating how the teaching of reading to graduate students is a necessary activity to uphold

much of what we claim to be espouse about the teaching of reading, writing, and rhetoric.

Argument the First: Reading Is a Struggle, Even for Graduate Students and Faculty

Members of the discipline, including and especially graduate students, struggle to make

sense of and make use of the professional texts that they must read. They struggle to manage

unreasonable reading loads, and then they feel guilty about taking what are perceived to be

“shortcuts” and failing to measure up to their own or communally circulating ideals of what

reading is. Sadly, this struggle is not always experienced as the forward-moving kind in which

one wrestles with difficulty for a time, overcomes it, and, in addition to acquiring the knowledge

with which one struggled, gains confidence in one’s resilience to endure hardship. Sometimes

the struggle for graduate students and faculty to read professionally can be deeply demoralizing

and debilitating. Sometimes, as a matter of survival, reading difficulty is ignored or

circumvented. This struggle is an outgrowth, I believe, of problematic perceptions about what

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reading is, how it should be performed, and where it should be learned that circulate writing

studies and which intimately impact its membership’s reading practices. Our becoming more

aware of these perceptions and their impact, our working to change these things, and our

teaching the as-yet-unarticulated conventions, processes, and procedures that attend to reading

academic texts can help lessen the struggle members of our field experience and help them to

relate to that struggle in more productive ways.

Importantly, to say that members of the field of writing studies struggle to read

professionally does not mean that they are bad or poor readers. Nor does it mean necessarily that

all of its membership struggles, or struggles seriously, or struggles with the same frequency, or

in the same ways. On the contrary, in a general sense, even the field’s least disciplinarily

experienced readers—graduate students—are very good readers, very careful readers, very

concerned readers, and the strategies they have acquired for interpreting texts have brought them

successfully to the door of the discipline. Rather, to say that members of the field struggle to read

professionally is to recognize (1) that reading is not a “natural” activity which humans are born

pre-equipped to perform, (2) that there are many kinds of reading that differ based upon many

contextual factors, (3) that reading within an academic discipline comprises a complex context

that poses unique challenges for readers, (4) and that to experience difficulty or struggle as a

result of any of these things—at least sometimes—is the most likely outcome for readers new to

such a context.

Unfortunately, graduate student struggles to read are usually quite hidden from view.

Many of the internalized social conditions of the university—including persistence of the myth

that academics perform their work as “solitary geniuses”—dissuade graduate students from

speaking openly and honestly about reading troubles beyond a trusted circle of peers. Further, the

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reading practices and problems of graduate students in our field have yet to become a subject of

inquiry in our formal scholarship (with a few rare but significant outliers—see Charney, Haas

and Flower). Indeed, reading difficulties are only uncommonly expressed in research, but

reframing the narratives that exist as expressions of reading difficulty helps shed light on the

scope, stakes, and nature of the problems inherent to composition’s relationship with reading.

One admission of faculty having experienced reading difficulty comes from Mariolina

Salvatori and Patricia Donahue’s undergraduate reading textbook, The Elements (and Pleasures)

of Difficulty. In asking student readers to apply a suggested strategy to a dense passage from

Michel Foucault, they offer as encouragement acknowledgement of their own difficulty in

parsing the selection: “You might find it comforting to know that we all struggled with this essay

and with all of Michel Foucault’s work” (111). This admission, situated as it is in a work that

deeply sympathizes with and seeks to support students in using reading difficulties as a learning

tool, offers some comfort for students to know that their professors “all struggled,” at one time.

But to me, it loses some of its incisiveness by being so brief and by framing the authors’

struggles to read in the past tense—as completed, over, and conquered. Thus, while validating

students’ reading struggles, it raises more questions than it answers in making me want to know

more about how the authors struggled. Do these authors, for example, recall the depth of

frustration and anxiety of not understanding a text that they needed to understand, or has it

receded from their memories? With what aspects of texts did they struggle? What strategies and

tools did they employ to handle their struggles at the time? Did they ever skip readings or take

other “shortcuts”? Did they ever feel like an imposter for having done so? Do they remember the

silent comparisons graduate students draw between themselves and colleagues? And, perhaps

most importantly, do the authors imply that being a professor never means experiencing reading

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difficulty again? These are the concerns that the rare admissions of reading difficulty in

scholarship often leave unaddressed.

The “Solitary Genius” Is Alive and Kicking

Very often, when admissions of reading difficulty are made in scholarship, they are

distanced from the writer. Either such admissions are placed in the past tense like the example

above, or reading difficulties are primarily attributed to others. Such distancing raises questions

for me about how readily scholars in writing studies—on average—are willing to acknowledge

and engage with personal reading difficulty. And if they, we—some of us—have resistance to

acknowledging personal reading difficulty, what might be the reasons for it?

Probing an example of this second form of distancing might shed light on some of these

questions. In “Reprivileging Reading: The Negotiation of Uncertainty,” Ira James Allen

contrasts his personal literacy history to that of the students he encountered while working as

graduate student in a writing center. Allen positions himself as a naturally voracious reader

whose privileged upbringing prevented him from having to recognize reading “as a practice, as

something to be worked at, something with vaguely foreign methods to be learned or, from the

other side of the expertise line, to be theorized and understood” (97). Because reading even

complex philosophical and theoretical texts came so easily for him, he remarks that “I did not

have to think of myself as a reader; I got to be a thinker instead. Reading was transparent and

thinking was a thrill.” (98; emphasis in original). Allen’s privileged situatedness conditioned him

to mistake the academic-like reading practices he had developed as natural, simple, self-evident.

His perceptions about reading began to change, however, as his work in the writing center

introduced him to others who seemed to struggle with academic reading:

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Feeling myself part of a larger conversation, though not precisely a member of a

discourse community I could name, I didn’t understand classmates who stood on the

sidelines in class discussion, satisfied with SparkNotes and a lecture. That understanding

began to come only in my first year of graduate school at a large research university, as I

struggled to relearn reading from a different perspective, at last consciously questioning

what it meant to read. In this struggle, I developed more sensitivity to the struggles of

others and a beginning awareness of my reading practices as a production of privilege. In

particular, I started noticing how some visitors to the writing center, where I worked as a

tutor, found that difficulties with academic reading prevented them from writing

coherent, academic-style texts themselves. (98).

This newfound sensitivity that the reading and writing practices of others were different from his

own, that learning to read academically was difficult for many students, and that such difficulty

impeded these individuals’ ability to write effectively in academic contexts served as catalyst for

writing his piece and reflecting further on his reading practices as a function of privilege.

Allen’s story and acknowledgement of reading difficulty is, I think, emblematic of some

of the more problematic aspects of writing studies’ perceptions of reading. Firstly, Allen’s initial

self-representation as someone for whom reading came easily in many ways embodies the

archetype of the “solitary genius,”—the naturally gifted individual who grasps new concepts

easily, reads and writes brilliantly, and never requires assistance to do so. The figure of the

solitary genius still deeply circulates within the discipline and influences the lived experiences

and material realities of its membership, sometimes in harmful ways. It serves as the unspoken

standard against which many of the practices of graduate programs and institutions measure both

faculty and students, and, more insidiously, the unrealistic ideal against which many in the

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discipline privately judge themselves (see J.K.’s admissions of guilt for not always completing

her assigned reading load as an example of the influence of the solitary genius construct, “What

We Learn,” below). The solitary genius looms particularly large when it comes to reading

practices because, while writing is made public through publication and receives assistance in

production in the form of feedback from faculty, editors, peer reviewers, etc., reading is by

default expected to take place privately without assistance, interaction, or feedback. Class

discussions typically take place after reading acts, not during, and while faculty and students

regularly form reading groups, most disciplinary reading is conducted solitarily. Secondly,

Allen’s encounters with struggling readers/writers in the writing center and the recognition of his

reading practices as having been the “production of privilege” mirrors writing studies’ ostensible

recognition of the falseness of the solitary genius construct. We know through constructivist

theories that a person’s accomplishments are never solely the result of individual ability or effort,

but are instead complexly intertwined in issues of experience, access, agency, privilege, and

power. Thus, we ought to recognize, as Allen does, that our disciplinary reading practices are

likewise a function of these issues, and that the facility of students’ acquiring such practices—

graduate or undergraduate—should not be assumed.

And, yet, Allen seemingly downplays his own potential reading difficulties and can’t

quite get free of the solitary genius construct, and I wonder how much his experiences and

thinking echo those of others in the field. In summarizing the factors catalyzing the writing of his

piece, Allen includes only the briefest acknowledgment of his own reading experiences as a

component of his motivation:

Working with these writers, while also negotiating my then-new identity as a graduate

student and the large, difficult reading load of graduate coursework, started me thinking

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about reading as an interlocking set of practices, a group of physical and psychical

attitudes toward texts — behaviors structured by social privilege and approaching

varying ends. (98; emphasis mine)

There is explicit admission in this statement that the difficulties of Allen’s writing-center

students weren’t the only factor motivating him. He notes his graduate reading load as “large,

difficult,” and required “negotiating” but says no more. Why? What other unspoken memories

prompted inclusion of this statement, and do they imply Allen having experienced more

personally impactful difficulties? How much of Allen’s story of facility with reading is, in fact,

posturing? For the rest of us compositionists, to what extent do our own internalized literacy

stories likewise minimize personal difficulty with reading? How much might these narratives fail

to see the deeply internalized presence of constructs like the solitary genius? How might these

constructs shape our perceptions of reading and the actions we take because of them? How might

these actions help or hinder our colleagues, our students, and ourselves?

My personal belief is that many of us in writing studies have not yet taken full ownership

of our own reading difficulties. We seem to be able to recognize and sympathize with others’

reading difficulties. We might even muster a nod that we have personally struggled to read

academically (usually in the past tense), but many of us have not yet been able or willing to

examine the depths of what those difficulties are, to consider what consequences result from

such struggle, or to question if how we learn to read in our profession might be approached

differently. Until we do these things for ourselves, we have little hope of meaningfully

decoupling our disciplinary culture and institutional practices from the influence of problematic

received notions of how reading ought to work—notions like the solitary genius. Likewise, we

will have little hope of better teaching reading to our students—undergraduate or graduate—

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because we will be unable to fully acknowledge reading difficulty as something with which we

are personally capable of struggling.

Writing Problems are Reading Problems

To say that many in the discipline have not yet deeply recognized their own reading

struggles is not to say that all have not, but the efforts of those who have attempted to identify

and learn from personal reading difficulties have not been widespread enough to consistently

impact the ways in which the discipline approaches teaching reading, especially in its graduate

programs. Laura Micciche, for instance, offers an example of recognizing the depth of the impact

graduate students’ reading difficulties can have on their development as academics, albeit

inadvertently. In advocating for explicit graduate-level writing instruction, she makes poignant

reference both to difficulties she experienced as a student in a graduate-writing workshop as well

as those shared with her by students enrolled in a similar course which she taught. She writes,

“when I was a student in that workshop, the participants […] cried regularly in or after class, so

overwhelmed were we all by all that we had to know in order to create writing that made a

contribution, no matter how minor, or just made sense” (479). Later, summarizing her students’

experiences, she reflects, “when I taught a version of this course for the first time, two

accomplished, well-respected graduate students in our program wept when asked to introduce

themselves and narrate their writing processes to the class” (479). Micciche, of course, framed

these expressions of informational overload as writing problems, but they can just as easily be

reframed as reading problems. A great deal of the knowledge that Micciche states overwhelmed

her, her colleagues, and later her students, must have been reading-related: vocabulary

knowledge, disciplinary-specific discourse knowledge, content knowledge, and knowledge of

how to summarize, analyze, evaluate, and synthesize arguments. All of this knowledge is

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necessary to acquire and employ while reading and prior to setting pen to page in order to yield

even the marginally contributing, minimally coherent disciplinary writing to which Micciche

refers.

Micciche’s story also suggests that graduate students have trouble integrating research

sources into academic writing, a phenomenon documented among undergraduate students via

studies conducted by Rebecca Moore Howard and the scholars of the Citation Project and linked

to student difficulties comprehending academic texts. Micciche tells of once having received

feedback on an assignment as a graduate student in which her professor complained that her

writing was so laden with undefined theoretical terms that her argument was incomprehensible.

Reflecting on this feedback, Micciche notes: “I failed to unpack the terms not because I thought

it was unnecessary, but because I did not yet know how to do so. In effect, I was not borrowing

from Foucault to make my case as I was outright lifting his language in a vain hope to legitimize

my project” (478; emphasis in original). Such “lifting” of the author’s original language would,

under many circumstances, be viewed by academics as plagiarism. Howard, Serviss, and

Rodrigue, however, have employed an alternative term, “patchwriting,” to describe writing

incidents when students engage in “reproducing source language with some words deleted or

added, some grammatical structures altered, or some synonyms used,” without the malfeasant

moral intent of stealing the original author’s ideas. (181). Howard, Serviss, and Rodrigue

combine results of their study with several others to suggest “that patchwriting is a sign of

uncertain comprehension of the source” (182). The notion that improper or insufficient source

integration is linked to student problems comprehending texts has been further cited by others in

our field (Carillo, “Preparing” 199-200; Nowacek and James 295). Thus, the writing problem

Micciche relates in her story is, by her own admission, also a reading problem: as a student, she

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clearly did not yet fully understand the meanings of the concepts she sought to employ in making

her argument, concepts connected to the unseen ways of thinking and doing (threshold concepts)

inherent to the disciplinary discourse community of which she was not yet a full member. She

was attempting to read the field, and she may have been able to employ such terms in her own

writing, but only in a superficial, regurgitative way that too closely resembled the words and

thinking of the original author. At that point in her professional development, she was not yet

capable of translating Foucault’s words into her own, of intermingling them with her own ideas

and creating new uses for them.

Looked at from a Bakhtinian perspective, Micciche’s story also demonstrates an example

of the externally authoritative discourse of the academy confounding efforts by professionalizing

graduate students to convert it into internally persuasive discourse. According to Bakhtin,

authoritative discourse:

Demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent

of any power it might have to persuade us internally; we encounter it with its authority

already fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically

connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of

the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. (342)

Further, such discourse prohibits “free association and appropriation of the word itself,” instead

requiring “our unconditional allegiance.” (343) It “permits no play with the context framing it,

no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing

variants on it. It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass” (343). In

contrast, discourse that is internally persuasive:

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Is, as it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly interwoven with "one's own word." In the

everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and

half-someone else's. (…) It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely,

developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating

relationships with new contexts. (345-6)

The discourse of the academy is certainly infused with the authority Bakhtin describes, and the

act of making such discourse internally persuasive—of internalizing it to the point that such

discourse intermingles with, shapes, and is shaped by the rest of the student’s consciousness—is

a clear expectation of graduate school. Acquiring this ability to assimilate and wield such

discourse in dialogue with one’s own ideas—in writing, but firstly in reading—is ultimately

(through satisfactory completion of written assignments) the only means graduate students have

to achieve agency and insider status in the field. Such agency and insider status are in turn

required to access the material and social benefits of that membership (employment, tenure, etc.).

Micciche’s difficulty in assimilating, adapting, applying, and wielding the language of Foucault

is, I would argue, representative of the difficulties experienced by many in our field as graduate

students—including myself—and it suggests that such difficulties manifest in the reading of

academic texts long before graduate students attempt to write their own. The languages of

academic disciplines are abstract, contextually nuanced, and often distanced from readers’

everyday experiences. Such language is hard enough to understand, let alone to earn to think

with and through. In short, writing problems like source integration very often get their start as

reading problems.

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We Can’t Let Go of Thinking We Can Know It All

Amy Robillard, in “Prototypical Reading: Volume, Desire, Anxiety,” offers another

example of a disciplinary practitioner recognizing an aspect of her personal reading difficulty.

Edging on similar territory as the discussion of Allen and the solitary genius construct above, she

sets out to unpack the field’s “prototypes” of what it means for its practitioners to be a “reader”

and “to read. In doing this, she uncovers some of the ways in which these prototypes are

problematic and can negatively impact the psyches of practitioners. She defines these prototypes

as “the most salient, recognizable instance of a category,” or ideal representations held in mind

of what it means to perform the identity of reader and the activity of reading (203). These

prototypes, she argues, are based in literary habits of reading:

The “readingest reading” we do, the prototype for our conception of to read, is the act of

reading a book. Not just any book—not a book of instructions or a cookbook or a

handbook, but a book of fiction. And we read this book in a comfortable space, usually a

couch, an overstuffed chair, or in a bed, propped up by pillows. […] Further, reading is a

solitary activity, one that is undertaken for openly affective reasons. (206)

From this, she deduces that if “the prototype of to read entails the reading of a work of literary

fiction, it follows that a prototypical reader is one who reads a great deal of literary fiction”

(207). Attendant to these prototypes is the understanding that the ideal reader has strong desire to

read and reads voluminously.

Yet, she explains that this desire is often transformed into anxiety when practitioners are

confronted with the overwhelming amount of reading expected to perform our disciplinary

writing and the very real constraints on our time and attention:

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I want to suggest, then, that the tension between the prototypes of reader and to read,

together with our basic-level category visualization of reading, is at least partly

responsible for our field's ambivalence toward reading […]. We continue to

conceptualize reading in terms of volume. We worry whether we’re assigning too much

reading, and we have become inured to students’ complaints that they have too much

reading to do for their other classes. When we conceptualize reading this way, the best

we can do in terms of pedagogy is to provide time-management strategies. Further,

understanding and referring to reading in terms of volume encourages the transmutation

of desire into anxiety. Feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to read leads to a

dampening of desire even—especially?—on the part of English majors. (210)

Robillard locates this anxiety about volume both in her personal experience reading and in the

experiences of students in our field:

There are too many ideas and too many books and not enough time, [/] and always I have

the sense that I’m not reading enough. Perhaps the tension between the reader and the to

read prototype isn’t so much about desire as it is about anxiety […] Perhaps we need to

think about ways to quell the anxiety some of us feel—and I’m going to go ahead and

assume that I can count many, many students among that ‘us’—when we wonder whether

we’re reading enough, whether we’re reading the right things, and how much there is out

there that we don’t yet know about. (309-10)

In short, then, Robillard sees that the discipline’s idealized notions of what it means to read in

the field, embedded in literary mental “prototypes” and difficult to break free from, have caused

its membership to imagine reading in terms of volume, which turns into anxiety when we

confront the reality that we physically cannot read everything.

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While Robillard sees tension between the “reader” and “to read” as the source of anxiety

about reading volume, I would argue that that tension instead lies in the mismatch between both

terms’ embeddedness in literary conceptions of reading and the type of professional reading

actually required to produce research. If the field’s ideal “readingest” reading is solitary,

voluminous reading of literary works, and its ideal “readerest” reader is one who consumes

literature in such ways, then these ideals are incongruent with the kinds of texts we read as

researchers, the ways we are expected to read them, and the circumstances under which we do

so. For one, literary reading is usually characterized as leisure—something that is engaged in

from volition, “for openly affective reasons,” as Robillard puts it (206). While such motivation

can be present in our professional reading, it is also always labor. We are reading, ultimately, as

part of our jobs. Labor, unlike leisure, entails time constraints, specific purposes for activities,

and meeting commitments for which we are answerable to others. For two, the genres are very

different. Literary reading entails reading stories and experiences. Reading for academic research

can involve these kinds of texts, but more often entails plodding through analysis, argument,

explication. For three, while we might say that reading literature primarily enriches the reader,

we expect that our professional reading will yield writings that enrich knowledge in the field.

Thus, disciplinary purposes for reading are, broadly speaking, communal and dialogic, not

private.

If, as Robillard argues, our discipline’s idealized prototypes of “reader” and “to read” are

indeed embedded in literary reading activities, then it is not difficult to see how they can cause us

anxiety. We pressure ourselves and each other to read volume when our jobs really require of us

to read with purpose only that which can be put in service to our writing or teaching—and not

even all of those texts. We expect the bulk of reading to be performed privately, without aid,

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even as we expect that the written product of that reading will be publicly consumed and propel

forward “the conversation” of the field. We think our duty to graduate students’ reading

development is primarily to expose them to “as wide a swathe of scholarship as possible” (when

I was a graduate student, I recall one faculty member literally telling me this with much of the

same palpable anxiety to which Robillard confesses), but have we asked if that exposure results

in meaningful reading experiences with the texts assigned or if the overwhelming volume isn’t

itself counterproductive to students’ professionalization? If such incongruent and unreasonable

expectations cling to our professional reading practices, aren’t we causing much unnecessary

stress to ourselves, each other, and our students when we inevitably fail to live up to them?

Even as Robillard seeks to help the field decouple from problematic prototypes, their

influence can still be observed in the very way she is compelled to frame her argument. Robillard

opens by confessing her concern that, in a previous piece, she might have inadvertently

plagiarized an idea—a phrase—from Salvatori and Donahue, and this occasion becomes her

entrée for reflecting on the influence of the prototypes. This act of potential plagiarism she

continually labels a “transgression,” a sin against the very problematic prototypes she wishes to

bring to light. She writes: “what happens when we conceptualize my transgression not in terms

of a lack of ethics or a lack of knowledge of how to cite, but a lack of thoroughness, a failure to

read enough? What happens when we shift our frame for understanding plagiarism as a

transgression against writing to a transgression against reading?” (200; emphasis in original).

She questions whether if she had only read enough—encountered Salvatori and Donahue before

writing—if she would have avoided their conceptual overlap. She does ultimately conclude that

such overlap is unavoidable, suggesting that we “acknowledge that these things do happen, that it

makes sense that more than one scholar would have the same idea around the same time, and to

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consider what, if anything, is to be gained by calling attention to it the way I do in this article”

(210). Further, she asserts that “we do not—nor can we—systematically read everything there is

to read in the way a child imagines she can read through all the stacks in the library” (210). Still,

Robillard’s discussion of reading anxiety is demonstrating in real time the struggle to decouple

from received notions of what we believe reading ought to do and be and suggests that our

field’s struggle to reimagine our disciplinary reading will likewise be piecemeal, iterative.

Robillard isn’t alone in expressing anxiety over reading volume. Nancy Morrow

describes distress felt by instructors when we have to make cuts to our assigned reading lists:

“As a teacher, I have always found the selection of texts peculiarly painful. To choose what to

include in a literature or composition course is inevitably to make decisions about what to

exclude, and exclusion is nearly always painful” (453). Morrow attributes this pain to difficulty

defining our pedagogical values, asserting that “quite simply, text selection defines us: defines

the courses we teach, our goals and ambitions, our theories and pedagogies” (453). She uses this

story as a call to instructors to define more specifically their reasons for assigning readings, share

those reasons with students, and select pieces that more tightly align to them. Still, I can’t help

but wonder if some of the pain she describes in cutting texts from a reading list doesn’t arise

from the tension of the prototypes Robillard names. To what extent do we hear two competing

voices when we sit down to select the texts for our courses? If our prototypes of reading insist

“we must cover all relevant material!” while other voices suggest that our reading selections

ought to be thoughtful, strategic, and aligned to our pedagogy, then such ambivalent voices

would easily cause us instructors stress in having to arbitrate between them, and stress to our

students in ultimately having to navigate inconsistent expectations if we fail to choose one voice

over the other.

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That faculty admissions of reading difficulties like those described by Salvatori and

Donahue, Allen, Micciche, Robillard, and Morrow are relatively uncommon or must be

recuperated from expressions of writing difficulty are a testament to the invisibility of graduate

and faculty reading problems. This makes sense from a standpoint, as Robert Scholes has noted

that “we do not see reading” (166). That is, we don’t tend to notice literacy problems until there

is a visible, tangible product we can assess, at which point it becomes obvious that students don’t

understand things in the way we want them to. This recognition, though, comes quite late in the

learning process, usually during high stakes conditions, even though problems commonly

attributed to graduate writing difficulties may begin far earlier while graduate students are

reading the texts that they use to build their seminar papers, theses, and dissertations.

Additionally, reading in academia is largely a private affair done in the cloister of the home or

library before arriving at the public space of the conference or classroom. Though departmental

cultures vary in context and over time, problematic archetypes for reading still circulate these

spaces to varying degrees (e.g., volume, anxiety, the solitary genius), often giving graduate

students and faculty little social incentive to make their reading processes (let alone difficulties)

public. These are some of the problems attending to writing studies’ relationship to reading.

What We Learn About Graduate Reading When We Look Beyond Scholarship

The scarcity of stories in scholarship describing reading difficulties should not be taken

as evidence that faculty and graduate student problems with reading are insignificant or are

confined to rare individual cases. To find more complete and frank expressions of students’

difficulty learning to read professionally as well as descriptions of the specific problems they

encounter, it is helpful to turn to informal accounts outside of scholarship. One such account is

offered by an English Ph.D. student, known as “J.K.,” writing through her WordPress blog, The

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Grad Student. Though studying literature rather than composition, J.K.’s depiction of unrealistic

reading expectations, the pressure students put on themselves, this pressure’s negative emotional

effects, and the coping strategies students use to survive are all consistent with elements form the

stories recounted above, my own personal experiences, and the many oral anecdotes fellow

students have shared with me from my own graduate programs, suggesting that the conditions of

graduate reading pose similar problems across fields in English studies. In a post titled “Graduate

Student Problems: The Impossible Reading Load,” J.K. writes:

I’m often baffled by the quantity of reading assigned for many of my classes. I’m used to

it after attending a rigorous high school and then a big research university for undergrad,

but the standard seems to be to assign more reading than reasonably achievable for class

each week. And by “achievable” I mean reading for full understanding—as in you could

sit down and critique/wield the writer’s argument in a research paper.

J.K.’s account touches on several aspects of graduate students’ reading problems. First, there is

acknowledgement of the pace of assigned reading in course work—too much for a student to

fully digest each week. Second, linked to this acknowledgment is a concern about

comprehension—being able to internalize a text’s argument to a point where it can be analyzed,

evaluated, and synthesized into the student’s own writing. Importantly, J.K.’s persona is more

positive than the tone of many of the “venting” conversations I’ve been privy to as a graduate

student: she presents herself as well-adjusted to the demands of graduate reading, and so

understanding and wielding a text for her own purposes is presented as merely a function of time

and effort. Several of the colleagues I’ve talked to have not expressed this same confidence that

they would come to comprehend certain difficult texts fully, no matter how much time they

invested, and the thought of coming to wield such texts in their own research was often

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supplanted by calculations of how much they needed to know to stumble through seminar

sessions or whether they really needed to read the text at all.

As confidently as J.K. presents herself, even she touches on the “shortcuts” or coping

strategies graduate students regularly employ to manage the reading load. She also notes the self-

denigrating tendency to compare one’s performance against other students, often incorrectly

concluding that they themselves are the only one’s struggling:

I fluctuate between the belief that the other English graduate students are super-human

readers who can devour written texts at unthinkable rates and the more realistic notion

that no one actually does the assigned reading in its entirety. For example, last week I

was expected to read about 700-800 pages. So here’s my confession: I didn’t read it all—

not even close.

J.K. goes on to explain how she regularly reads using a “research lens,” a process of prioritizing

reading texts she estimates to be more important to the instructor’s aims or her own research

interests. As she narrates the practices of this reading—scanning headings, introductions, and

conclusions for main ideas, etc.—it strikes me that she is surprisingly at ease with reading texts

differently than students are often asked to do in K-12 and undergraduate contexts, where the

received notion of “correct reading” implies verbatim word decoding of the entire text and

memorization of all major points for later regurgitation. J.K.’s reading practices are, in fact,

consistent with those Davida Charney observed being used by professional readers in

evolutionary biology. These readers tend to read texts “selectively and purposefully,” scanning,

skimming, picking, and skipping entire sections to suit their immediate research interests and

time constraints rather than reading texts linearly and verbatim (212). Indeed, Rebecca Nowacek

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and Heather James, reviewing several similar studies, have confirmed that such reading practices

are common throughout the STEM disciplines (296-7).

Even if selective and nonlinear reading practices are common among experts, likely even

among those in our own field, this doesn’t mean that most students—even graduate—are as

comfortable or prepared as J.K. to adopt them. Mary Lou Odom notes that “too often, however,

our students come to college in possession of inaccurate notions of what it means to read for

school while at the same time clinging to inadequate reading strategies that do not enable them to

correct those misconceptions” (269). And while it may be believed that such inaccurate notions

and inadequate strategies ought to be dispelled and replaced as part of the undergraduate

curriculum, there is evidence that this doesn’t fully bear out in practice. Charney’s study

observed that “The least experienced participants—the four graduate students—all read in

sequence. In contrast, two of the three faculty members—the two most senior ones—read

nonlinearly” (212). The least experienced members in the field read least like members of the

field, in spite of whatever training their education gave or didn’t give them. It seems reasonable

to conclude, then, that either the graduate students (and junior faculty member, for that matter)

did not know the ways experienced members of their field read in practice, or that something

was interfering with their adopting those ways.

Even if graduate students know there are other ways to read texts than whatever default

practice they employ—and that fact itself is not a given—it may not occur to students to use

them, or they may not know how to employ them, or they may internally struggle to adapt

because their perceptions of what is a “right” or “honest” way to read makes them reluctant to

change their habits. Students may feel the guilt of “cheating” when employing “shortcuts” like

skimming or selective reading, even if these are, in fact, strategies academics actually use, even

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if these strategies are necessary to reasonably manage graduate and professional life, and even if

faculty secretly expect them to be used. J.K., herself, ultimately succumbs to traces of this guilt

in asking “is this the trademark of a lazy student?” while describing how she truncates her

reading practices even further in the concluding weeks of the semester as time pressure grows

more severe. J.K’s reading experience reveals clear disconnects between implicit and explicit

expectations for reading in the graduate curriculum and implies the interference of problematic

received notions—like Robillard’s prototypes of “reader” and “to read”—of what academic

reading ought to entail.

It is worth dwelling a little longer on a few other of students’ received notions of what

reading is and why they may so powerfully interfere against graduate students’ adopting habits

that are necessary to perform reading as academics. In the K-12 curriculum, two more received

notions of reading are often privileged: “reading for information” and “close reading.” “Reading

for information” is reading to locate content—facts—to be regurgitated later, often for

assessments, without critical interaction on the part of reader. “Close reading” is the ubiquitous

but semantically broad term for literary reading that most often involves analysis of the meanings

of individual words, phrases, and clauses and how they contribute to the meaning of a whole

text. Close reading can also encompass critical reading and a host of other definitions, including

the analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and application of texts, but for the moment I want only to

dwell on the “close-up” aspects of what the term implies. Though performed for very different

purposes according to different practices, each of these types tends to focus on reading whole

texts verbatim. When reading for information, verbatim reading is necessary so as not to

overlook any factoid that the reader could be called to account for on a test. Close reading also

entails verbatim reading, lest the omitted passages contain the most significant morsels for

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analysis. Though students may be expected to acquire other modes of reading, these two

continue to be commonly employed at the university, especially close reading in undergraduate

literature programs from which writing studies still draws large portions of its graduate

population. These two modes of reading persist in the psyches of students—especially those who

are good at playing the “game of school” and have found success using them—as deeply

internalized, implicit theories about what reading is, does, and ought to be, theories that manifest

in the habitual reading habits students employ automatically. When students embedded in these

received notions of reading encounter contexts that entail different purposes and require different

strategies for reading, as graduate education often does, such notions can create not only

cognitive dissonance among students struggling to see for the first time that there are, in fact,

multiple ways of reading, but also emotional distress at their having to abandon or alter deep-

seeded habits. Add to this situation that graduate faculty rarely show graduate students how they

read academic texts, and students are left unaided to invent the practices that will help them

navigate the unique difficulties of reading disciplinary discourses.

The preceding stories of difficulty help bring to light some of the problematic aspects of

writing studies’ relationship with reading and illustrate the struggles graduate students and

faculty experience when they read its disciplinary texts. First, graduate students, being new to the

discipline, have increased difficulty making sense of and putting to use the academic texts they

read. Second, graduate students are unfamiliar with the hidden disciplinary presumptions and

beliefs—threshold concepts—that will help them unlock the meaning of these texts in ways that

are beneficial to their careers. Third, faculty and students alike struggle with managing

unrealistic reading loads. Fourth, members of the discipline, but especially graduate students,

struggle to discover, acquire, and implement the strategies for reading that will allow them to

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handle those loads, often battling against deeply ingrained habits of reading that no longer serve

them well but are difficult to abandon because of received notions of how reading should be

done. Fifth, faculty and students struggle—intellectually and emotionally—to manage

difficulties with reading within a larger academic culture still enmeshed in elitist constructs of

academic identity—like the solitary genius—which encourage stoicism and intellectual

competition while discouraging admission of difficulty and efforts to seek help. These

difficulties comprise much of what is problematic in writing-studies’ relationship with reading

and are what this project seeks to help ameliorate in teaching reading to graduate students.

Argument the Second: Teaching Reading to Graduate Students Upholds What We Say We

Value

The argument so far has been that incorporating sustained, explicit attention to reading in

graduate programs in writing studies is ethically necessary to support students as they struggle

with learning to read in the novel ways required by the complex context of an academic

discipline. While to me this is the most compelling reason for overhauling the place of reading in

graduate curricula, doing so also helps the discipline to live out in practice a constellation of the

values it already professes about reading and writing. Specifically, teaching professional-level

academic reading to graduate students implements disciplinary values in at least four ways:

1. It (teaching reading to graduate students) enacts and extends writing studies’

commitment to teaching reading.

2. It fills gaps in our field’s professional development mechanisms.

3. It productively deepens our understanding of the reading/writing connection.

4. It demystifies academic work by making what we know and do explicit.

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There is an inevitable gap between the identity that is imagined about any institution and the

identity of that entity that is enacted in the world. Reading, it would seem, has historically

inhabited one of those gaps between the imagined and enacted identities of writing studies:

reading has been something for which the discipline has, in various documents, acknowledged its

importance but to which the discipline has inconsistently attended in the classroom and in

scholarship. In exploring these four ways in which the teaching of reading enacts disciplinary

values, this project hopes to work toward closing the “reading gap” between writing studies

imagined and enacted identities.

1. It Enacts and Extends Writing Studies’ Commitment to Teaching Reading

Implementing explicit, sustained, graduate-level reading instruction answers and extends

calls to make reading a central component of composition studies’ scholarship and pedagogy.

Attention to reading in composition is currently enjoying a much-welcomed and much-needed

renaissance. Until recently, apart from a period stretching from the 1980s to the early 1990s,

reading has been largely neglected as a topic of inquiry, supported only by a trickle of scholarly

works in the intervening years from that time to the present era (see Helmers; Salvatori and

Donahue, “Stories about Reading”; and Carillo, Securing for historical accounts of reading’s

decline as a subject in writing studies). But in the last decade or so, composition has seen the

publication of a number of major scholarly books dedicated to reading, more than in the entire

preceding two decades: a pair of monographs authored by Ellen Carillo (2015; 2017); a pair of

collections co-edited, in part, by Alice Horning (2013; 2017); a collection edited by Patrick

Sullivan, Howard Tinberg, and Sheridan Blau (2017); and a monograph by Daniel Keller (2014),

to name several of them. In roughly this same timeframe, the journal Pedagogy has become a

regular venue for the publication of reading-centered scholarship in composition, including two

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special issues on reading released in 2016 and 2019. A common refrain throughout much of this

body of work is that composition has neglected the teaching and research of reading, and the

scholars contributing to that body see themselves as attempting to rectify that neglect.

The grounds upon which this scholarship has staked calls to increase attention to reading

have varied, but all ultimately descend from composition’s long-acknowledged belief that

reading and writing are two inextricably interrelated literate activities and that improvement in

one of these activities will facilitate student growth in the other. Ellen Carillo frames her call as

improving teacher training and facilitating transfer of reading and writing knowledge across and

beyond university courses: “It becomes crucial to reanimate reading research in order to better

understand how instructors can prepare their students to effectively read beyond their first year,

and to provide these instructors with the means for doing so” (Securing 17). Dan Keller locates

his exigency in the need to understand how multimodal communication and digital technologies

are changing how students read—and will need to learn to read—to remain rhetorically savvy

producers and consumers of information into the 21st century”

The disconnect between reading pedagogy and writing pedagogy will only grow if the

field pursues writing in digital environments without considering the role reading plays in

those environments as well. As we ask students to write in a variety of ways, giving them

sophisticated tools for reading will strengthen how they approach and understand those

genres and media. (2)

Alice Horning predicates the need for increased attention to reading on promoting good

citizenship and supporting reading’s social and material significance in students’ lives: “There

are a number of reasons to be concerned about our students’ reading abilities: reading has an

impact on their success in college as well as on their success after college in their personal and

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professional lives, and as members of a democratic society” (8). These are but a few reasons why

reading researchers have argued why writing studies needs to pursue reading as a subject in it

research and pedagogy.

The increased production of scholarship on reading and the proliferation of reasons

offered for why writing studies ought to continue to produce it are excellent developments in

securing reading as a robust, integral topic of inquiry in the field, but this corpus of scholarship

has thus far been bounded, almost without exception, by imagining the value of teaching reading

only in undergraduate curricular contexts. There is, in fact, practically no mention of graduate

students anywhere in composition’s scholarship on reading, before or after the decline in the

1990s. One notable exception occurs in a piece by Haas and Flower, who, in studying the

constructive meaning-making skills of college readers, position graduate students as advantaged

“experienced readers, who would be able to read automatically by invoking their knowledge of

academic topics and discourse conventions” (71). This rare discussion of graduate-student

readers positions them as well-versed in academic discourse and alludes, I think, to the reason

they have largely been excluded from studies of reading elsewhere: the perception that graduate

students are fully-formed “finished” readers, who have—or should have—at their disposal all of

the tools necessary to make sense of any text, even those steeped in the largely invisible

disciplinary knowledge and conventions of an academic field. However, as Davida Charney’s

study of graduate readers (see, “What We Learn,” above) and preceding accounts of graduate-

student reading struggles suggest, I challenge this perception.

It may or may not be a widespread belief in writing studies that graduate students do not

or should not require reading instruction. What is clear, though, is that all of the reasons cited

above for the importance of teaching reading to undergraduates—as well as the challenges

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associated with learning to read effectively—apply to graduate students, and often with greater

stakes. Take, for instance, Carillo’s claim that the teaching of reading is important to facilitate

transfer. In becoming scholars—in reading, writing, and thinking the knowledge of a field into

being—graduate students are preparing to perform the highest of high-road transfers, and they

are preparing for a career in which they will do so daily. They are expected to learn to analyze,

evaluative, extract, and synthesize information from the existing conversations and sources of a

field to create original research of their own, to say nothing of how their jobs will require them to

complexly read and transfer knowledge in their teaching, administrative, and service duties.

Next, keeping in mind Keller’s concerns regarding how reading is changing as a result of the

proliferation of digital media, graduate students are engaged in acquiring an increasing number

of professional academic literacies as the genres and modes of scholarship rapidly mutate in

response to technology. Finally, invoking Horning’s argument that reading effectively is

necessary for good citizenship and the acquisition of material and social goods, reading is a

central activity crucial to the material and social success of graduate students, not only for

finishing their degree requirements, but in helping them earn and keep an academic job. And, if

we in writing studies see ourselves as caretakers of democracy by helping students learn to read,

write, and think critically, then the stakes of maintaining a healthy democracy are only higher

when preparing future generations of caretakers. Attention to reading, then, is as important for

graduate students as it is for undergraduates, if not more so.

Our colleagues in education and developmental psychology some time ago reached an

epiphany about the nature of learning to read that I hope we in composition have also recognized

or are on the verge of discovering for ourselves: learning to read— just like learning to write—is

never finished. Education researchers Patricia Alexander and Emily Fox write:

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It has become increasingly difficult to ignore that reading is a domain that relates not

only to the young or to the struggling reader but also to readers of all abilities and all

ages. Further, reading extends beyond the initial phase of acquisition and across the

lifespan as readers engage in a range of reading-related, goal-directed activities. [….]

Developmentally, individuals are continually in the process of learning to read and have a

direct role to play in their literacy. From this vantage point, students are not complete as

readers when they can demonstrate basic linguistic skills or fluency. Rather, they

continue to grow as readers as their linguistic knowledge, subject-matter knowledge,

strategic capabilities, and their motivations expand and mature (Alexander 1997b). This

developmental perspective on reading extends concern beyond the early elementary years

into adolescence and adulthood. (51-53)

Literacy education, then, is ultimately a lifelong developmental process. Readers never possess

all of the possible tools, strategies, or experiences necessary to automatically understand and

make use of all texts written in all contexts for all audiences. College-level educators would be

wise not to assume that the task of assisting graduate students in their reading development is

complete prior to their arrival in their programs. After all, students’ rhetorical situations for

reading and writing very much change once they get to graduate school. What experiences or

training can they reasonably be expected to have had that prepare them for the nuance and

complexity of professional academic life? Instead, it would seem wise that we such educators

should help graduate students expand their literate repertoires and assist them in constructing

meta-cognitive tools for reading—tools like threshold concepts, tools to build the tools they will

need when and where they will need them.

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Happily, some of us in writing studies may be close to reaching similar conclusions about

lifelong process of literacy development and college educators’ roles in actively supporting that

development at every stage of degree. Alice Horning, in What is College Reading? asserts that

“just as K-12 reading instruction must permeate the entire K-12 school curriculum to be

effective, so too should reading instruction be a part of every course in the college curriculum to

reinforce and develop students’ abilities in both reading and writing” (6). From context, it would

seem Horning only imagines her statement as extending reading instruction across undergraduate

degrees, but the veracity of her call—that reading instruction must be consistent and conducted

in every discipline and at every stage of education—extends well beyond the undergraduate

curriculum into master’s and doctoral work.

It seems clear, then, that to live out writing studies’ emergent commitment to the teaching

and studying of reading, it must apply what it has learned about literacy instruction to all levels

of university education, including graduate. In order to stabilize reading as a sustainable, fully

integrated component of who we are and what we do, we must continuously plumb the depth and

breadth of topics reading encompasses, we must uncover new avenues of inquiry, and the results

of these inquiries must have real impact on our practices, both in our teaching and how we

prepare future generations of compositionists to do that teaching. More than this, though, if our

field claims to be caretakers of knowledge about writing and, increasingly, (some) of the

caretakers of reading, then the scope of our knowledge cannot be limited to the first-year writing

classroom.

2. It Fills Gaps in Our Field’s Professional Development Mechanisms

Teaching graduate-level professional reading also contributes to plugging a significant

gap in writing studies’ systems for supporting graduate professionalization. If the goal of

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professional development for these students is to assist them in acquiring the ways in which a

discipline reads, writes, researches, teaches, thinks, and does, then composition has been far

more productive in assisting students in acquiring some of these ways than others. Reading, I

would argue, does not currently rank highly on that list of tasks.

Indeed, if the discipline bases its progress in preparing students to perform disciplinary

tasks solely on a task’s visibility as a topic in its scholarship and graduate programs, it has done

comparatively well in preparing graduate students to teach. Most funded students across English

studies routinely complete a practicum as part of their graduate coursework, and institutions

implement a range of formal and informal mentorship programs. In terms of scholarship, TA

preparation is a regular topic in WPA: Writing Program Administration, and there are several

book-length volumes on the subject (Pytlik and Liggett; Roen et al.), not to mention the host of

teacher’s manuals attached to composition textbooks. Helping students to learn about and

practice using various research methods appears to be another area of strength in disciplinary

professional development. Methods courses are often a required component of Ph.D.

coursework. There is also a supply of research devoted to methods (though not all methodologies

used in the field are attended to with the same level of detailed explication), and there are

accessible “starting point” texts (Kirsch and Sullivan) that students can use to begin to map the

landscape of approaches to inquiry.

The discipline does less well in assisting graduate students to learn to write

professionally. Writing, of course, is central to graduate work and students engage in it

constantly, but there is little evidence that students, in aggregate, receive much consistent support

in learning the hidden conventions of writing professionally, apart from being immersed in a sea

of readings to osmose those conventions for themselves. There are a smattering of works taking

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up graduate-level writing problems and pedagogy (“Focused Instruction,” 1973; Bloom, 1981;

Sullivan, 1991; Micciche and Carr, 2011), but the trail of sources is narrow, much of it more than

two-decades old, and it seems to terminate at the point of making calls to pay attention to

graduate-student writing and to institute graduate-level writing courses. These calls have,

broadly speaking, incompletely and inconsistently prompted tangible changes to graduate

curricula. For example, Laura Micciche’s call for graduate-level writing courses is nearly

identical to one voiced by a CCCC workshop committee almost 40 years earlier: “English

departments need to provide practical instruction in composition for graduate students”

(“Focused Instruction”). Some programs do offer graduate writing seminars—Micciche

describes a rich course she has taught at her institution—but these courses are rarely a required

component of the core curriculum, historically offered as electives, and sometimes as noncredit-

bearing extracurriculars. My own Ph.D. program offered a writing course that didn’t quite

measure up to need: as an elective taught asynchronously online by a faculty member outside of

writing studies, it lacked a level of focus, accountability, expertise, feedback, and direct

engagement between instructor and student that would have improved its usefulness. There are

also some works aimed directly at graduate students as self-help, usually providing advice

regarding the writing of “endpoint” documents, like theses and dissertations (Swales and Feak),

but there’s not much aimed at improving the teaching of disciplinary writing to graduate students

while in course work. While I am grateful for the research and pedagogical scaffolding writing

studies offers in support of graduate-student writing, I don’t think we should be satisfied with

those offerings.

If writing studies has attended somewhat thinly to graduate-student professionalization in

the domain of writing—that which is the center of the field—it should prompt little surprise that

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it has attended practically not at all to supporting graduate students in the interrelated domain of

reading. Despite searches to prove otherwise, there is no body of literature for assisting graduate

students in learning to read the discipline. There are no courses—required, elective,

extracurricular, or otherwise. Support for reading, where it exists, is as invisible as the

disciplinary practices for reading that graduate students are often left to intuit and invent for

themselves. This project, in outlining threshold concepts and pedagogical structures for teaching

graduate-level professional reading, takes important steps towards offering something that

visibly addresses this aspect of student professionalization.

3. It Productively Deepens our Understanding of the Reading/Writing Connection.

Producing research and developing pedagogy on graduate-student reading affords

opportunity to deepen writing studies’ understanding of the interconnectivity of reading and

writing as literate practices—a value to which we often pay lip service but inconsistently explore

in research and apply to teaching practice.

The ubiquity of composition’s assumption that reading and writing are interlinked

activities is evident both in the frequency of these terms’ coappearance in the field’s position

statements as well as the invocation of their linkage in scholarship. A simple “Control+F” search

of the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Framework for Success in Postsecondary

Writing reveals that twelve of the twenty times “read” appears, it does so alongside “writ(e).”

Similarly, in the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s “Principles for the

Postsecondary Teaching of Writing,” seven of thirteen instances of “read(ing)” are paired with

nearby mentions of “writ(ing).” Compared to writing, which appears more than 150 times in the

former document and over 230 in the latter, reading hardly gets mentioned at all, but when it

does, it is most often in the context of writing. As for the invocation of writing and reading’s

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linkage in scholarship, Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg, and Sheridan Blau write “We would

like to suggest […] that reading must be theorized as foundationally linked to any understanding

of college-level writing” (xix). And these three are but a few in the host of scholars to make

similar claims or presume the truth of this linkage in making their own arguments about reading

(Bazerman; Bunn; Helmers x; Salvatori, “Reading and Writing”; Salvatori, “Conversations” 45).

The problem is, apart from the small but growing cadre of scholars in composition

devoted to reading, the conversation about reading and writing as interconnected activities

generally stops at uttering the phrase itself, never much delving into how reading and writing are

connected, why these connections are significant, or what impact this connectivity ought to have

on the teaching and learning of both reading and writing. Composition’s reading researchers

have for decades lamented the superficial attention paid to the reading/writing connection by the

rest of the field. Charles Bazerman opines that “the connection between what a person reads and

what a person then writes seems so obvious as to be truistic. And current research and theory

about writing have been content to leave the relationship as a truism, making no serious attempt

to define either mechanisms or consequences of the interplay between reading and writing”

(656). Mariolina Salvatori extends this complaint to pedagogy, noting that “it is one thing to say,

even to articulate how, reading and writing are interconnected […]; it is another to imagine and

develop teaching practices that both enact and benefit from that interconnectedness”

(“Conversations” 446). More recently, Salvatori and Patricia Donahue have reiterated their

displeasure that the field’s stated commitment to the reading/writing connection, embodied in the

phrase “to write is to read is to write,” has not historically yielded more practical results:

Although this chiasmus became a compact and economical way of (almost a password

for) alluding to and acknowledging a highly complex theoretical and pedagogical project,

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its potential was never as expansively or exhaustively examined as it deserved, nor were

its implications for both the teaching of reading and the teaching of writing fully

actualized. (“Stories about Reading” 204)

These reading researchers attempted to counter composition’s indifference to reading even as

they raised the plaint, offering nascent theories exploring the interconnectedness of reading and

writing. Bazerman, for example, articulates a “conversational model” for conceptualizing the

relationship between reading and writing, and Salvatori and Donahue have developed

pedagogical techniques for probing student difficulties with reading as a means for improving

performance in both reading and writing. Sadly, until recently, few others in the field took up

such projects, slowing progress toward deepening and extending this work and applying it

toward meaningful change in reading pedagogy fieldwide.

The reading/writing connection is important to us in writing studies because it is

generally believed that improvements in one aspect of literacy learning contribute to

improvements in another. Elizabeth Kalbfleisch writes, “recognition of the benefit of reading

instruction for accomplishing pedagogical goals in writing has always been tacitly recognized,

but this relationship has inconsistently commanded primary attention in our discussion of

teaching literacy” (39). Improving reading, we believe, will lead to improvements in writing, and

such invocations are not uncommon as justifying clauses for compositionists choosing to

perform reading research.

But I would go one step farther in linking the importance of reading instruction to writing

instruction by arguing that learning to read well according to the demands of an academic

context is necessary prior to learning to write well in that context, and it remains necessary

alongside writing in that context. Mariolina Salvatori suggests the prior-ness of reading to

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writing in claiming that “the improvement in writers’ ability to manipulate syntactic structures—

their maturity as writers—is the result, rather than the cause, of their increased ability to engage

in, and be reflexive about, the reading of highly complex texts” (“Reading and Writing” 659;

emphasis mine). To do academic writing well requires doing academic reading well. Consider,

for example, the practical impossibility of publishing a piece of research that does not both

demonstrate its embeddedness in understanding the field’s ongoing written conversations and its

ability to wield those conversations fluently in service to the author’s own purposes. The second

task is not possible to achieve without the first, and one cannot hope to publish without being

able to read the field. Recall, also, how the preceding examples of reading difficulty recovered

from scholarship demonstrate reading’s prior-ness to writing. Micciche, for example, laments the

immense body of knowledge that must be read, understood, and analyzed before one can

contribute meaningfully to a field through one’s writing. Reading and writing are connected, to

be sure, but reading, at least in an academic context, precedes writing.

This project responds to the calls of composition’s reading researchers to meaningfully

explore the reading/writing relationship and its implication for both theory and pedagogy. By

articulating a set of threshold concepts related to professional reading in the discipline, this

project creates opportunities for analytical comparison, deepening our understanding of the dual

nature of literacy by re-seeing writing knowledge as reading knowledge. In describing a model

for teaching professional academic reading through those threshold concepts, and in making

suggestions for reconfiguring reading’s role elsewhere in graduate curricula, this project also

pays attention to the pedagogical and pragmatic applications arising from probing reading and

writing’s theoretical interconnectedness.

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4. It Demystifies Academic Work by Making What We Know and Do Explicit.

Performing academic work successfully is predicated on acquiring a large, complex and

implicit body of disciplinary discursive knowledge. Not only must graduate students seeking to

enter a discipline become familiar with a host of topics that are often abstract and filled with

nuance, but they must also acquire ways of thinking about and through those topics that will

make them viable candidates for admission to the field. While anyone who has gone through

graduate school has appreciation for how much of that knowledge there is to learn and how

difficult that knowledge is to acquire, I wonder how many of us have appreciation for just how

much of what we learn becomes “hidden” to us once it is learned? That is, how many of us are

aware of the many strategies, patterns, and assumptions we employ daily to perform academic

work? The act of acquiring these strategies, patterns, and assumptions does not necessarily call

conscious attention to itself. As a result, much of what we collectively know and how we know

it—probably including how we read in academic contexts—is hidden to us. This information is

likewise hidden from graduate students who have yet to learn these strategies, patterns and

assumptions. This project aims to articulate the hidden ways of thinking and doing that underlie

reading acts in our discipline, thus furthering efforts to make our discipline’s hidden, invisible

knowledge explicit for our students and ourselves.

Decades ago, Haas and Flower suggested the need for explicit, active methods of

teaching that lay bare the hidden moves of rhetorical reading: “Can we expect merely to hand

students tools for building rich representations of text and set them to work? Or will rhetorical

reading require active teaching—teaching by direct instruction, by modeling, and by encouraging

students to become contributing and committed members of rhetorical communities?” (182). It is

only recently, however, that the discipline has more actively committed to making implicit

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disciplinary knowledge explicit and to actively teaching it to students, including through the

threshold concepts. Calls for explicitness and explication have encompassed all that we know

professionally about writing. Dan Keller has noted “that we need to ‘decode ourselves’ (182), to

more closely examine our practices and expectations and how those might be more clearly

articulated to students” (“A Framework” 44). And Kathleen Blake Yancey, writing on behalf of

the thirty-plus compositionists contributing to Naming What We Know, asserts that “we agree, as

Adler Kassner and Majewski argue, that we need to be explicit in working with both faculty and

students, and that explicitness […] facilitates transfer” (xxvii). The message is clear: to know

ourselves, to help bring newcomers into our disciplinary community, to better teach writing and

reading, we must uncover our secret knowledge, name it, and actively assist its sharing with any

who might seek to benefit from it.

Calls for making the teaching of reading an active, explicit component of writing-studies’

pedagogy, though previously addressed to first-year writing and writing-across-the curriculum

contexts, have been likewise numerous. Marguerite Helmers has argued that “as a discipline, we

need to define what we believe about reading processes and describe what we do to teach reading

before we can assess students’ progress and our own” (xiv; emphasis mine). Alice Horning

observes that “getting students to read mindfully is not easy, but it can be facilitated by making

the invisible processes of meaning-making more visible to students, so they can ‘see’ and reflect

on those processes” (“Introduction” 5, emphasis mine). Mary Lou Odom asserts that “making

reading a more overt element of our pedagogies and better articulated in our expectations can

only serve to reduce teacher anxiety and frustration and improve students’ performances with

regard to reading” (268-9). Finally, Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue contend:

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To reclaim the complex and elusive nature of reading, we need to reflect on, recapture,

and learn to disclose to our students some of the basic steps and strategies we have

become so proficient at that we often forget to acknowledge them. We need also to

engage students in activities that demonstrate the interconnectedness of reading and

writing and make certain moves visible and thus available for understanding and

improvement (“Unruly Reading” 318).

Across these calls, making the teaching of reading an active and explicit component of writing

studies’ pedagogy entails making its unseen practices of reading visible to ourselves—naming

what we know about reading—and then sharing, modeling these practices to students.

This project marries the discipline’s efforts to make its knowledge, reading practices, and

teaching explicit, extending those efforts beyond the confines of undergraduate classrooms to

graduate education, where they are no less needed.

What’s at Stake in Teaching Graduate Reading

The stories of reading difficulty recuperated above have already suggested that serious

difficulties with disciplinary reading can result in emotional and intellectual distress for those

who struggle. The significance of that distress itself should not be understated. But in addition to

the potential psychological harm caused by reading struggles, pondering the material

consequences for students experiencing such struggle has led me to a somewhat more

controversial claim: I want to suggest that reading troubles are at least one factor that can cause

graduate students to quit their programs. The Ph. D. Completion Project, a multiyear longitudinal

study of graduate completion and attrition rates at more than twenty universities across the

United States and Canada, found that just 49% of students enrolled in Ph.D. programs in the

humanities completed their degrees in ten years (Council of Graduate Schools 3). Difficulty

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reading may be a significant as-yet unstudied factor contributing to these low Ph.D. completion

rates.

I need to make two caveats before I elaborate this claim, though. First, reasons for

graduate attrition are multiple and unique to the circumstances of each student. Susan K.

Gardner, in summarizing the findings of multiple studies on graduate attrition finds that “There

is no one reason why doctoral students leave; indeed, collectively these efforts point to the

multifaceted nature of the attrition problem” (97-98). Trends in attrition that apply to many

students may be aggregated, but it would be irresponsible to attribute attrition conclusively to

any one factor. The Ph.D. Completion Project identifies no less than five categories of

intervention in improving doctoral degree completion rates—mentoring and advising, financial

support, program environment, research experience, and curricular and administrative processes

and procedures—each category encompassing multiple factors contributing to Ph.D. attrition.

Second, there is no study—as far as I have found—directly linking Ph.D. attrition to graduate

reading difficulties, but neither have I found any studies attempting to study such a linkage.

There is, however, a logical argument for why graduate reading difficulties could

reasonably play a role in attrition. Graduate writing difficulties, especially in the writing of the

dissertation, are acknowledged by the Ph.D. Completion Project as an attrition factor under the

“curricular and administrative processes” category and are a site of intervention at multiple of the

institutions taking part in the study. The study authors assert: “there is widespread recognition

that students at the dissertation stage feel isolated and vulnerable and universities are putting into

place a number of efforts to help students overcome these feelings and remain on track” (57).

One study respondent from Brown University went even further, acknowledging that “through

conversation with faculty [and students], we found that writing issues occur not only at the end

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of graduate training, but throughout” (62; brackets in original). Because (1) graduate students

can seriously struggle with their writing, (2) writing struggles are an acknowledged factor in

graduate attrition, (3) reading and writing are intimately connected, (4) graduate writing

problems can, in fact, be graduate reading problems and (5), to once more invoke Robert

Scholes, “we do not see reading,” at least some of the difficulties labeled as writing problems

causing attrition are probably also reading difficulties that institutional infrastructure is ill-

equipped to recognize (166). It follows, also, that difficulty reading may be a significant factor in

graduate attrition and that this factor is worthy of intervention. Such conclusions make intuitive

sense as well: the analysis and synthesis work necessary to weave the existing conversations of a

field into original research does not begin at the point of writing: it begins when researchers read

texts and note patterns, problems, comparisons, and inconsistencies in what they see that matter

to the disciplinary community. If graduate students don’t acquire knowledge of how their

discipline engages texts well enough to be able to see these things while they read, then they

have little hope to be able to write about them effectively.

The possibility that reading difficulty contributes to doctoral attrition is significant, firstly

for the students who invest their time, labor, intellect, and emotions into graduate work and may

ultimately leave without much to show for it (and who may even be damaged by the ordeal).

Secondly, this kind of attrition unnecessarily hurts the viability of graduate programs facing

increasing budgetary restrictions from cash-strapped institutions. It is likewise bad for the

institutions themselves, who invest considerable financial and personnel resources into graduate

education. Finally, it also weakens the breadth and diversity of perspectives participating in

writing studies by pushing out people who struggle to perform disciplinary reading but who, if

offered appropriate support, might otherwise become contributing scholars and instructors. For

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these reasons and all of those I have argued previously, teaching to graduate students a range of

practices and strategies for reading texts within the context of an academic discipline, and

teaching these things explicitly and consistently, would seem to be a moral imperative.

Threshold Concepts as Tools for Graduate Reading Instruction

What Are Threshold Concepts?

Threshold concepts were developed in the research of Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land and

have been ported to writing studies most notably via Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth

Wardle’s collection, Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies. This

project furthers the important work of articulating, theorizing, and applying threshold concepts to

disciplinary areas of study by naming what we in writing studies know (but may not know that

we know, and rarely outright say) about the ways we read as professionals in our field. Naming

new threshold concepts for reading is the work of chapter four of this volume. This section

reviews threshold concepts terminology and establishes their usefulness in teaching reading to

graduate students.

Threshold concepts are the oft-hidden presumptions and patterns that define the ways of

thinking and doing unique to a cultural group or community. They are hidden to insiders of that

group because they become such a ubiquitous, integral part of thinking that awareness of them

tends to recede from consciousness. They are likewise hidden to outsiders of the group, but for

these individuals, the hiddenness arises from the fact that (1) threshold concepts aren’t typically

stated explicitly unless insiders perform the difficult reflective work necessary to name them, and

(2) they are in no way intuitive or obvious for outsiders to understand unless those outsiders

undergo the transformation process to become an insider. In this way, threshold concepts act as

both a barrier and an entryway into a discursive community. Meyer and Land explain further:

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A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and

previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way

of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot

progress. As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a

transformed internal view of subject matter, subject landscape, or even world view. This

transformation may be sudden or it may be protracted over a considerable period, with

the transition proving troublesome. Such a transformed view or landscape may represent

how people ‘think’ in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or

experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more generally). (3)

In many ways, threshold concepts comprise the unique shared knowledge of a community—the

very center of what it tacitly believes that cause it to behave like no other that exists. Indeed,

Kathleen Blake Yancey has noted that writing studies’ threshold concepts “articulate the

substance of the field” (xxix). Because enculturating graduate students into the community of

writing teachers and researchers is a tacit, if not intentional, goal of graduate education, the

acquisition of these substance encapsulating threshold concepts—as well as how to teach and

learn through them—would seem to be of interest to students and faculty alike.

Not all knowledge that is important or central to a discipline is necessarily a threshold

concept, however. Meyer and Land distinguish between a “threshold concept,” the acquisition of

which tends to transform both subject matter and learner, and a “core concept” which “is a

conceptual ‘building block’ that progresses understanding of the subject; it has to be understood

but it does not necessarily lead to a qualitatively different view of subject matter” (6). Many

concepts are important to know to acquire a discipline’s content knowledge but do not require

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fundamental changes to the learner’s perspective or ways of seeing the world. Thus, all threshold

concepts are core concepts, but not all core concepts are threshold concepts.

From their definition, Meyer and Land extrude five distinguishing characteristics of

threshold concepts. Threshold concepts are (usually):

1. Transformative

2. Irreversible

3. Integrative

4. Bounded

5. Potentially troublesome

Threshold concepts are transformative in that, as noted above, their acquisition tends to change

the way the learner looks at a subject, and quite possibly, this “shift in perspective may lead to a

transformation of personal identity, a reconstruction of subjectivity” (7). Indeed, many of the

threshold concepts inherent to composition require both types of transformation—of subject

matter and of self—before professionalizing students can speak persuasively as insiders of the

community. Further, threshold concepts are irreversible in that once one has undergone

transformation, the internalized concept is so integrated into the learner’s ways of thinking that it

is (probably) impossible for that learner to return to a state of unknowing. Threshold concepts are

integrative in that they reveal “the previously hidden interrelatedness of something” (7).

Threshold concepts allow leaners to construct increasingly abstract and complex mental

frameworks for understanding aspects of how the world works, to see new connections between

what had been unrelated elements of experience. According to Meyer and Land, threshold

concepts are also often bounded, “in that any conceptual space will have terminal frontiers,

bordering with thresholds into new conceptual areas” (8). Threshold concepts overlap with one

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another, but they do have boundaries regarding their transformative potential which necessitate

that learners acquire a community’s entire system of threshold concepts to gain insider access.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, threshold concepts are potentially troublesome to learn

for several reasons, many of which are entwined with the preceding four characteristics.

What Makes Threshold Concepts Difficult to Learn?

The transformative nature of threshold concepts is troublesome because it usually entails

that the learner endures multiple exposures, interactions, and chances to practice employing it

over an unpredictable or extended time before “crossing over.” Meyer and Land acknowledge

that threshold concepts’ transformation of learner and subject matter can cause students to

become “stuck in an ‘in-between’ state in which they oscillate between earlier, less sophisticated

understandings, and the fuller appreciation of a concept” (xvi). Such oscillation within this

“liminal” state includes periods of regression as well as mimicry of knowledge of the threshold

concept, and may continue for weeks, months, or years depending upon the learner. In the case

of professionalizing graduate students, liminal states probably persist well into the writing of the

dissertation and quite likely stretch into the first years of the profession. All this time and

oscillation spent in the liminal state can, of course, be extremely frustrating or discouraging for

the learner.

The mimicry inherent to the liminal “in-between” state of acquiring a threshold concept

can itself be problematic in the context of graduate school. There are many forms of good

mimicry as Meyer and Land note—of copying, with greater and lesser degrees of success, the

habits and practices of insiders, of “both attempts at understanding and troubled

misunderstanding, or limited understanding” (24). But graduate school is also home to highly

intelligent people placed in a competitive environment, and where intelligence is currency,

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egotism and intellectual insecurity can emerge also. As a result, some of the more problematic

mimicry engaged in by graduate students manifests as pretense, a show to look smart when

performance expectations are high and financial resources and career opportunities in limited

supply. This kind of mimicry becomes a barrier to professionalization if students convince

themselves that their understanding of the field is complete. Graduate students and faculty alike

can become retrenched in their “troubled misunderstandings,” of disciplinary thresholds,

fostering resistance to further reflection or obtaining outside assistance in crossing them.

In addition to the troublesomeness of the liminal stage of threshold concept acquisition,

threshold concepts are also troublesome as forms of knowledge. David Perkins identifies five

forms of troublesome knowledge, each of which can apply to threshold concepts: ritual

knowledge, inert knowledge, conceptually difficult knowledge, foreign or alien knowledge, and

tacit knowledge. According to Perkins, “ritual knowledge has a routine and rather meaningless

character” (37). Ritual knowledge represents a set of scrutinized directions or recipes for how to

perform some activity. It is procedure followed by the performer automatically without thought

as to why. Threshold concepts risk being reduced to ritual knowledge when students receive and

habitually reproduce practices without reflection about the purposes, contexts, and conditions

that make a practice appropriate or not. Teacher retrenchment—teaching the same content in the

same way, year after year, without regard to pedagogical goals or efficacy of practices in

promoting student learning—can be a form of ritual knowledge. Reading, even at the graduate

level, can become ritualized knowledge when students perceive and experience it as a passive,

monolithic activity of receiving information from a text.

Inert knowledge is knowledge that individuals have and know exists but don’t much use

for anything. Perkins offers the traditional way of learning vocabulary words in school as an

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example of inert knowledge: their meanings are typically memorized for a test and then forgotten

by students who are never prompted to internalize their usage in everyday speech. Threshold

concepts, too, can become inert vocabulary words if learners fail to internalize the meaning or

way of thinking behind the words that name them.

The next two forms of troublesome knowledge, “conceptually difficult” and “foreign or

alien,” are often experienced together. Whereas the first two forms represent things to which

threshold concepts risk being reduced in the mind of the learner, these next are what make the

liminal stage of threshold-concept acquisition so contentious and protracted. Conceptually

difficult knowledge is just that: knowledge that is difficult to learn because it is more complex or

more abstract than what the learner already knows. It is hard for us to “wrap our brains around

it.” Any threshold concepts related to the reading of an academic or professional text are likely to

be conceptually difficult because these text’s authors almost always assume the phenomena

about which they write are the result of far more factors, with far more interactions among them,

than “lay” readers are accustomed to. In addition, conceptually difficult knowledge may also be

foreign or alien to the reader. Perkins writes that “foreign or alien knowledge comes from a

perspective that conflicts with our own” (39). Acquiring new threshold concepts may challenge

learners’ deeply held belief systems. Consider, for example, how many of composition’s

threshold concepts listed in Naming What We Know presume an underlying social-constructivist

epistemological stance: “1.1 Writing Is a Knowledge-Making Activity,” “1.3 Writing Expresses

and Shares Meaning to be Reconstructed by the Reader,” “3.0 Writing Enacts and Creates

Identities and Ideologies,” etc. Even when their conceptual difficulty is overcome, and students

begin to realize what these threshold concepts mean, the implied underlying meta-concept—that

knowledge of the world is constructed collectively by the humans living in it—poses a potential

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ideological threat to those coming to graduate education from a variety of cultural traditions

which assert that knowledge is received from a fixed authority. Resolving the internal conflicts

and paradoxes created by the juxtaposition of competing worldviews—or accepting a lack of

resolution to these things—accounts for much of the oscillation taking place during the liminal

stage of threshold-concept acquisition.

Finally, threshold concepts may be troublesome to learners in that the knowledge they

contain is tacit to the community in which that knowledge operates. Perkins writes: “much of the

knowledge we rely upon every day in both commonplace and professional activities is tacit: we

act upon it but are only peripherally aware or entirely unconscious of it” (40). This situation is

endemic to the threshold concepts defining academic disciplinary work. Our writing, as all

writing, is laden with presumptions about what the reader already knows and invisible signposts

guiding the reader as to how what we say should be interpreted. Next to their being difficult to

understand, it is the hidden, tacit nature of our threshold concepts for disciplinary reading that

ought to drive us to name them for the benefit of our students and ourselves.

How May Threshold Concepts Be Useful to Us?

As theory-making tools, threshold concepts are useful to us in writing studies to help us

map an as-yet uncharted portion of our field: what we know about writing’s reciprocal activity,

reading. They are a starting point to marshal how we already think, do, and believe. The lists of

threshold concepts comprising chapters two and four of this project draw heavily on existing

research in the discipline, and their coining shows that we already know more than we think

about reading. Further, threshold concepts can help us to discover the boundaries of what we

know so that we might look toward discovering what lies beyond them—what we might study

next to better help our understanding and our teaching of reading.

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Threshold concepts are useful to the teaching of reading—and not only to graduate

students—as “translational bridges” that make a discipline’s “hidden” ways of comprehending,

interpreting, and synthesizing information from professional texts transparent. They attempt to

put our discipline’s assumptions and academic language into terms that students can begin to

access from outside of our discipline, rather than asking them to intuit our ways of thinking

implicitly for themselves. Naming threshold concepts of reading provides a lexicon that can

guide student reflection on their reading habits by giving names to difficulties they may be

experiencing. This naming gives students a measure of control over that difficulty and may help

somewhat to decrease the time and intensity of their struggles. And even if explicitly learning

about and through threshold concepts proves not to shorten the time graduate students spend

stuck in liminal states, learning that there are hidden processes and presumptions to reading may

go a long way in supporting their determination to continue to undertake the struggle of graduate

education. Through learning about threshold concepts for reding, students can come to

understand that academic reading is difficult, that everyone experiences difficulty with reading,

that experiencing difficulty is normal and ok, and that working through that difficulty is an

iterative, time-consuming process that requires patience, humility, and perseverance.

But important as it is to acknowledge threshold concepts’ potential for helping to affirm

graduate student struggles and bolster morale, I think explicit exposure to threshold concepts can

offer them much more than a productive disposition toward difficulty with professional reading.

The strategies for teaching graduate reading described in chapter five—what I have some to call

the “reading cycle sandwich”—advocate for making reading visible and hearable in the graduate

seminar, for making academic reading processes—their practice, reflection, and analysis—a

central activity of in-class and out-of-class learning. Reading is transformed from private to

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public events of shared textual meaning-making, modeling of thinking processes, and reflection

upon difficulties and successes. With threshold concepts as the framework of knowledge behind

this public reading activity, the aim is to provide catalyzing experiences that support students in

their long-term journeys of coming to acquire the discipline and its hidden ways of being. As

Meyer and Land helpfully remind us, threshold concepts cannot be taught and learned within a

defined timeframe because they represent fundamental shifts in how learners see the world, and

there is no way to predict how long it will take or what experiences will be required for any

learner to “cross the threshold,” of internalized understanding. However, by introducing students

to threshold concepts and by providing scaffolded opportunities to practice, explore, and reflect

upon them, instructors can help orient students in the right direction toward professionalization.

As translational bridges, threshold concepts become the subject and substance of pedagogical

modeling activities designed to help graduate students cross into the academy.

One final benefit of using threshold concepts to teach academic reading to graduate

students is that it may, in the long term, help the discipline to better teach reading to

undergraduate students. Composition’s reading researchers have focused much of their efforts on

advocating for the need to teach reading in undergraduate courses, but there are few disciplinary

mechanisms for training new instructors in how to teach reading. As Ellen Carillo notes,

“graduate students rarely receive training in how to productively attend to reading in writing

courses and what that attention to reading might contribute to instruction in writing” (Securing

21). When graduate faculty teach threshold concepts and reading strategies to graduate students,

and model how they do so, they are demonstrating for their students a range of pedagogical tools

that they can adopt, adapt, and innovate from in their own teaching. In other words, faculty can

help prepare future teachers of reading by exposing them in their own learning to the practices,

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strategies, and frameworks that are valued. While teaching graduate students to read

professionally is not in itself a substitute for explicit teacher training in reading, it may be an

important first step leading to it. In the absence of formal training structures, instructors tend to

mimic the teaching they have experienced, and experiencing the teaching of reading through

threshold concepts in a rich environment of well-theorized and carefully organized practices at

least gives graduate instructors useful memories for imagining what reading instruction could

look like. Before we can successfully implement a field-wide reading pedagogy for

undergraduate students, it might be that we must learn how to approach our own learning to read

with greater directedness and reflection. In other words, before we can teach others how to read

our discipline, it may be necessary to teach ourselves—and future generations of ourselves—

how we do so. Threshold concepts are one tool that can help with this self-teaching.

Previous Efforts to Link Reading with Threshold Concepts

Two previous efforts in writing studies to link threshold concepts to the topic of reading

deserve attention for their impact on this project. Both productively deepen the

interconnectedness of threshold concepts and reading but imagine the relationship between these

topics in somewhat different ways than I do in this project.

In the first of these efforts, Brian Gogan has theorized reading as “transformation

unbound,” positioning it as the thinking experience through which conceptual thresholds may be

crossed, regardless of the context or discipline to which the learner seeks to gain access. He

writes:

Reading is crucially important to learning across disciplines—so much so that reading

might be said to be positioned before, at, around, and after the metaphorical threshold

invoked by threshold concept researchers. Key to reading’s importance is its ubiquity:

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reading, much like writing, is an activity that extends beyond disciplinary boundaries and

informs transformative learning in most, if not all disciplinary fields and professional

organizations. Put differently, reading can be viewed as transformation unbound—that is,

a kind of activity that leads to transformative effects irrespective of a particular

community. (46)

I agree that reading—as a mode of thinking alongside writing—is an activity through which

conceptual thresholds may be crossed regardless of discipline, but whereas Gogan’s focus lies in

articulating the interdisciplinary affordances of reading’s transformative potential, this project’s

concern is narrowed to our own discipline and how our practitioners are initiated into it. As such,

while reading can indeed be a conceptually transformative activity in any context, the way that

reading can be performed effectively in a particular context is constrained by the practices

deemed acceptable to the community within which and for which one reads. Reading’s

performance is always conducted and judged through a set of context-bound practices. These

practices include hidden assumptions or patterns of thought—threshold concepts—that are not

easily observable nor learnable to newcomers of the community. Thus, while reading is an

activity through which the crossing of thresholds occurs, as contextually bound practice, it is also

composed of threshold concepts itself.

In a second effort linking threshold concepts to reading, Patrick Sullivan takes up work

similar to this project in defining a reading-based disciplinary threshold concept: “deep reading.”

He advocates that “we embrace deep reading as a threshold concept in our discipline” and that

we think of “reading as a luminous, creative, and profoundly meaning-making activity,” both

sentiments with which I broadly agree (“The World Confronts Us” 113). He defines deep

reading as “an active, generative process of intellectual inquiry built around reading and

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sustained engagement with complex, ill-structured problems.” (“Deep Reading” 145). Such

inquiry, he writes, “privileges student immersion in confusion, uncertainty, and ‘chaos’”, and it

“embraces engagement with ‘troublesome knowledge’ as essential for the development of

mature meaning-making” (145). Sullivan’s notion of deep reading entails both reading and

writing activities and is designed to promote transfer. Indeed, deep reading, for Sullivan, seems

to be a package holding a little bit of everything: a complete pedagogical framework that

encompasses a host of definitions, theories, values, and practices ascribed to reading:

The pedagogy of deep reading I am theorizing here is designed to target and engage this

‘profound generativity’ of the mind. This pedagogy is not, therefore, focused exclusively

on how we read and decode assigned texts, although devoting class time and attention to

discussing reading strategies and decoding assigned readings collaboratively is certainly

an essential part of it. Deep reading is also not simply close reading of texts, like those

famously championed by the New Critics and scholars like I. A. Richards and William

Epson and more recently by Lehman, Roberts, and Antao, although close reading is an

important part of it. Nor is deep reading exclusively what Thomas Newkirk calls ‘slow

reading,’ which focuses on ‘the quality of attention that we bring to our reading, with the

investment we are willing to make’ (2), even though this is also an essential component

of the curriculum I am proposing here. Deep reading is also not focused only on difficult

texts, although there is considerable value, of course, in assigning readings that may first

appear beyond students’ ability and that position students in a ‘zone of proximal

development’ (Vygotsky 79-91; Salvatori and Donahue, Elements). (147)

This packaging gestures to the first important difference between this project’s conception of

threshold concepts and that of Sullivan’s: this project does not see threshold concepts, or any

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individual threshold concept, as a complete and coherent pedagogical framework in and of itself.

Rather, threshold concepts can be components of any pedagogy for the teaching of reading and

writing. They are a list of statements distilling the thinking behind disciplinary practices into

digestible chunks so that learners can more easily see the thresholds they must cross to enter new

discourse communities. This project presents threshold concepts as particularly useful heuristics

through which and about which students can more deeply reflect on their difficulties with

academic reading.

The second difference between Sullivan’s conceptions of threshold concepts and my own

is chiefly one of number: Sullivan proposes seeing reading as a singular threshold concept while

I propose seeing it as comprised of many. Reading, as I have invoked our field to establish, is the

complex, reciprocal communicative activity to writing. It stands to reason, then, that to do justice

to that significance and complexity, we would be better served considering disciplinary acts of

reading as embedded within multiple threshold concepts rather than encapsulating them into one.

Threshold concepts, though, are ultimately constructs—devices we humans invent for naming,

organizing, and teaching our knowledge. Depending upon how we choose to categorize that

knowledge, we can indeed bundle all of it under one heading like “deep reading,” or we can

attempt to subdivide that knowledge, as Adler-Kassner and Wardle do in Naming What We

Know. This subdivision can be performed ad infinitum et ad nauseum.

The question becomes, then, how many threshold concepts are ideal and what purposes

ought they serve? Quantifying an ideal number of threshold concepts is a messy proposition at

best. A singular threshold concept, I would argue, is useful for propelling forward theoretical

knowledge in our field, but it is less useful for shaping pedagogical action improving the

teaching of reading for our students. To be sure, it is a significant movement to claim that our

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field knows something about reading and then attempt to name that something specifically. I

fear, though, that such a singular mass of knowledge would remain as intangible and inaccessible

to our students as not naming it at all. If we wish to use the explicit teaching of threshold

concepts as objects driving reflection about how students read and write, then I think we must

make those objects smaller and more concrete, able to be looked at both individually and as

pieces in a larger puzzle of disciplinary professionalization. Naming and teaching too many

threshold concepts, on the other hand, also risks overwhelming students for similar reasons.

Thus, I propose a balanced approach: name multiple, but keep them to a manageable number.

More importantly than this, though, the threshold concepts we name must be relevant to the

purposes for which we use them. For this project, that manageable number ended up being

nineteen (five “foundational” threshold concepts listed in chapter two and fourteen more listed in

chapter four) and their purpose was to address the aspects of writing-studies’ reading practices

that graduate students are likely to find most difficult.

Threshold Concepts: Limitations and Caveats

Threshold concepts, though a useful reflective and pedagogical tool, are not a panacea for

disciplinary problems with writing studies’ relationship to reading. In fact, their use as such tools

poses problems and concerns that need to be addressed. This project advocates for transparency

in argumentation, a stance which entails problematizing its pedagogical and theoretical

frameworks, meaningfully acknowledging criticisms to them, and offering robust responses. The

bulk of this work probing the limitations and caveats of threshold concepts is performed in

chapters three and five where such discussion is more relevant to those chapters’ local content.

Chapter three responds in depth to limitations of threshold concepts as a theory-making

framework as part of discussion of the project’s research methods, and chapter five responds to

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several risks that inhere to using threshold concepts as pedagogical tools. Here, I wish only to

acknowledge that any research path presents its affordances and drawbacks and propose that

researchers have much to gain from problematizing their own work. Still, when used responsibly,

I believe that threshold concepts offer greater benefits for the research and teaching of reading

than their drawbacks.

Chapter Summaries

This chapter laid out the aim of this project: to work toward an explicit graduate reading

curriculum embedded in disciplinary threshold concepts for reading. It has made the case for

why graduate students could benefit from sustained, explicit reading instruction: because they

struggle to read disciplinary texts and because doing so upholds what we as a discipline have

said we value about reading and writing. The chapter also introduced threshold concepts and

described their usefulness as a vehicle for teaching graduate reading.

Chapter two situates threshold concepts in a larger theoretical framework for the type of

reading that I advocate teaching to graduate students. It defines this type of reading as

“professional academic reading” and constructs a five-principled theory of what reading is and

does. These principles are extracted from the writings of various reading researchers drawn from

composition and its allied fields of linguistics, educational psychology, and literature. While this

chapter is not formatted to foreground these five principles as threshold concepts in the same

way as those listed in chapter four, the principles it contains constitute “foundational” threshold

concepts for reading upon which many of those in chapter four are premised.

Chapter three outlines the methods by which I derived the list of threshold concepts

comprising chapter four. It attempts to answer Peter Smagorinsky’s call for greater transparency

in presenting the methods and methodologies by which researchers produce their work and it

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extends the exigency for this call to theory-based research. The chapter describes the affordances

and limitations inherent to using theoretical methods as well as employing threshold concepts as

a theory-making framework. It then “pulls back the curtain” on the threshold concept creation

process, telling three narrative “developer diaries” of how I conceived of, revised, and evaluated

threshold concepts for inclusion in chapter four’s list.

The main list of threshold concepts for reading occupies chapter four. These threshold

concepts are formatted in a way similar to that used by Adler-Kassner and Wardle in Naming

What We Know: as encyclopedic entries. Each entry includes an explanation of the concept,

discussion of what makes the concept “troublesome” to learn, what makes the concept useful to

acquire in improving one’s understanding of reading or performing reading like an academic,

and referential “links” to related threshold concepts.

Chapter five moves from the realm of theory to practice, explaining how the threshold

concepts named in the preceding chapter may be integrated into a model for sustained explicit

reading instruction that I call the “reading cycle sandwich.” This model is designed to be

adaptable and “droppable” into a variety of instructors’ existing course designs. In addition to

foregrounding the identification and analysis of student reading difficulties through use of

threshold concepts, this model incorporates several well-regarded strategies for teaching reading

suggested by researchers in composition and education. Some of these strategies include “read-

aloud” protocols, teacher demonstrations, and guided practice activities.

As something of an attached epilogue, the very end of chapter five zooms out to reflect

on the project’s implications—what has been learned about how the field understands reading

and how it may be taught or taught differently to graduate students. This section also reflects on

what the project has not accomplished and what further research is still needed at the

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intersections of the topics of reading, writing studies, and graduate education. Of note, it offers

some musings for how writing studies might reconfigure the field’s relationship with reading to

support graduate reading instruction throughout the entire curriculum beyond coursework,

through preliminary/qualifying exams, and into the thesis/dissertation stage. It asks what might

be gained if the discipline were to move away from its seeming focus on content coverage and

what we know, instead focusing on showing students how members of a discipline make

knowledge and teach that knowledge to others.

Throughout the winding courses of these four remaining chapters, I hope this theme

resonates with readers: sustained, explicit attention to reading and reading instruction—

particularly at the graduate level, but also at all educational stages—matters.

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CHAPTER 2. TOWARDS A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR GRADUATE

INSTRUCTION IN READING: FIVE PRINCIPLES

Chapter Overview

The preceding chapter advocated for sustained, explicit reading instruction at the

graduate-level and made several moves in service to that goal. It overviewed the current status of

such reading instruction, concluding that while it is taking place in many instances, any attention

given to reading is the purview of individual faculty members who have come to recognize its

need and value to students, not a component of pedagogical practice explicitly supported by the

field collectively in its scholarship and professional initiatives. That chapter also began to define

an instantiation of what sustained graduate reading instruction might look like, a task that will

require the length of the project to fully illustrate. As important, it made a multipronged

argument for why the teaching of reading to graduate students is so crucially important. It did so

by first pointing out some of the more problematic aspects of the discipline’s relationship with

reading and their effects on its membership, and second by demonstrating how the teaching of

reading at all educational levels is a logical extension of the discipline’s espoused values.

Finally, it introduced threshold concepts as a valuable tool for teaching graduate-level reading. In

short, chapter one laid much context and groundwork.

This chapter extends that groundwork, explaining in-depth the definition of reading from

which the project proceeds and which it aims to teach to graduate students. As part of that

definitional work, it articulates five principles grounded in theories drawn from composition and

allied fields. Each of these five principles, in addition to undergirding the project’s definition of

reading, constitutes a base-level threshold concept upon which the larger list in chapter four

builds.

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What is Reading?

As employed in common usage, the meaning of the word “reading” would seem so

apparent as to obviate explanation. One sets eyes to a text, things happen in the brain to make

sense of the symbols that appear thereupon, and, voila, reading. But delving into the robust

scholarship on the topic reveals that “reading” is a most slippery term that names multiple and

complex overlapping frameworks seeking to understand the cognitive and social activities that

occur when humans derive meaning from marks on a page or images on a screen.

To demonstrate the complexity of what is involved in reading a text, and thereby of

defining the act, consider this list of cognitive and physiological activities attendant to traditional

print literacy: “phonemic awareness, word recognition, decoding knowledge, vocabulary

knowledge, comprehension, inferential reasoning, the writing process, spelling,” and “response

to literature,” among many other things (Leu et al.1590-91). Most researchers focus their

writings on only a subset of these activities, and this list excludes much of the contextually

nuanced ways of thinking attendant to professional-level reading within a discipline. And not

only are there a host of activities attendant to reading, but there are also multiple, intersecting,

competing and complementary theoretical lenses through which to understand the significance of

those activities. Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue note, for example, that reading “is a

complex term that signifies a range of ideas, practices, assumptions, and identities. The

recognition of its complexity only increases when it is understood that different theories of

reading lead to different approaches to the reading of texts […] in addition to the teaching of

writing” (“Stories about Reading” 203). Indeed, that reading is a much more complex activity

than it is perceived to be by the general public is a primary point of agreement among reading

researchers. Marguerite Helmers contends that “reading is not a simple process of absorbing the

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qualities of the best that has been said from the Great Books that appear on the syllabi in

departments of English, but a complex, ever-changing process of situational interaction and self-

reflection with words, images, and other readers” (ix; emphasis in original). Similarly, Mary Lou

Odom asserts:

Student reading is a complexity at any level. Characterized by a transparency that renders

it too easily and too often overlooked, explicit reading instruction tapers off precipitously

after elementary school as students, teachers, and testing begin to focus on the texts being

read rather than the strategies used to read them. (267)

Finally, Chris Anson writes:

College reading must be understood as much more complex than common definitions

often allow. It is the process of actively constructing meaning from text, including

multimedia manifestations of text, in the context of specific genres, domains of

knowledge, and specialized uses of language. It involves a transaction between authorial

intention, features of text, and the reader’s instantiation of schemas and other forms of

existing knowledge. (28)

Anson’s comments are particularly apt because they gesture to some of the things that make

reading in academic disciplines uniquely difficult: complex and unfamiliar genres, novel

“domains of knowledge” with their own assumptions and ways of thinking, and different uses of

language. The message here is clear, though: reading is much more complicated and contextually

nuanced than even the institution of school often represents it as.

Ultimately, any researcher of reading must understand that definitions, types, theories,

and models of what reading is, how it works, and how it should be taught are always complex,

multiple, and dependent upon context (Who is speaking about reading? Which kinds of texts are

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being read? For what purposes? Under what conditions?). At the same time, though,

undergirding this list of statements about the complexity of reading are common theoretical

presumptions (reading involves interaction between text and reader, active construction of

meaning, etc.) many of which also undergird the operational definition of reading driving this

project. Making the theoretical presumptions that drive this operational definition explicit is the

primary work of this chapter.

Professional Academic Reading: A Definition

That there exist multiple types of reading require placing some definitional brackets on

the kind of reading this project advocates teaching to graduate students. Most graduate students

are excellent readers in a general sense, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t struggle with the

specific conditions of reading professionally in academic contexts. Thus, this project is interested

in cultivating among graduate student professional academic reading—the range of practices,

processes, and ways of thinking employed by academics to successfully comprehend, critically

interact with, and make use of research texts in their own original, professional writings.

Certainly, there is great variation among how members of the field read, but there are likewise

patterns and constraints shared among us, and such patterns can be named and known. But to

better communicate the kind of reading for which this project advocates, let’s break down the

definition, piece by piece.

By “practices, processes, and ways of thinking,” it is meant the oft-hidden assumptions

and patterns of thought unique to and shared among members of a disciplinary discourse

community. These assumptions and patterns constitute the “threshold concepts” the project

articulates (here and in chapter four) and makes use of as a teaching tool (in chapter five).

Recalling the definition of threshold concepts in the preceding chapter, it is useful to think of

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them metaphorically as semipermeable boundaries: walls of imbricated culturally-specific

knowledge that separate insiders—those who are academics in terms of what they think and do

and accepted as such within their discourse communities—from those who are not yet. The walls

are passable, but only in one direction, and usually not without great difficulty and

transformation on the part of the subject passing through.

By “comprehend,” it is meant one’s effort to understand the meaning, the points, the

argument of a piece of writing in ways congruent to how the author is trying to communicate or

in ways in which the community for which the reading is performed will deem acceptable. There

is, for multiple reasons, nothing simple or natural about understanding academic texts. For one,

as review of Louise Rosenblattt’s transactional theory of reading and writing will later show, a

reader never interacts directly with an author’s intention or meaning, but only at a distance

through the features and conventions written into the text. Thus, even when readers are

generously “listening” to an author, they are always only constructing their “best guess” of what

the author meant to say, and this “guessing game” is a complex cognitive and social dynamic.

For two, academic texts are so enmeshed in the threshold concepts of the communities that

produce them that an outsider must have internalized at least a portion of them to build an

understanding of a text, a “guess,” that could resemble something acceptable to that community.

Acquisition of these threshold concepts, whether encountered as overt statements or implicitly

intuited by learners, is necessary for effective reading comprehension in our discipline.

Of course, to become an academic and to stay one requires far more of graduate students

in their reading than comprehension alone. Thus, “critically interact with,” means the analysis,

synthesis, and evaluation of academic texts and their arguments while and after comprehension is

achieved. By “make use of,” it is meant the processes by which academics combine and

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recombine (apply) ideas from the multiple texts they’ve read with their own thoughts to produce

original research writings. The definition’s emphasis on describing reading in terms of the

higher-order thinking tasks (analysis, synthesis, evaluation, application) required of graduate

student readers is heavily influenced by Alice Horning and Elizabeth Kraemer, who in turn

model their thoughts on Linda Flower’s “critical reading”:

Reading refers to getting meaning from print, whether the print is viewed on paper or on

a screen. In college courses in writing and elsewhere, however, reading must go beyond

just getting meaning: Readers must be able to analyze texts to see how parts fit together.

They must also be able to synthesize different readings on the same topic or issue so they

can see a range of perspectives and/or research on the topic or issue. In addition, students

must be able to evaluate the materials they read. […] Finally, critical reading entails

students’ ability to make use of what they read for their own purposes. (10)

Such higher-order thinking tasks are crucial: they are the threshold at which graduate students’

thinking about texts transforms from reading to writing because they are the points at which

students begin to put texts (what they are given) in conversation with, and in service to, their

own purposes (what they create).

The kind of reading outlined here is an intensely practical one—one that foregrounds

academic reading as labor. In the sense that academic work is a job through which a worker

obtains the means to sustain life, and to the extent to which the publication of scholarship is often

the privileged component of tenure and promotion decisions, graduate students must learn to

“read like us,” so that they can write like us, so that they can earn a living. “Read like us,” should

be construed as the broad swath and diversity of approaches to reading that are effectively used

by current practitioners. To the extent that such a swath might prove a boundary keeping out

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other approaches to reading, the legitimacy of this swath can and should be challenged and the

swath broadened, but communities always place boundaries on what they do and how they do it,

and students would likely find an easier time challenging such boundaries if, firstly, they have

gained the insider status to the community that affords them agency to do something about those

boundaries and, secondly, if they know what those boundaries are. A consequence of this

perspective on reading as labor is that what becomes far more important for graduate curricula

than assigning students to read any particular text is to teach them how to read the kinds of texts

we read and in the ways we read them when they have need to do so.

The type of reading advocated in this project bears both similarities and key differences

to what Ira James Allen has dubbed “instrumental reading.” Instrumental reading is “driven by

the exigencies of the situations in which academics labor as knowledge workers, which as often

as not have no very direct connection with a simple love of the text or of knowledge” (100).

Thus, instrumental reading is performed so that those in the academy may “produce themselves

as institutionally viable subjects” (100). Instrumental reading is reading as labor to perform a

task—a means to an end. The counterpoint to instrumental reading, in Allen’s binary schemata,

is “real reading,” which is characterized as an “ethical engagement with the words of others,” or

reading for the love of ideas:

This is the reading academics cannot always teach but that we hope to foster or even

inspire. Real reading offers more than “mere” comprehension (as though that were not

already quite something). For Haas and Flower (1988: 170), “critical reading,” real

reading, “involves more than careful reading for content, more than identification of

conventional features of discourse, . . . and more than simple evaluation based on

agreeing or disagreeing.” Rather, it means building “equally sophisticated, complex

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representation[s] of meaning” to keep pace with “sophisticated, difficult texts.” It has

something to do, in the now painful idiom of Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren’s

How to Read a Book, with “elevation” (1972: 8–10). Real reading, for Adler and van

Doren, is an “art” and a “process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the

symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the

power of its own operations” (8). (99-100)

The fulcrum of Allen’s binary is reader motivation—the leisure and volition of real reading

versus the labor and practicality of instrumental reading. Allen rightfully acknowledges his

schemata as “a binary heuristic as problematic and useful as any other,” (99) further clarifying

that, “I only offer real and instrumental as covering terms for already extant ways of speaking

and thinking; at the most, these are tendencies that can be regarded as both ever-present and

often conflicting. They are heuristic categories reflecting, rhetorically enough, the ways in which

we discourse about reading” (101). Even so, Allen seems to uphold the privileging of real

reading in this binary, attributing to it a kind of moral superiority as well as most of the

components of higher order-thinking writing instructors desire their students to engage in when

reading for their classes. He does this even as he acknowledges a disconnect between this

idealized “real” reading and academics’ actual reading practices:

My survey respondents suggested that what “academic reading” consists of for academics

is often different from the “real reading” that undergirds the enterprises of English studies

and that we often request of students. Instead, much of their reading tends to be what we

might call “instrumental reading”. (100)

The type of reading proposed by this project shares with Allen’s definition of instrumental

reading the metaphor of academic reading as labor, but it lacks any binary moral judgment.

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Instead, this project accepts instrumental purposes and practices for reading as necessary to

doing academic work—neither good nor bad in themselves, just reflective of what actual readers

are doing—and therefore valuable to make explicit for everyone in our discipline.

Indeed, a binary conception of reading like that described by Allen is troubling in several

ways that perpetuate problematic aspects of the field’s relationship with reading. If, for example,

“real reading” involves “ethical engagement” with others’ ideas, doesn’t this imply that

“instrumental reading” does not? If compositionists subscribe to this binary, is it surprising that

they might feel guilt when they must skim texts only to obtain information necessary for research

writings? This project assumes that no type of reading is more or less ethical than another, but

some strategies and processes to approaching a text may be more or less appropriate in helping

readers accomplish their purposes—purposes which include reading for leisure as well as to

write research texts. And, if all reading has a purpose, then “real reading,” is always necessarily

“instrumental reading.” Furthermore, I would contend that instrumental reading in our discipline

absolutely requires of us to engage in the higher-order thinking that Allen tends to afford to real

reading. One can critically and deeply engage with the ideas of others through reading—even

derive some form of fulfillment or satisfaction from doing so—but not experience leisurely

pleasure.

The kind of academic reading imagined by this project is thus always labor that is

enmeshed with many other complex motivations for reading and writing. The reason I think it so

important to acknowledge the labor of academic reading is that it is far easier to accept the

significance of difficulties experienced while performing labor than those experienced while

engaged in leisure. Labor entails struggle—at least at times—and struggle that matters in ways

more immediate than struggles encountered during leisure. In seeing disciplinary reading in this

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way, I hope that the reading struggles that all of us academics experience in our reading lives—

and I do believe we all struggle, albeit at varying times and to varying degrees, frequencies, and

durations—take on new importance for us. I hope, also, that the particular struggles graduate

students are likely to encounter while acculturating to an academic discipline invite faculty to

reflect deeply on their practices for supporting students in those struggles. Such reflection is

healthy for all faculty, whether we have actively taught reading in our classes for many years or

never thought to do so. Such reflection helps to better align the kinds of reading we say we value,

those we actually engage in to complete our work, and those we teach to graduate students,

ultimately leading to more-sustained, more-responsive, and more-purposeful instruction.

What Reading Is: Five Theoretical Principles

The following five principles of reading elaborate on the theoretical groundings of the

definition provided above. What are described here aren’t new theories of reading, but rather an

amalgamation of many existing ones, a synthesis of the strands of thought that have influenced

this project’s arguments and been synthesized into an operational understanding. “Operational”

implies a non-final, “good-enough-for-now” framework that allows one to operate, to move from

theory to action while articulating a coherent set of beliefs that remain open to later revision. The

five principles are drawn from theories of reading located across the fields of composition and

rhetoric, literature, linguistics, and cognitive psychology, but even those that arose from sister

fields are unlikely to read as entirely foreign: all have had some level of influence on writing

studies. Together, these principles represent much of what reading is and has been to our field.

They inevitably overlap and intersect, and they have even conflicted or been criticized by

scholars at various times in their life spans. Even so, each has a strand of truth useful in weaving

together a more complex tapestry of the activity of reading:

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1. Reading is Active Construction of Meaning from a Text.

2. Reading is Cognition.

3. Reading is Socially Situated.

4. Reading is a Transaction Reader and Text.

5. Reading is Rhetorical.

Importantly, each of these principles is itself a threshold concept, though I have chosen not to

format their presentation here in quite the same way as those appearing in chapter four. Each

principle is a statement of what our field knows about reading that has been extrapolated from

previously existing scholarship. Careful readers of Naming What We Know will note clear

parallels with how threshold concepts are presented there and how they appear here, both in the

general formatting of these statements and in the mirroring of specific threshold concepts from

that volume. None of these principles are easily learned to the point of internalization, but once

learned they are transformative of the learner’s thinking on the topic of reading in a way that is

probably irreversible. They are integrative with each other and they collectively form important

boundaries in what the discipline knows about reading. These are the first threshold concepts of

reading—the premises of disciplinary knowledge from which the later ones of chapter four are

built.

1. Reading Is Active Construction of Meaning from a Text

When someone reads to understand a text in the way that academics in their disciplines

do, rather than passively receiving information fully-formed and embedded in the text, said

someone is engaged in an active process of constructing meaning—building an interpretation in

one’s mind—from it. Such a proposition is ubiquitous in professional literature in writing

studies. Recently, Ellen Carillo, in Securing a Place for Reading in Composition, has asserted

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“that both practices of reading and writing involve construction—or composition—of meaning,”

and also “that reading is a deliberate intellectual practice that helps us make sense of—

interpret—that which surrounds us” (5-6; emphasis added). Christina Haas and Linda Flower,

writing almost thirty years prior, express a similar view: “There is growing consensus in our field

that reading should be thought of as a constructive rather than a receptive process: that ‘meaning’

does not exist in a text but in readers and the representations they build” (167). Reading is made

not begotten. A text “means” nothing without human minds to create meaning from it. Even the

coded system of marks on a page or screen called “language” has no significance apart from

what humans who know that system make of them. Given writing studies’ long imbrication with

social-constructivist and rhetorical theories of writing, the idea that writing’s reciprocal activity,

reading, is likewise constructive is neither novel nor controversial.

The principal is worth making explicit, however, because it suggests that the act of

comprehending a text is far more complicated than is often supposed and that learning to

comprehend texts is a process more difficult and more in need of instruction than is often

provided. The principal intimates that, because meaning must be constructed from a text, there is

nothing natural or facile about understanding it. Reading requires mental labor and, more

importantly, the acquisition of tools on the part of the reader to build a reasonable understanding,

especially when a text is carefully situated within an intellectually dense and highly implicit

discourse like an academic discipline. If writing studies internalizes the notion that professional

academic reading is a constructive, interpretive act, one that requires intimate knowledge of

patterns of thought unique to and possessed only by a particular disciplinary community (see

principle 3, “Reading is Socially Situated,” this chapter), and if it acknowledges that such

knowledge is necessary in constructing meaning from a text prior to and alongside critical

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analysis of research texts, then it cannot maintain the position that graduate students are prepared

to read the field without instructional support in learning the ways in which the field thinks.

Importantly, this discussion of the constructivist nature of reading and comprehension has

not yet explained in detail how that construction operates. Rather, this explanation will come

through discussion of the remaining four principles, each of which relies upon this first one.

2. Reading is Cognition.

When human beings read, they construct the meaning of the text by thinking about it.

More specifically, they perform this construction by mentally integrating what is new—the

content, ideas, messages, themes, arguments, perspectives, etc.—from the text with their

repertoire of prior experiences. The notion that reading involves the human brain and thinking

might seem too obvious to mention at all, but composition has had an uneasy historical

relationship with cognitive psychology, the field from which most research studying the

relationship between the mind and reading has been conducted, and it has therefore sometimes

downplayed the cognitive aspect of reading and how it can enrich understanding of the act.

Discussion of cognition is included here for several important reasons: (1) to emphasize that

reading is thinking, (2) to articulate two concepts from cognitive psychology, "schemata” and

“cognitive flexibility” that help explain what happens in the brain when humans try to

understand something they read, and (3) to recuperate a more productive relationship between

composition and cognitive psychology—one that allows the discipline to recognize the

problematic historical role some cognitive theories have played in the teaching of writing

without discounting what they can still offer our understanding on the topic.

Starting, with the first of the two concepts listed above, “schemata” were introduced to

psychology by Jean Piaget nearly a century ago and have been greatly expanded upon since.

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“Schemata” names a set of mental blueprints or plans that an individual constructs, deconstructs,

rearranges, and applies to understanding new information that is to be learned. Such information

includes the content of a text to be read. Educational psychologist Richard C. Anderson

characterizes schemata as “organized knowledge of the world,” which, when applied to reading

“provides much of the basis for comprehending, learning, and remembering the ideas in stories

and texts” (594). Anderson describes six functions of schemata:

1. A schema provides ideational scaffolding for assimilating textual information.

2. A schema facilitates selective allocation of attention.

3. A schema enables inferential elaboration.

4. A schema allows orderly searches of memory.

5. A schema facilitates editing and summarizing.

6. A schema permits inferential reconstruction. (598-99).

The blueprints that are schemata provide categories in which to classify new information and

connective material that fill in the gaps in readers’ emerging understanding of a text, “accounting

for the relationships among elements” (596; emphasis in original). Schemata also provide a filter

for managing the reader’s finite operational memory, ensuring that elements relevant to the

schema are retained and those that are not are ignored. This filtering allows information to be

condensed into packets small and simple enough to be remembered and used. Schemata, in other

words, help readers construct a coherent vision of what a text means.

To illustrate the operation of schemata, it is useful to think of any invocation of a word—

read, written, spoken, heard, thought—as activating a web of associated meanings. The word

“grape,” for example, might conjure thoughts of “small, round, purple, green, vine, fruit, wine,”

etc. What associations are activated depends on the personal experiences the invoker has to draw

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upon in constructing their web. These associations have both private and public aspects—the

individual instantiation of what a “grape” looks like is unique to the invoker but will share

similarities with others who have a similar range of experiences to draw upon in their

associational web. Schemata exist around individual words or entire phrases and clauses, but the

more abstract and complex the linguistic unit, the more complex and abstract the schemata

becomes.

When reading, readers can not only activate previously constructed schemata more-or-

less intact—like the example above—and slot new information into them, but they can also build

novel schemata by combining scraps from multiple preexisting ones. It follows, also, that readers

can bring a single schema or multiple schemata to bear when reading a text. Returning to the

metaphor of schemata as blueprints, imagine the process of constructing new schemata as

cutting, pasting, and manipulating elements of construction plans. One might take the bedroom

floor plan from one blueprint, mirror it in the mind, and place it in another. One could take the

arrangement of windows in an elevation sketch of one house and use them in the kitchen of

another, etc. Every conceivable combination and permutation of elements drawn from readers’

prior experiences is possible when constructing new schemata. Psychologist Rand J. Spiro

characterizes this activity of, “assembl[ing] elements of prior knowledge and tailor[ing] those

elements to fit the new situation’s needs,” as constructing a “schema of the moment” (654-5).

Building new schemata may prove necessary when readers encounter particularly difficult or

unfamiliar texts, as the application of any preexisting schema may fail to produce a coherent

understanding or one deemed appropriate to the reading situation.

The capacity to build new schemata on the fly is a crucial component of the second term

named above, what Spiro et al. term “cognitive flexibility” which they argue is necessary for

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students to acquire “advanced knowledge”—to think like a professional—in ill-structured

domains like academic disciplines. They explain that, to build the cognitive flexibility necessary

to operate within a discipline requires students to approach learning situations (in our case,

reading) from multiple perspectives, to see the interrelatedness of seemingly disparate elements

of their experience, and to combine these elements with relative rapidity in novel ways to solve

novel problems:

Central to the cultivation of cognitive flexibility are approaches to learning, instruction

and knowledge representation that (a) allow an important role for multiple

representations, (b) view learning as the multidirectional and multiperspectival “criss-

crossing” of cases and concepts that make up complex domains’ landscapes (with

resulting interconnectedness along multiple dimensions), and (c) foster the ability to

assemble diverse knowledge sources to adaptively fit the needs of a particular knowledge

application situation (rather than the search for a precompiled schema that fits the

situation). (652)

Put more simply, for students to do the work of academics, they need to acquire the versatile

ways in which academics use and apply knowledge and transfer these ways to new contexts. A

key component of this flexibility is learning how to transfer and apply patterns and scraps of

knowledge from various experiences to create new mental maps whenever they encounter new

situations that demand them, but especially when they read.

One way in which schema theory and its outgrowth, cognitive flexibility theory, are

useful to the teaching of reading to graduate students is that they help explain the operation of a

relatively simple and uncontroversial educational maxim: human beings learn by integrating new

information with what they already know. Understanding this process of building new meaning

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out of old can give compositionists greater sympathy for, as well as greater insight into, the

difficulty of the labor graduate students undertake in becoming professional readers, especially if

it is understood that students’ prior experiences and prior schemata can be a double-edged sword.

Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue eloquently capture the duality of students’ prior

experiences:

When readers confront new versions of an idea—or issue, category, or text—they tend to

formulate the new in terms that they already know, in terms that are already a part of their

repertoire. This is a form of transfer, and it is a fundamental principle of knowledge

formation. However, sometimes the transfer is productive; sometimes it is not. When

there is ‘mismatch’ between new ideas and the old frameworks used for making sense of

them, readers tend to experience difficulty, confusion, a “say what?” moment. (35)

Given the many hidden presumptions of academic thinking, including a discipline’s threshold

concepts, such “say what?” moments of cognitive dissonance are common for graduate-student

readers. They are unlikely to have encountered before entering their graduate programs much

related to the way a discipline thinks, except through prior graduate-school experiences.

Schemata drawn from other sources within the reader’s experience may or may not be relevant

and useful for the student in academic contexts. They may provide alternative ways of handling

academic reading. They may productively challenge established patterns or approaches and be

encouraged. Alternatively, schemata or ways of thinking drawn from students’ prior experiences

outside academia might be so repugnant (consider, for example, racist, or sexist, or homophobic

explanations of phenomena) that the student’s continued use of them might threaten their ability

to progress professionally in the discipline. Or, students’ prior schemata may be so distanced

from academia as to not offer any clear pathway for making sense of academic reading at all. In

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these latter cases, the cognitive dissonance can be debilitating if no guidance is provided in

helping students to construct new schemata more appropriate to the discipline.

Schema theory and cognitive flexibility are also useful because they point toward

locations in the reading process where graduate students might struggle, and thereby, points at

which faculty can intervene to assist. Several of these points of difficulty arise from the filtering

and simplifying functions of schema activation and construction. A student may employ a

schema that reduces or simplifies a text’s meaning to the point that an author’s argument is

distorted altogether. And there is always a risk that the reader’s employment of a single schema

will filter out textual information essential to constructing a reading that will allow the reader to

complete whatever task the reading serves. Spiro et al. identify these points of difficulty within

their list of seven types of “reductive biases” that can impede learning when reading in settings

like the academy:

1. Oversimplification of complex and irregular structure.

2. Overreliance on a single basis [schema] for mental representation.

3. Overreliance on “top-down” processing.

4. Context-independent conceptual representation.

5. Overreliance on precompiled knowledge structures.

6. Rigid compartmentalization of knowledge components.

7. Passive transmission of knowledge. (642-43)

Many of the points on this list indicate problems that arise when readers can’t construct

appropriate novel schemata during reading. Instead of applying relevant components of

experience extracted from various schemata and recombining them to fit the situation, humans

by default tend to apply previously acquired cognitive patterns wholesale to new reading

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problems. Knowing this tendency begins to suggest where and how faculty might intervene with

students: by modeling for them how to read academic texts in the multiple ways that members of

the discipline do, possibly by narrating aloud how they construct a pattern for understanding a

part of the text while reading that selection to students.

The discussion turns now to acknowledging and responding to composition’s problematic

history with cognitive psychology. It does this to join my voice to a growing chorus of those in

writing studies who recognize the value of what cognitive theories can teach us about how

people read, write, and learn and what is hazarded to be lost if the operation of the mind as an

essential aspect of these activities is ignored.

To reclaim the usefulness of cognitive research, though, requires knowing a little more

about the history of writing studies’ relationship to it. Research applying cognitive methods,

theories, and models to the study of writing achieved prominence in the early 1980s, particularly

in the works of Linda Flower and John Hayes, but has been largely discouraged as an area of

study since the 1990s. Hayes himself, writing in Patricia Portanova, J. Michael Rifenburg, and

Duane Roane’s 2017 edited collection, Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing,

confirms the decline of attention to cognition in the field, finding that although research in

cognitive theories and methods has grown worldwide since the 1980s, research inside North

American English departments on this subject has sharply declined over that same period (x-xi).

Why did the decline take place, and why did (do) many compositionists take issue with

cognitive psychology? The reasons are multiple, complex, and interrelated. Hayes lists five

strands of criticism levied against cognition that he connects to its fall from prominence: (1)

cognitive theory was “scientistic”; (2) it was “anti-feminist”; (3) it was uncritically embedded in

“dominant ideologies”; (4) it was “ineffective”; and (5) it “failed to take adequate account of

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social, political, and historical contexts” (vii-viii). All of the other criticisms seem to stem from

the last one on this list: the perception that cognitive psychology ignores the profound

significance of one’s social-situatedness and context—one’s enculturation into the social groups

of which one is a member and the nexus of unequal power relations among and within such

groups as they interact—on the ways in which one writes, reads, thinks, and learns. It is to this

criticism that Hayes primarily responds, and it is the one to which I will as well.

Why does social context matter so much? Any theoretical model of how reading works

necessarily entails an ideological framework underpinning it—a series of further underlying

assumptions about what is true and right about the world. The danger of a framework that

assumes everything about reading can be explained solely in terms of the human mind is that

when readers experience problems reading, researchers operating under such a framework have

historically tended to envision those problems as deficiencies in the reader’s thinking or

deficiencies in their ability to think. Further, it is possible to too narrowly envision how the

mental processes that support reading function—to assume that they always work the same way

regardless of readers’ differences in cultural or individual prior-experiences and regardless of the

specific contexts for reading. As compositionists, we recognize that human beings, existing

within and across their various groupings, can think in very different ways and value very

different things, so belief in a theoretical model that does not account for multiplicity and

cultural variability among mental processes and prior knowledge is deeply problematic. When

mental processes for reading do get too narrowly defined, they tend to be patterned on the

processes of the dominant cultural group doing the theory-making. The result, then, is that

without adequate attention to social context, cognitive theories of reading can collapse and

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mistake cultural differences for cognitive deficiencies and thus help to perpetuate ideologies that

are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

While the perception that cognitive theories ignore social context and uncritically

perpetuate dominant ideologies may hold true for some, perhaps even many, psychology-based

frameworks in some eras of reading research, these perceptions do not hold true for all in all,

especially for much of the work conducted after the 1970s. Cognitive theories, or at least their

uses, have evolved over time. Educational psychologists Patricia Alexander and Emily Fox have

categorized reading research into five historical eras, beginning in the 1950s. Most of the earlier

psychology-based theories (say, prior to 1970) are certainly devoid of interest in culture and

context. The term “cognitive psychology” itself, though, doesn’t seem to emerge until the mid-

1970s during “The Era of Information Processing” (41). This era is characterized by its focus on

understanding the processes of the human mind, and the terms “prior-knowledge” and schema

theory arise from this time. During this period, according to Alexander and Fox, the human mind

was studied as an individual phenomenon, and “there was little, if any, consideration of

sociocultural or contextual influences on the processing of linguistic information” (43). Thus far

in the historical overview, composition’s negative perceptions of cognitive theory as context-

devoid seem to hold true.

That situation changes, however, by the mid-1980s, during the “Era of Sociocultural

Learning,” which lasts, according to Alexander and Fox, until the mid-1990s and roughly

coincides with composition’s own “social turn.” Reading research during this period is

increasingly influenced by anthropology, and because of such influence, “group orientations

came to replace the earlier focus on individualistic learning and instruction seen in the prior era”

(46). Part of the epistemological shift of research during this time were the realizations that

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knowledges are multiple, are constructed by cultural groups of language practitioners, are shared

among and within these groups, and are contingent upon context. From this epistemological shift

arose a commensurate one in the goal of reading research, as Alexander and Fox describe: “from

the detection of the universal laws of learning, the goal became the description of the “ways of

knowing” unique to particular social, cultural, and educational groups” (46). This shift in the

field of reading to becoming more interdisciplinary and more embedded in issues of culture and

context would have implications for the instantiations of cognitive-based theories.

It may be tempting to think, given the story thus far, that social theories of reading simply

replaced cognitive ones in the mid-1980s, but even as theories are inevitably critiqued,

problematized, and fall out of fashion, they still tend to influence the thinking of new ones that

grow from their passing. This is a positive development when new theories borrow from the still

useful and non-problematic components of old ones, and there is evidence that such borrowing

has happened regarding cognitive theories of reading. Consider the longevity of schema theory—

based in cognitive psychology—for providing explanatory power of how humans construct

meaning from texts. As recently as 2019, the 7th edition of Theoretical Models and Processes of

Reading has continued to publish pieces on or indebted to schema theory. Long after

cognitivism’s heyday, Alexander and Fox have opined that “even those forwarding alternative

explanations for the structure of human knowledge have had to counter the tenets of schema

theory and the body of supporting evidence” (43). Finally and most importantly, the continued

usefulness of cognitive theories is evidenced through their imbrication with social theories in the

development of “sociocognitive” models of the reading process (Ruddell and Unrau, Gee). For

these models, social context and cognition operate side-by-side as coessential aspects to

theorizing reading acts.

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Even if the perception that all cognitive theories ignore, deny, or fail to adequately

account for readers’ social contexts held true throughout all eras, and even if the work of

integrating context and cognition had not already begun in literacy studies, this fact would not,

has not, and should not prevent us in writing studies from adapting cognitive reading theories to

better fit our needs and beliefs. There have, in fact, been long-standing efforts in composition to

pay attention to cognition and to integrate it with social theories and methods of writing research.

As far back as the 1990s, Karen A. Schriver described “a hybrid line of inquiry” that “explores

the complex interplay between cognition and context,” in an effort to promote integrated writing

research methods (190). More recently, Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s Naming What We Know has

included “Writing Is (Also Always) a Cognitive Activity” as its own category of threshold

concepts alongside “Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity.” Finally, the 2017 publication

of Contemporary Perspectives on Cognition and Writing, a work involving contributions from

over a dozen members of writing studies and forwarding multiple aspects of cognitive research,

shows that the field is reawakening to the usefulness of understanding the operation of the mind

in studying writing. The purpose of the present discussion here has been to extend these efforts

to the study of reading as well.

Of course, reading should not be thought of solely through the lens of cognition—nor

through any single lens, for that matter. Balancing attention between the lenses of “cognition”

and “context” is crucial to building any multifaceted representation of reading, and so it is

toward the latter of these two terms that discussion now turns.

3. Reading Is Socially Situated

Acts of reading always take place within particular cultural and social contexts that shape

how the reader constructs the text and what can be done with it. This statement is an equally

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important corollary principle to the notion that reading is cognition. For while acts of reading are

conducted by the faculties of the brain, the reader’s situatedness among multiple cultural groups

and communities determines the repertoire of prior-experiences available for the reader to draw

upon in building that meaning. Further, the reader’s situatedness within and among groups

shapes the practices and ways of thinking involved in constructing meaning from a text. Finally,

the reasons for which one reads and the conditions for what one must do with the text once read

are likewise socially situated and constrained.

Linguist and literacy researcher James Gee’s sociocognitive perspective on language (a

term which implies the intermarriage of cognitive and social theories of reading) and his concept

of Discourses offer further insight on how culture and context shape meaning. Gee’s theory of

reading is embedded within a viewpoint on language that ties the meaning of words, phrases, and

clauses to readers’ situated, lived experiences in the world. For Gee, the meanings of words are

not encoded in the brain as language, but rather as representational models of experience that are

metaphorically more similar to mental “movies” or “videotapes”:

These videotapes are what we think with and through. They are what we use to give

meaning to our experiences in the world. They are what we use to give meaning to our

words and sentences. But they are not language or even in language (not even in

propositions). Further, because they are representations of experience (including feelings,

attitudes, embodied positions, and various sorts of foregrounds and backgrounds of

attention), they are not just information or facts. Rather, they are value-laden,

perspective-taking movies in the mind. (118)

Experience and the language used to codify it for communication are intertwined with the value

systems of the multiple, intersecting, inter-nesting cultural groups to which one belongs—from

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large demographic categories (race, class, gender, sexual identity, etc.) to smaller, local

communities (one’s workplace, school, family). Thus, rather than neutrally conveying

information, any act of language—read, written, spoken, heard—is actually a performance of the

identity and worldview of a particular social group or groups. According to Gee, these value-

laden language acts always serve at least one of two social functions: “To scaffold performance

of action in the world, including social activities and interactions; to scaffold human affiliation in

cultures and social groups and institutions through enticing others to take certain perspectives on

experience” (117). In other words, language is always a social tool used for persuasion, even

when persuasion is not consciously intended. It is a tool used to get people to take certain actions

and not others. It is also used to get people to perform the preferred actions of the group in

certain ways, to maintain relationships between members of a group, to get members to think like

other members of the group, and to maintain the group’s ideological and performative identity.

Because there are many cultural groups, each with their own unique identities, unique

varieties of language exist for each. Thus “English” is not monolithically “English,” but rather a

conglomeration of the varieties of English spoken by welders on the worksite, by schoolteachers

to children, by academics to each other, and so forth. Gee terms each of these varieties a “social

language.” These social languages are, in turn, components of a cultural group’s “Discourse”

(with a capital “D”) or “identity kit,” which comprises the group’s “ways of talking, listening,

writing, reading, acting, interacting, believing, valuing, and feeling” which allow one to perform

the activities of that group as an insider to it (124).

But what has all of this discussion of videotapes, social languages, and Discourses got

specifically to do with reading? When a reader reads, the resulting meaning constructed of the

text—the videotape produced—is cut and edited from fragments of experience drawn from the

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library of tapes recorded from the reader’s prior socialization into various Discourses. A reader’s

ability to construct an interpretation—produce a video—of a text that is acceptable, even

comprehensible to the Discourse of the community for which the reading is being performed,

depends upon whether that reader has been socialized into said Discourse, or at least similar

ones. Further, any act of reading is performance of at least one Discourse identity, and so asking

someone to learn to read in a particular way is asking someone to internalize the worldview of

that way’s Discourse, and, in turn, for the reader to accept irrevocable changes to their identity.

Because acts of reading are so often tied to acts of writing or the production of other deliverables

upon which the acquisition of material and social capital (i.e., money, grades, degrees,

reputation, job securing and retention) depends, the stakes of not being able to perform the kind

of reading demanded by a particular context and within a particular Discourse are all too real.

Gee’s sociocognitive view of language and reading offers some productive overlap with

schema theory. In the sense that Gee’s mental videotapes are activated, constructed, and

reconstructed from elements of readers’ prior experiences, they closely resemble schemata.

Consider Gee’s description of tape production in light of previous description of schema

construction:

It is almost as if we videotape our experiences as we are having them, create a library of

such videotapes, edit them to make some prototypical tapes (on a set of typical instances),

but stand ever ready to add new tapes to our library. We reedit the tapes based on new

experiences or draw out of the library less typical tapes when the need arises. As we face

new situations or new texts we run our tapes—perhaps a prototypical one, or a set of

typical ones, or a less typical one, whatever the case may be. We do this to apply our old

experiences to our new experiences and to aid us in making, editing, and storing the

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videotape that will capture this new experience, integrate it into our library, and allow us

to make sense of it. (118)

Like schemata, Gee’s tapes can be called to mind or activated more or less intact, or previous

tapes can be sliced into tiny clips and spliced together in complex and novel ways with other

clips from other tapes. Additionally, both schemata and mental videotapes provide a structure for

giving coherence to the meaning the reader makes from the text, and they allow readers to

integrate new knowledge with old.

A key difference between the two schemata and gee’s videotapes, however, is that some

cognitive theories presume that the substance of schemata is linguistic, whereas Gee classifies

the components of his videotapes as pre-linguistic representations tied to sensory data and

memory. This disagreement creates a tension, to be sure, but not one that I think requires us to

invalidate either theory. Haas and Flower, for example, seem to find a way to live with such

uncertainty, suggesting that the structures by which readers form coherent understandings of

texts are both linguistic and experiential:

Readers’ and writers’ mental representations are not limited to verbally well-formed

ideas and plans, but may include information coded as visual images, or as emotions, or

as linguistic propositions that exist just above the level of specific words. These

representations may also reflect more abstract schema, such as the schema most people

have for narrative or for establishing credibility in a conversation. (169)

More important to me than resolving tension about the nature of the structures readers build to

make meaning from texts, is a consideration of what we might stand to lose if we shut ourselves

off to the possibility that both language and experience encoded in the brain in other ways play a

role. If we are inclined to accept Gee’ position that pre-linguistic experience prevails, we might

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ask ourselves if it is possible that some experience might be encoded in language or that

individuals in certain contexts (like academic ones) might come to think in this way. Is it

possible that some of the mental models of schemata required to make meaning from academic

texts are so abstract as to be impossible to imprint on the mind as experience alone? Do not

language and propositional logic assist the reader in organizing the experiences they bring to

bear on a text prior to, during, or after reading and thus become part of the videotape or schema?

If, conversely, we take language to be the sole substance of schemata, then how do we account

for the fact that their activation so often happens beneath our awareness—without our having

mentally “said the words” necessary to construct the meaning we build while reading a text? I

am not prepared to give definitive answers to any of these questions, and, like Haas and Flower, I

think it productive to accept the heterogenous character of schemata and mental representations

so as to remain open to all of the possible ways in which readers construct meaning from text.

Social theories of reading like Gee’s are useful in building a framework for teaching

reading to graduate students because they provide explanation for why otherwise very good and

experienced readers can still struggle to understand and use academic texts: the cultural distance

between text and reader is too great to traverse without assistance. Because these texts are so

imbricated in the practices and ways of thinking (at least some of which we might label as

threshold concepts) inherent to academic Discourses, and because so many of these practices are

invisible, foreign, contradictory, or counterintuitive to graduate students’ previously acquired

Discourses, they often cannot begin to translate what they read into language that both makes

sense in light of their prior cultural experiences and represents an authorized or satisfactory

understanding from the standpoint of established members of their disciplines. At least, they

cannot do these things without much socialization into the values and practices of the

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disciplinary Discourse and at least some explicit modeling and calling-attention-to some of those

hidden practices and ways of thinking. That is, graduate students need to be taught how to see

research works like academics do to make their struggles with texts productive.

4. Reading Is a Transaction Between Reader and Text

This principle, drawn from Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and

writing, posits that acts of reading are mutually shaping transactions: readers attempt to build

meaning from a text, employing their reservoirs of prior experience to do so, and readers’

interactions with that text, in turn, shape their identities. Historically, Rosenblatt’s theory has

been influential in shaping conceptions of reading in literary studies, and by means of our shared

disciplinary history, in composition and rhetoric as well. Its current cachet with those us in

writing studies from a research standpoint, however, is much lower than its still significant

influence among us as instructors, a status I hope the following discussion will improve.

Unsurprisingly, this principle overlaps greatly with preceding ones. It presumes that

reading is constructive meaning-making activity. It implies the cognitive nature of that

constructive activity in proposing that readers build mental understandings of texts from the raw

material of prior experiences. Finally, it intimates that reading is socially situated in

acknowledging the role readers’ environments play in supplying and shaping their stores of prior

knowledge used for making sense of a text. Even with this overlap, discussion of this principle

and Rosenblatt’s theory are important for several reasons: (1) to assert that reading shapes

readers as much as texts; (2) to remind us that reading is experienced individually, and thus

differently, by every reader; (3) to foreground where the construction of meaning takes place—

between reader and text—a foregrounding that implies readers only have access to the intentions

of an author at a distance, and only through the filter of their own experiences; and (4) to

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reinforce the inextricable linkage of cognitive and social theories of reading and the history of

that linkage in scholarship that has influenced writing studies.

Rosenblatt’s terminology, that readers “transact” with a text in order to create meaning, is

essential because the mutual influencing of text-on-reader and reader-on-text implied by the term

deepens our understanding of how reading constructs readers. As the reader attempts to make-

meaning from the text, the experience of reading is also making, altering, the reader—though

more often in small, unconscious ways than via transformative revelations. She writes: “Instead

of two fixed entities acting on one another, the reader and the text are two aspects of a total

dynamic situation. The ‘meaning’ does not reside ready-made ‘in’ the text or ‘in’ the reader but

happens or comes into being during the transactions between reader and text” (1369). Rosenblatt

terms the readers’ prior experiences used to transact with the text their “linguistic-experiential

reservoirs,” which consist of “residue of the individual’s past transactions—in particular, natural

and social contexts” (1367). A reader’s every transaction with a text, indeed every experience

with anything, leaves an impression on the reader which accretes with impressions left by

preceding transactions and contributes to the impressions built from later transactions. The

linguistic-experiential reservoir encompasses both the reader’s unique, individual “private”

experiences with words, and “public” experiences or meanings shared by members of cultural

and social groups to which the reader belongs. Therefore, while the transaction any reader enters

into with a text will bear (often strong) resemblance to those experienced by others who are

similarly socially situated, each transaction is unique because each reader’s reservoir of

experience is unique. Ultimately, Rosenblatt’s transactional theory adds to our growing

integrative understanding of reading by foregrounding the individualistic, dynamic nature of the

reader, whose identity is as much in flux as the meaning built from the texts.

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Drawing comparison to other theories, Rosenblatt’s “Linguistic-experiential reservoirs”

serve as a convenient label for the heterogenous substance comprising cognitive psychologists’

schemata or Gee’s mental videotapes which was referenced previously. Rosenblatt writes:

Embodying funded assumptions, attitudes, and expectations about language and about the

world, this inner capital is all that each of us has to draw on in speaking, listening,

writing, or reading. We ‘make sense’ of a new situation or transaction and make new

meanings by applying, reorganizing, revising, or extending public and private elements

selected from our personal linguistic-experiential reservoirs. (1367)

Like analogous components from these other constructivist theories of reading, Rosenblatt’s

reservoirs give a name to the “takeaways” of readers’ prior experiences—in this case, partially

linguistic in nature and partially not—and allow us to describe how readers interpret, categorize,

and synthesize new knowledge with old when they read.

In addition to contributing a greater understanding of how readers are constructed by

texts and how prior experience is employed by readers to make sense of them, Rosenblatt offers

insight about authorial intent—about the disconnect between what authors attempt to make a text

mean and what readers construct it to mean. This insight will assist in addressing a common

mischaracterization of Rosenblatt’s work a little later. Rosenblatt explains that a similar, but

reciprocal transactive process experienced by readers as they read occurs as writers write:

Both reader and writer engage in constituting symbolic structures of meaning in a to-and-

fro, spiral transaction with the text. They follow similar patterns of thinking and call upon

similar linguistic habits. Both processes depend on the individual’s past experiences with

language in particular life situations. Both reader and writer therefore are drawing on past

linkages of signs, signifiers, and organic states in order to create new symbolizations,

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new linkages, and new organic states. Both reader and writer develop a framework,

principle, or purpose, however nebulous or explicit, that guides the selective attention and

the synthesizing, organizing activities that constitute meaning. (1378)

Writers employ their linguistic-experiential reservoirs, as well as familiarity with Discourse and

genre conventions of the intended piece, to attempt to build a representation of their intentions in

their texts. But, in addition to monitoring how well their writing captures their own purposes as

they compose—whatever feeling, experience, argument, or idea they wish to express—they must

also imagine how their writing is likely to be interpreted by the audience. To monitor these dual

considerations, writers engage in a two-fold process of authorial reading throughout textual

composition. This activity, what Rosenblatt terms “Expression-oriented authorial reading,” tests

new tidbits of writing against those already written for their consistency and effectiveness in

representing the authors’ emerging purposes for the text. In contrast, during “reception-oriented

authorial reading,” writers read their in-process texts “through the eyes of potential readers”

attempting to imagine whether readers would likely reconstruct writers’ purposes from the words

that appear on the page (1382). As will be seen shortly, Rosenblatt’s description of authorial

reading—with its attention to audience and purpose—is quite compatible with the rhetorical

view of reading expressed in the fifth and final principle below.

Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and writing has received criticism related to

its emphasis on individual readers’ responses to texts and its having been (mis)labeled as

“reader-response theory.” Over time, this category of literary theory became something of a

catch-all term that condensed and conflated diverse theories of reading with one another,

acquired negative connotations in the field of composition and rhetoric, and was largely

abandoned as an area of study. Particularly, Rosenblatt’s assertion that meaning was constructed

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by the individual reader in transaction with the text, rather than lying within the text itself,

opened the door for the transactional theory to be (mis)categorized with reader-response theories.

Reader-response theories, in turn, became (mis)associated with denials or dismissals of authorial

intent and the perception that all personal interpretations of a text are equally valid and useful.

Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue explain that, by the 1990s, reader-response theories

had lost much of their intellectual credibility and scholarly interest they had enjoyed in the 1980s

because of this very reason:

Eventually substituted for the "hard" energizing, engaged, critical version of reader-

response (and literacy) theories described up to this point was a "soft" version—

especially in the classroom—which proclaimed the right of readers and students to their

"own readings." Once reader-oriented theories were viewed in this diminished form and

used to justify the approach that "anything goes," theoretically inflected work on reading

was severely compromised. (“Stories” 205).

It would seem that, as scholarly interest in reader-response theories waned, the dominant

perception of them among scholars was driven increasingly by how these theories were

interpreted, misinterpreted, adapted, and practiced in the classroom rather than by an intimate

knowledge of having read reader-response theories for themselves—a downward spiral of

misperception driving misperception.

Salvatori and Donahue also link the decline of reader-response to the consolidation of the

field of composition and rhetoric and its desire to distance itself from theories—like reader-

response—that had been inherited from literary studies:

Once this consolidation [of the discipline] began to occur, or perhaps as part of the price

paid for it, major sectors of composition studies became increasingly separated from

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literary studies and everything connected with it, which for many included so-called high

theory and its presumed elitist associations. (“Stories” 204)

Perhaps, then, reader-response theories fell out of fashion for some less-than-intellectually-sound

reasons, owing as much to a newly independent discipline’s desire to define its identity

differently than its predecessors than a thorough examination of these theories’ merits. And

because scholarly interest in composition in the 1990s generally moved away from the topic of

reading altogether, there hasn’t been much interest in revisiting reader response theories until

recently.

Of these reasons given for the decline of credibility of reader-response theories like

Rosenblatt’s, only the perception that they deny or ignore authorial intent stands to me as

grounds for intellectual concern. Denial of the existence or the importance of authorial intention

is problematic for adherents of a rhetorical view of language, who tend to presume that all

communicative acts seek to effect purposes upon their recipients; that these purposes are, to

some practical extent, knowable, even if they are unconscious to the perceptions of both

addressor and addressee; and that techniques of successfully effecting purposes on audiences can

be studied, taught, and learned. Likewise, such a position on authorial intent would undermine

much of the criteria composition teachers employ to judge the effectiveness of texts—how well

they accomplish their persuasive purposes on the audience.

Close examination of the transactional theory, however, shows that it has been

significantly mischaracterized. Rosenblatt holds that authors do attempt to write their intentions

into their texts, actively seeking to shape their audiences’ perceptions through the dual

monitoring functions of expression-oriented and reception-oriented authorial reading. Readers do

also always make some attempt to reconstruct authorial intentions when they read, but they can

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only perform this reconstruction through the filter of their own experience, and they only ever

encounter a representation of the author’s intentions, “an author persona sensed through and

behind the text” (1383). There is no guarantee that readers will reconstruct an understanding

similar to what which the writer imagined. Rosenblatt herself asserts the impossibility of readers

perfectly knowing authorial intent:

Intent itself is not an absolutely definable or delimitable event by the writer. The word

absolute, the notion of a single “correct” meaning inherent “in” the text, is the stumbling

block. The same text takes on different meanings in different transactions with different

readers or even with the same readers in different contexts or times. (1384)

But though an absolute understanding of authorial intent is impossible, a “good enough” or

“effective enough” subjective interpretation of such intent is, and the closer readers are socially

situated to the writer, the more likely they are to transact similar meaning:

The closer their linguistic-experiential equipment, the more likely the reader’s

interpretation will fulfill the writer’s intention. [. . .] Other positive factors affecting

communication are contemporary membership in the same social and cultural group, the

same educational level, and membership in the same discourse community, such as

academic, legal, athletic, literary, scientific, or theological. Given such similarities, the

reader is more likely to bring to the text the prior knowledge, acquaintance with linguistic

and literary conventions, and assumptions about social situations required for

understanding implication or allusions and noting nuances of tone and thought. (1383)

Rather than proclaiming the “death of the author,” Rosenblatt’s argument might better be

characterized as perceiving transactions between reader and writer as distanced by the medium

of the text itself. Reader and writer are engaged in a “telephone game” of interpretation and

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reinterpretation with the text, and the result of the last transaction never completely resembles

that of the original input.

In addition to recognizing the existence of authorial intent, the transactional theory

recognizes its significance—along with social and cultural contexts—in shaping the

consequences or outcomes of reading acts. Far from employing an “anything goes” attitude about

the appropriateness of any individual textual interpretation, Rosenblatt’s transactional theory

identifies the importance of “warranted assertions,” understandings of texts built from textual

evidence that correspond to a cultural group’s shared criteria of effectiveness, accuracy, or

appropriateness. She writes:

Given shared criteria concerning methods of investigation and kinds of evidence, there

can be agreement concerning the decision as to what is a sound interpretation of the

evidence, or ‘a warranted assertion.’ This is not set forth as permanent, absolute truth, but

leaves open the possibility that alternative explanations for the same facts may be found,

that new evidence may be discovered, or that different criteria or paradigms may be

developed. (1385)

While there does not exist any objectively “correct” understanding of a text, there certainly exist

subjective, socially-constructed, contextually-situated analogues to correctness. Achieving these

analogues to correctness, constructed or arbitrary as they may be, still holds consequences for

individuals who are performing reading acts in service to those who hold power over them. And,

though Rosenblatt prefers to foreground the mutable nature of the social criteria used to

determine the appropriateness of textual understanding, the value systems of cultural groups tend

to change only slowly. As a result, readers’ abilities to reconstruct “authorial intent” can very

much matter in producing discursively acceptable interpretations. And such discursively

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acceptable interpretations are often necessary to demonstrate prior to and alongside making a

written argument in an academic field.

Several revelations result from righting misperceptions about the transactional theory of

reading and writing. First, the theory sees the author as very much alive and active in shaping a

text for a particular purpose and audience—a view quite compatible with rhetorical theories of

language. Second, depending upon the context and purposes for which a reader reads, it

recognizes that reconstructing authorial intent can sometimes be important for the reader.

Finally, it recognizes the living nature of readers, who read through their own experiences in

such a way that the author is only ever encounterable at a distance, a reality which makes

reconstructing authorial intent difficult and imperfect, but still possible to a relative and tentative

extent.

Ultimately, Rosenblatt’s transactional theory is useful in undergirding the teaching of

reading to graduate students because of its emphasis on the significance of individuals’ unique

experiences in reading a text. It reminds us that there is no self-contained, “apparent” meaning

laden in the disciplinary texts academics write, and therefore, instructors cannot take students’

understanding of those texts as a given. Students, like any other readers, will always filter the

experience of reading through their existing linguistic-experiential reservoirs. Their abilities to

construct interpretations, evaluations, and syntheses of professional literature that constitute

“warranted assertions” to a disciplinary discourse community depend upon the extent to which

they have been enculturated into that discipline’s implicit values, assumptions, and ways of

thinking, including its threshold concepts. It falls to graduate faculty, then, as the only ones

uniquely positioned to be both versed in all of these types of implicit disciplinary knowledge and

involved in the professional formation of new disciplinary members, to assist students in

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undertaking productive transactions with disciplinary texts by supplying their linguistic-

experiential reservoirs with the appropriate tools and showing students how to ply them in their

reading.

5. Reading Is Rhetorical

Understood from a rhetorical view of language, reading is a purposeful meaning-making

activity in which readers negotiate an author’s intended purposes on them—to get readers to

think, believe, or do something or in a certain way—with readers’ own purposes for reading.

Such activity is rhetorical—persuasive—in that texts influence readers, and readers employ the

meanings they construct from texts to further shape their realities and identities. The influence of

any given text on readers’ identities and activities can range from indirect to direct, insignificant

to transformative, and unconscious to conscious. Readers’ purposes can similarly vary along

these axes. Both the readers’ and the texts’ rhetorical purposes can be complex and multiple.

Texts are influential even if they reaffirm beliefs or ideas that readers already hold, or if

they cause readers to reject texts’ premises out-of-hand. Kenneth Burke’s concepts of

“identification” and “consubstantiation” usefully illustrate this argument. Burke defines these

terms as follows:

A is not identical with his colleague B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is

identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not

joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.

Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is “substantially one”

with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual

locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and

consubstantial with another. (1325)

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Identification, then, is inventing or invoking some commonality that unites two entities such that

they are considered similar, or the same, or within the same category. The thing that makes these

entities the same is the common “substance”—in Burke’s terms—that gives them their

consubstantiality. Readers can construct identifications among a variety of entities when they

read. They can construct identifications between themselves and the author—becoming

convinced they share some commonality of ideology, experience, or motive. They can similarly

construct identifications between the text’s author and some topic the author raises, or

themselves and such a topic, or between two topics. Further, the author, in writing the text, exerts

some level of influence in attempting to shape—whether purposefully or not—the kinds of

identifications the reader makes.

Take, for example, a reader reading an op-ed piece that espouses a political view he

already holds—let’s call this reader Duncan. Duncan can be completely unaware of the author’s

intention to persuade him to believe something, and likewise unaware of why he is reading the

piece in the first place. The author may not even have had an explicit intention in mind when

writing (though that is unlikely, given the genre of this example), and even if the author did, it is

not a given that Duncan’s reading would reconstruct a similar intent. Perhaps Duncan found the

piece through a social media platform that employed algorithms to track his browsing history and

suggest new content based on patterns in his prior searches. Duncan may be aware that the piece

strikes his interest—hence he clicked on the link to it—but he is probably in part motivated to

read for the purpose of validating the belief he holds in common—or he thinks he holds—with

the author. Perhaps the piece provides ammunition for Duncan’s later contentious political talk

with friends, relatives, and even strangers. Perhaps having searched for the article on the internet,

Duncan seeks out or is led by web-browser algorithms to similarly oriented articles. Perhaps

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Duncan later becomes an activist for a cause related to the issue, or alternatively, an extremist.

Perhaps nothing much happens at all except Duncan decides he liked the piece. Identification has

happened in any case, and this identification is a form of persuasion—persuasion to maintain a

position rather than move from it.

Just as the second and third principles above served as important corollaries to one

another, each emphasizing one half of the socially situated and cognitive nature of reading,

“Reading Is Rhetorical” serves as corollary to “Reading Is a Transaction.” If Rosenblatt’s

transactional theory emphasizes the private, individual aspects of readers constructing meaning

from texts, then rhetorical theories of language tend to emphasize the communal, public aspects

of that construction—the purposes and audiences for which reading is undertaken, the role of

Discourses and cultural communities in shaping the construction of meaning, and the strategies

collectively employed by readers to effectively accomplish their purposes.

That all language acts are rhetorical is a ubiquitous postulate of composition and rhetoric,

yet the field only rarely emphasizes theorizing reading’s language acts as rhetorical. One

important exception is when rhetoric is itself used as a lens for reading. “Rhetorical reading,” as

that lens is eponymously called, is a set of strategies for or a type of reading, perhaps most

notably described in John Bean’s undergraduate textbook, Reading Rhetorically. This type of

reading enjoins readers to pay close attention to discerning texts’ purposes and intentions,

analyzing texts’ strategies for enacting these intentions, and putting texts to readers’ use in the

writing tasks to which college reading assignments are typically attached. From this work on

rhetorical reading, we can distill several useful theoretical presumptions writing studies scholars

have made about what happens when readers engage with texts, and how this engagement is

rhetorical.

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The first presumption we might extract is one that has already been outlined in

responding to criticisms of Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading, and before that,

intimated in discussing Gee: texts embody a representation of the intents and purposes of their

creators to get audiences to do, think, or believe something. This claim is subtended by the belief

that authorial purposes are both real and, at least to some extent, knowable. Thomas Huckin

eloquently explains a rhetorician’s attitude toward the relationship between texts and authorial

intent:

Texts are the product of an attempt by a writer to communicate meaning to one or more

readers. This is not to say that we can know for certain what that meaning is, or that

readers do not themselves construct meaning from a text, or that the reader’s

interpretation may not differ from the writer’s intended meaning. The assumption simply

recognizes that writers have something to say and that they invest thought and effort to

share that something with their readers. From this it follows that writers try to use

language in ways that will be recognized and understood. (86-7)

The operation of a reader’s purpose when reading a text is twofold, however, because readers

bring their own intents for reading as well as encountering those of the author. Bean, Chappell,

and Gillam observe that a reader’s “purposes for reading may or may not match an author’s

purposes for writing,” and so readers must learn how to recognize those purposes while

“maintain[ing] a critical distance from a text and determin[ing] the extent to which they will go

along with the author” (2). In short, to achieve an effective understanding of the text, reader and

author intents must be recognized and negotiated. Ultimately, readers must put the meanings

they construct from the text in service to the purposes they place on the reading themselves, or

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the purposes imposed on them by others. This latter situation is the case whenever students are

asked to read at the university and is partially the case when academics read to produce research.

That purposes can be imposed on readers is evidence of a second presumption inherent to

the notion that “Reading Is Rhetorical”: the reader’s and the writer’s contexts play pivotal roles

in shaping how a text will be understood and used by a reader, and those contexts create real-

world consequences. I have already discussed the interrelatedness of reading and social context

in describing the third principle, “Reading Is Socially Situated.” All of that discussion is

imbricated with the notion that “Reading Is Rhetorical” as well. In particular, readers’ social-

situatedness and power relations inhere consequences for their material realities when they read.

In circumstances where purposes for reading are imposed upon the reader, such as at the

university, or on the job, or whenever reading is tied to writing or some form of evaluation

controlled by others, it is essential for readers to “get the reading right” in the eyes of that

evaluating authority in order to gain access to the material or social goods gated by the reading

situation. That “rightness” is a subjective construct (and, as such, prone to being problematic)

contingent upon the individual circumstances prompting the reading and the hidden rules of the

authority’s Discourse, but it does not make it any less significant or impactful. Not all possible

meanings constructed of a text are equally valid, at least if the reader wants to keep a job,

complete a degree, get published, etc. Regarding the discursive constraints imposed on student

readers in university contexts, Charles Bazerman has noted that “writing in content disciplines

requires mastery of disciplinary literature. The accumulated knowledge and accepted forms of

writing circumscribe what and how a student may write in disciplines such as history, biology,

and philosophy” (657). Bazerman rightly posits that reading disciplinary literature in certain

ways is necessary to produce disciplinarily acceptable writing, but I would go a step further in

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saying that the accumulated knowledge and accepted forms of reading in a discipline

circumscribe what and how a student may read in order to write in those disciplines.

The extent to which readers are able to construct discursively acceptable readings of

texts—what Rosenblatt would call her “warranted assertions”—depends upon their repertoire of

prior experiences and cultural situatedness—the relative cultural distance between how the

reader understands the world and the text and how the authority with evaluative control over the

reading situation understands these things. Since no two people—nor two groups of people—

have precisely the same experiences, variation of understanding is inevitable both on the

individual and communal levels. As Haas and Flower conclude, “if reading, then is a process of

responding to cues in the text and the reader’s context to build a complex, multifaceted

representation of meaning, it should be no surprise that different readers might construct

radically different representations of the same text and might use very different strategies to do

so” (168). Without explicit socialization into the hidden presumptions of thought, the “threshold

concepts,” of a disciplinary discourse, graduate students have only their prior experiences to rely

upon in constructing meaning when they read, and this situation places some students at great

disadvantage to others.

The potential consequences for graduate students failing to fully acquire disciplinarily

congruent processes of thinking when they read can become especially severe. Even if struggling

students do manage to muddle through academic reading and writing enough to complete their

coursework, difficulty comprehending, analyzing, and synthesizing texts may contribute to

reluctance or failure to complete the larger self-directed tasks of graduate work, particularly

dissertations and theses. How can one write original works, after all, if one doesn’t really

understand the sources upon which that work is to be built? Difficulties reading disciplinary texts

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may likewise contribute to students’ reluctance to pursue research-based jobs after graduation;

loss of self-worth; development of imposter syndrome; dropping out of programs altogether; and

loss of time, alternative job opportunities, and income from pursuing degrees unsuccessfully.

How often these potential consequences actually become reality is difficult to measure—reasons

for graduate attrition, for example, are often complex and multiple. The point here, though, is

that while a rhetorical view of reading recognizes there is no objectively, “correct” meaning to

any text, getting the reading “right” according to subjective contextual standards imposed by

authorities with power over the reader can very much matter.

One final presumption that might be extracted from the statement, “Reading Is

Rhetorical,” is that compositionists believe writers leave behind relatively knowable, identifiable

discursive cues to help nudge readers toward constructing meanings from texts that align to

writerly intentions. Huckin asserts that, when reading a text, “the number of plausible

interpretations is constrained by various linguistic conventions that are manifested in the text.

The meanings of these conventions are tacitly agreed upon by members of a discourse

community” (86). If the text’s author shares membership in the discourse community of the

authority figures holding power over the reader, these agreed upon cues or conventions become

keys not only to understanding the text, but also describable features or patterns that can be

communicated to others. Huckin continues, asserting that “analyzing these patterns in certain

ways […] can give us insight into the meaning-making practices of the community and its

individual members” (86). A rhetorical view of reading, in other words, understands that

purposefully written texts are laden with rhetorical cues, conventions, and strategies; that these

conventions have shared meaning among the members of the discourse communities which write

and read them; and that these meanings can be taught to others.

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“Reading Is Rhetorical” is an important principle in grounding the teaching of reading to

graduate students for two reasons. First, it emphasizes the purposeful, public, persuasive,

consequence-bearing nature of reading texts. Haas and Flower capture many of these

assumptions about texts and readers entailed by a rhetorical view: “A text is not only understood

as content and information, but also as someone’s intentions, as part of a larger discourse world,

and as having real effects on real readers” (170). These assumptions contribute to the conclusion

that learning to read in ways that give readers access to social and material goods matters.

Graduate school is a particularly potent example of a high-stakes context in which acquiring

disciplinarily, discursively authorized ways of understanding texts is tied to social and material

success. Second, as a corollary to the principle, “Reading Is a Transaction,” viewing reading as

rhetorical—as taking place within and among communities that share common conventions of

meaning-making—opens the possibility that all ways of reading, even those unique to academic

disciplines, are knowable, namable, describable, learnable, teachable. A rhetorical view of

reading, like a rhetorical view of writing, reminds us that although learning and teaching any

kind of communicative act is difficult, professional academic reading is not a mystical capacity

inherent to the intellect of an elite few, or a self-evident process obviating the need for

instruction. It can be taught.

Chapter Summary

This chapter explained the definition of reading from which the project proceeds and

articulated five principles upon which that definition is based. These principles—threshold

concepts for reading in their own right—provide the theoretical grounding for those appearing in

chapter four of this volume. Though their presentation in the current format of this volume may

be novel, none of the principles themselves are truly new or groundbreaking. Like previous

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efforts to name threshold concepts, they have been foregrounded to consolidate much of what the

field already believes reading is and ought to be, and the chapter has put disparate theories in

conversation with one another to demonstrate with some coherence how these multiple theories

intersect, overlap, and enrich one another in building our understanding of reading. What is

useful about them is their integrative explanatory power in helping us to understand what is

going on when members of the field—students and faculty alike—attempt to read the discipline.

In explaining these goings-on, these principles in turn enrich our understanding of what kind of

reading needs to be taught in graduate programs and why.

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CHAPTER 3. BUILDING THRESHOLD CONCEPTS FOR READING: METHODS AND

METHODOLOGIES

Chapter Overview

Preceding chapters have laid out this project’s aims: to advocate for explicit, sustained

reading instruction in graduate programs in writing studies and for the potential usefulness of

reading-based threshold concepts as a tool for such instruction. Those chapters made the case

that reading instruction is needed for graduate students—even though they are already good

readers—because reading at a professional level in a discipline is a different kind of reading that

presents significant and unique difficulties. Those chapters also articulated the kind of discipline-

specific reading practices that this project seeks to teach and gave some small preview of what

sustained reading instruction at the graduate level might look like.

This chapter builds from that work to narrate the research methods and methodologies the

project employs. It explains the research processes and practices by which the list of threshold

concepts comprising chapter four were constructed, it shows these processes and practices up-

close in a series of “developer diary” stories, and it interrogates their limitations and affordances

as research tools. All of this work is done not only to make this project’s research methods more

transparent, but also as a model for how theory-based research might closely attend to methods

and methodology.

Methodological Overview: Transparency in Theory-Making and Argumentation

What methods does this project employ? In short, it uses theory-based literature review

and textual analysis to argue for the need to address graduate-level reading difficulty and to

explain how threshold concepts can assist faculty and students in writing studies with this

endeavor. It also uses these methods to construct a list of threshold concepts for reading in

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writing studies. Or rather I should say that I, the writer, use these methods in the project and

attempt to communicate them through the writing of this chapter. For reasons that will become

clearer as the discussion progresses, this chapter is as much about the researcher (me), the

choices he (I) made to conduct the project, and the reasoning behind those choices as it is about

the methods themselves. All research methods—no matter how rigid or loose the procedure of

inquiry—require of the researcher to make countless acts of judgment. An important measure of

rigor in research is how carefully and according to what principles the researcher made the

decisions that “fill in the gaps” between the described procedures—how they answered

ambiguities or situations not anticipated and how they scrutinized their own thinking and value

structures when addressing these conundrums. This project being theory-based, there are few

explicitly defined procedures and a great number of ambiguities. Its work is methodologically

based on my own logical reasoning supported through evidence, warrants, and expert testimony

from ours and allied fields. Transparency in judgment would seem all the more important under

these circumstances. Thus, much of my aim with this chapter is to not only to help make the

process by which I used and made theory visible to readers, but also to make my judgment

transparent as well.

Textual analysis and theory making are ubiquitous research methods in writing studies

and yet the specific practices researchers engage in to make theory—and the underlying values

enacted by these practices—don’t much get discussed in the field’s scholarship if the research

project falls outside of an established methodological system. The field does have some research

talking about theory as method, such as Susan Miller’s chapter, “Writing Theory::Theory

Writing,” from Kirsch and Sullivan’s Methods and Methodology in Composition Research.

However, Miller’s chapter is more of an argument advocating for the creation of certain kinds of

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theories—localized, context-bound theories over universalized ones—than a practical discussion

of how she makes theory herself. The field also has numerous established methods—grounded

theory, ethnography, discourse analysis, etc. that analyze data in ways that employ and

ultimately produce theory. But, when research doesn’t quite follow any of these trajectories, and

relies chiefly on logical argumentation, literature review, and textual analysis to create theory—

like this project does—it more likely than not omits explicit discussion of methods and

methodology entirely.

This elision or omission of accounts of research method in theory-based projects, I think,

is problematic for three reasons. First, omitting discussion of processes of theory-making risks

perpetuating the impression that hermeneutical approaches to research are less rigorous than

empirical approaches. Gesa Kirsch, in critiquing Bereiter and Scardamalia, has demonstrated that

empirical methods—particularly quantitative methods—have historically been afforded

hierarchical preference in terms of their accepted validity (250). Theory making is, in fact, an

intensely rigorous—sometimes excruciating—process of synthesizing ideas and making

decisions about abstract topics that have no absolute certainty. Interpretation is always a risky

business, and “good” theory making is often beset by the researcher’s self-doubts that the theory

invented responsibly, reasonably, ethically represents the phenomena described. In this sense, the

interpretation required of theory making through literature review and textual analysis is no less

rigorous, and no less uncertain than other methods. Keith Grant-Davie argues that “in order to

interpret any kind of data, some form of coding is necessary (and indeed unavoidable), but the

coding process is less determinate than most descriptions of coding systems and reliability tests

assert. Unequivocal accounts of methods invariably hide a trail of difficult and questionable

decisions” (270). Grant-Davie defines coding broadly, as “loosely equivalent to reading,” an

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activity which also encompasses the classification and division of that data (273). Such reading,

classifying, interpreting of data happens, then, even when that data is text taken from a field’s

existing scholarship, as was the case in this project. Letting readers see the decision-making

involved in theory-making from textual analysis helps them to comprehend the difficulty of

reaching sound (at least for the moment) and ethical judgments under these conditions.

Second, the transparency achieved in articulating theory-making and argument-building

practices opens theory-based research works to critical scrutiny and productive revision. This

kind of transparency may make research more vulnerable to intellectual attack—which can be

painful—but responding to and revising thinking based on criticism ultimately leads to better

judgments and pushes knowledge in the field forward. To not open theory-based work to this

kind of scrutiny risks entrenching dominant approaches and perspectives that oppress and stultify

research diversity in the long-term. Third, not articulating theory-based research practices leaves

them mysterious and intimidating to take on for some graduate students when determining their

identities as researchers. This is because students’ models of anything the field might label

“theory” are often the dense and intimidating texts they are assigned to read for their classes—

texts full of complex abstractions that are difficult to comprehend, let alone to attempt to mimic

in their writing. Even if students come to the important conclusion that theory doesn’t have to

look like the “archetypes” of theory commonly read in The Rhetorical Tradition—Aristotle,

Burke, Foucault, etc.—even if they find alternative models for theory elsewhere in the field, they

still would encounter great difficulty finding advice for writing their own theory. There are

numerous published volumes giving research writing advice and explicating methods and

methodologies (Booth et al.; Daynes and Williams; Feak and Swales; Gee, An Introduction to

Discourse Analysis and How to Do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit; Swales and Feak, to name but

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a few)—essentially providing blueprints for doing various forms of research—but none of these

seem to quite bridge the gap in explaining the kind of thinking and writing that turns textual

analysis and literature review into theory-making. Perhaps it is expected that graduate students

will learn to translate these writings into crafting theory as a matter of course, but it doesn’t

appear that anyone shows them how they might do it. Admittedly, providing students with

concrete blueprints for making theory that are perfectly appropriate to the specific projects they

will undertake may not be possible: every project is vastly different, and no one way of making

theory is appropriate to all cases. However, that doesn’t stop us researchers from providing

examples of how we made theory—models that others can study and learn from when they don’t

know how to proceed. The research account provided in this chapter aims to be one such model.

Additionally, in giving as transparent an account of this project’s research methods as

possible, this chapter is attempting to answer calls for greater transparency in articulating

research made elsewhere in writing studies. Peter Smagorinsky has called, for instance, for

“greater attention to accounts of research method, both for the reader’s sake and the writer’s”

(398). Gesa Kirsch, similarly, asserts that “researchers in composition studies would do well to

examine the assumptions underlying their research methods and articulate the principles that

inform their understanding of the nature of knowledge produced in composition studies” (255). I

with and echo these sentiments, but these calls have typically assumed of their readers, I think,

that the projects in question were empirical in nature, and would explicitly extend this call to

textual-analysis and theory-based projects as well.

Transparency is paramount to ethically enacting any research methodology, but I would

argue it is especially so in textual analysis, literature-review, and theory-based projects like this

one. Because such projects are often unable to tap into the well of automatic positive

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predispositions toward credibility, validity, and rigor afforded by readers to empirical methods, a

theoretical project’s validity rests more squarely on its argument and its arguers—both in the

strength of the logic researchers employ and the personal ethos they establish in doing so. Under

these conditions, then, it is crucial that the sequence of premises and assumptions I employed—

with all of their potential limitations—be laid bare. My observations, methods, conclusions, and

proposals don’t perfectly solve the problems of graduate reading, nor are they unproblematic in

and of themselves, as shall soon be shown. I do not pretend that they do or are. Even so, such

methods can perform useful work for us in writing studies, work for which the benefits outweigh

the drawbacks.

Overview of Methods: Strategies for Inventing Threshold Concepts

Regarding methods, much of the rest of this chapter discusses the process of writing

chapter four and how I went about coining the threshold concepts that appear therein. As an

overarching preview, I employed three broad strategies for inventing these concepts. In the first

strategy, which was also the most commonly employed, I carefully adapted threshold concepts

for writing articulated in Naming What We Know and (Re)Considering What We Know,

reframing their terminology, meaning, and implications through the activity of reading. I warrant

this translation of threshold concepts from writing to reading on composition studies’

longstanding assertion that these are inextricably linked, reciprocal, literate activities. Anthony

Petrosky notes that “reading, responding, and composing are aspects of understanding, and

theories that attempt to account for them outside of their interactions with each other run the

serious risk of building reductive models of human understanding” (13). Furthermore,

Marguerite Helmers posits that “any ‘gap’ between reading and writing is a construct” (x). It

follows, then, that adapting threshold concepts of writing to reading is not only acceptable, but

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necessary to enable threshold concept theory to construct a more complete model of how literate

activity operates within the discipline. For the second strategy, I carefully analyzed and

extrapolated threshold concepts from elsewhere in composition’s scholarship about reading. I

extracted moments from these texts in which key presumptions about what reading means in the

field and how it gets done were either explicitly stated or strongly implied, recasting them as

threshold concepts that had yet to be named. The third strategy, like the second, involved careful

analysis and reflection upon the field of composition’s reading research but this time with the

purpose of identifying moments of my personal difficulty comprehending these texts. If

threshold concepts name barriers to learners’ understanding of a discipline, then it stands to

reason that I, as a graduate student mucking about in disciplinary liminal spaces would likely run

into some. Once such moments of difficulty were identified, I analyzed that difficulty using

processes adapted from Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue’s “Triple-Entry Notebook”

described in The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. Through such analysis, I was able to

identify a number of generalizations about what reading in the discipline entails, which became

the basis of new threshold concepts. Notably, many of the threshold concepts I named were

constructed through a hybridization of two, or even all three of these strategies.

This chapter culminates in an in-depth description of these three strategies and a set of

corresponding “developer-diary” narrative examples of how each one was employed. Before

getting to that point, however, several moves are required to honor this project’s commitment to

transparency. In the next section, I discuss the general limitations and affordances of employing

theoretical methods to study graduate reading difficulty. Following that, I zoom in, articulating

and responding to the specific limitations and affordances of threshold concept theory as a

framework for identifying that difficulty. The goal of these two sections is not to gloss over

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weaknesses of threshold concept theory, but rather to demonstrate how threshold concepts are

still useful tools in spite of such limitations and because of their appropriateness to the subject

matter they are employed to study—what our discipline knows or claims to know. Only once all

of this work is finished can the final section of the chapter move forward in describing the

strategies of threshold concept production I employed.

Limitations and Affordances of Theoretical Methods in Studying Graduate Reading

A chief limitation of a theory-based literature-review methodology in the context of this

project is that it does not afford the direct collection and enumeration of difficulties graduate

students experience while reading academic texts. Thus, it can be difficult to convincingly

demonstrate the existence and significance of the problems of graduate reading. That a theory-

based literature review methodology cannot collect primary evidence of student difficulty—say

in the way that interviews, surveys, case studies, etc. can—is significant. This limitation implies

that securing a place for the future study and pedagogy of graduate reading in writing studies will

ultimately require an ongoing program of inquiry encompassing a host of theoretical and

empirical methods.

Even so, theory-based, literature-review textual analysis like that employed in this project

offers affordances that uniquely situate it as a launch-pad method for studying graduate reading.

One important point in this regard is that literature-review methods can collect data on graduate

and faculty reading practices and difficulties. They perform this function secondarily through

meta-analysis of first-hand accounts expressed by experts and students in their writings, much

like that which took place at the outset of this project (see “Argument the First: Reading Is a

Struggle, Even for Graduate Students and Faculty” chapter one, this volume). The stories of

difficulty recuperated from the works of Allen, Robillard, Micciche and Carr, and Salvatori and

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Donahue shed light on some of the more problematic aspects of writing studies’ relationship with

reading and how these problematic aspects may be more widespread than their infrequent

acknowledgment in scholarship might suggest. Consider, for example, Allen’s reference to other

students’ difficulties (98) or Salvatori and Donahue’s pronouncement that “we all struggled”

when reading difficult texts like the works of Michel Foucault (The Elements 111; emphasis

mine). Further, the stories of difficulty recuperated from formal scholarship lent credence to

those expressed outside of it—which this project’s literature review methodology also located

and brought into evidence—like the story graduate student J.K. shared in her blog, or my own

stories of reading difficulty. Even if readers are skeptical of these authors’ suggestions that

graduate reading problems are widespread, they should at least trust the tellers’ accounts of their

own experiences, and collectively these individual accounts indicate that many graduate students

and faculty do experience or have experienced real and significant difficulty in reading

disciplinary texts. The project’s literature-review methods allowed aggregation and synthesis of

these stories in ways no other method could. By reading and interpreting these texts

“perpendicularly” to the purposes for which they were written—neither against their author’s

intents nor with them, but in service to my own—I could uncover and establish patterns in how

reading has been experienced by members of the field. Similar aggregation, synthesis, and

perpendicular reading allowed me to put multiple theories of reading in conversation with one

another in building the second chapter of this project. I read the theoretical works of James Gee,

Louise Rosenblatt, Richard Anderson, among many others, discovering that although reading has

been theorized through many different terminologies, the concepts these terminologies name

often overlap, intersect, and complement one another. Theory-based literature-review methods

allow for these kinds of conversations to take place—for stories and ideas to be put in

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juxtaposition to one another and analyzed for trends. Put another way, my using these methods in

this project allowed me to marshal what has already been said about reading in writing studies

but may not yet have been recognized because it allowed me aggregate disparate accounts into a

body of evidence that is far more compelling than each story would have been on its own.

Theory-based, literature-review textual analysis also affords experimentation with a

wider range of pedagogical responses to the problems of graduate reading than an empirical

framework would allow, and they allow this experimentation to happen more quickly. Review of

composition and education literature suggests myriad existing techniques for teaching reading

that can be synthesized with threshold concepts to create graduate-level reading programs. Such

techniques include modeling reading practices (Pearson and Gallagher; Carillo, Securing), the

classical program of imitatio (Christiansen, Kalbfleisch), Ellen Carillo’s “mindful reading”

metacognitive framework (A Writer’s Guide), rhetorical reading (Bean et al.), and analyzing

student reading difficulties (Salvatori and Donahue, The Elements), among many others.

Literature-review methods allow researchers and practitioners to locate and begin applying these

strategies to assist graduate students with their reading now, rather than attempting to “reinvent

the wheel” of reading instruction or waiting to apply them only after lengthy empirical studies

confirm their potential usefulness. In fact, many of the strategies just mentioned are integrated

into the framework for teaching reading that comprises chapter five of this project. What’s more,

theory-based literature-review methods afford creative, wholistic, and integrative thinking about

how strategies may be employed in conjunction with one another to assist graduate students with

their reading difficulties. I strive to engage in just this kind of thinking in chapter five of this

volume by comparing, contrasting, adapting, applying, remixing—to borrow a term from Jason

Palmeri—existing strategies for teaching reading. Literature-review methods allow members of

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the field to see and compare patterns in what we’ve already discovered about reading pedagogy

and to imagine how that knowledge might be transformed to contexts like graduate education.

Threshold Concepts: Criticisms, Responses, and Impact

Using theory-based literature review as method carries with it a set of general research

concerns as just described, but using threshold concepts as a theory-making tool carries another

set of more specific drawbacks, caveats, and benefits. This section articulates and responds to

criticisms of threshold concept theory, teasing out its affordances and limitations for naming

knowledge in writing studies. In addressing the criticisms around this project’s most important

theoretical framework, as I do now, I seek both to uphold the commitment to transparency I

professed at the outset of this chapter, and to highlight one of the important ways I developed my

methods: the act of thinking through the criticisms around threshold concepts and my responses

to them actually altered not only the processes I employed in naming new threshold concepts,

but also the epistemological and ideological stances I inhabited while doing so. Even criticisms

that I ultimately rejected usually offered some kernel of concern that was worth considering and

which often prompted me to reconceive of my methods, usually with greater care and purpose. In

short, I learned from the critics.

Perhaps until Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s publication of (Re)Considering What We

Know, their follow-up volume to Naming which problematizes and expands their own threshold

concept framework, threshold concepts seem to have been met with overwhelmingly positive

reception. While I believe in the usefulness of threshold concepts for making unseen disciplinary

knowledge explicit and accessible, ignoring their real limitations raises potentially dangerous

consequences for the discipline and for graduate students. It also prevents proponents of

threshold concepts from learning from what their critics have to say. To demonstrate, then, how I

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learned from criticism, I address four “bands” of criticism adapted from Adler-Kassner and

Wardle (speaking from inside writing studies) and economist Rod O’Donnell (speaking outside

of it):

1. Threshold concepts are ambiguously defined, unreliably identifiable, and theoretically

unsound.

2. Threshold concepts undermine the constructivist epistemologies that guide thinking in

writing studies.

3. Threshold concepts reinforce boundedness between communities of practice rather than

promote interdisciplinarity.

4. Threshold concepts (re)produce dominant disciplinary ideologies that privilege some and

oppress others.

Inevitably, this list fails to address all possible criticisms of threshold concepts, ignoring some

outright and condensing or grouping others together. However, these four I think represent the

most significant concerns raised against threshold concepts. For each band, I summarize the

criticism as articulated in scholarship, respond to the concerns it raises, and explain how

consideration of the criticism has informed the methods and methodologies of this project.

1. Threshold Concepts Are Ambiguously Defined, Unreliably Identifiable, and

Theoretically Unsound.

Economist Rod O’Donnell has levied a host of criticisms against threshold concepts

rooted in weaknesses he finds in Meyer and Land’s (2006) definition of the term and the five

criteria which comprise it—transformativeness, irreversibility, integrativeness, boundedness, and

troublesomeness. He writes: “The definition of threshold concepts has deep-seated problems

which make their identification impossible or arbitrary, this leading to troubling epistemological

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and ontological implications concerning the knowability of such concepts and the conditions

under which they exist” (1). These weaknesses, in O’Donnell’s view, ultimately prove threshold

concepts to be unreliable, unsustainable, and un-useful as research or teaching tools.

Indeed, O’Donnell’s critiques along these lines are more numerous than can be fully

explicated here, but I will attempt to cover the most salient ones in greater detail before

rendering a response. Firstly, O’Donnell takes issue with the ambiguity in the number of

attributes needed for any particular threshold concept to meet Meyer and Land’s definition:

“Must all five attributes be present for a concept to qualify,” he asks, “or only a subset?” (3).

Secondly, O’Donnell challenges the validity of the five criteria themselves, finding their frequent

presentation with conditional or probabilistic qualifiers to be problematic because they render

none of the five characteristics to be “essential” in defining the term. O’Donnell, for example,

finds fault in Meyer and Land defining threshold concepts as only potentially troublesome rather

than definitely or always so. He asserts that “the purpose of a theoretical definition is to be

definitive rather than conditional” and that “conditional words applied to attributes destroy the

definitional power of these attributes” (3-4). After all, how can something be a defining attribute

of a phenomenon if it doesn’t have to be present in that phenomenon at all? O’Donnell seems to

take even greater issue, though, with how researchers following Meyer and Land have attempted

to “fix” these definitional problems by removing the probabilistic modifiers from the five

criteria, thus contributing to threshold concepts’ problematic “extraordinary elasticity” as a

theoretical framework. He particularly decries “definitional inconsistencies” on the part of these

researchers, who, “by eliminating some or all qualifiers, have converted the correct probabilistic

formulation into a more definitive but incorrect formulation” (5). Having lodged these and other

concerns, O’Donnell concludes that “any claimed identification [of threshold concepts] is either

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completely arbitrary or using an undisclosed procedure” (4). Later, he amplifies this conclusion:

“Declaring things to exist in the absence of coherent definitions and identification of criteria is a

form of wish-fulfillment, a mark of faith not science” (7).

O’Donnell’s conclusion that threshold concepts, in the absence of stable and definitive

criteria, constitute nothing more than unscientific wish-fulfillment lays at the heart of his

criticism, and this will be the primary point I wish to contest. However, he also expresses a

number of further related and consequential concerns. O’Donnell wonders, for one, whether

threshold concept identification requires that all five characteristics of the definition be present

simultaneously in the learner. He positions troublesomeness as particularly at odds with the other

characteristics, noting that “by the time the learner has grasped the threshold concept properly

and it has become transformative, irreversible, integrative and bounded, it ought to cease being

troublesome” (4). O’Donnell finds it troubling that “threshold concepts could possess changing

subsets of characteristics during students’ learning journeys” because such a finding is

contradictory to occasional but undecisive assertions in the literature that all five are encountered

simultaneously. He likewise raises concerns regarding threshold concepts’ criteria being at all

reliant on learner experiences—what he terms their “agent dependence.” He writes:

“Ontologically, threshold concepts must have the required impacts on the thoughts, perceptions,

and identities of subjects in order to exist. An alleged threshold concept that is not

transformative, integrative, irreversible and troublesome (in sum or in part) for the learner cannot

(presumably) be a threshold concept” (7). In other words, for any given threshold concept to

even exist, it must be experienced by students in the ways the researchers anticipate, a

contingency not required of terminology generated by most other conceptual frameworks.

Adding to this, O’Donnell is further troubled by the literature’s lack of specificity regarding how

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many learners must experience threshold concepts in the prescribed ways in order to prove them

valid. Because all learners bring with them a unique set of experiences and prior knowledge and

they are differently situated within their sociocultural landscapes, there can be no certainty that

any threshold concept will necessarily produce a given anticipated experience. Ultimately,

O’Donnell sees threshold concepts as failing at carrying an “excessive load” of “portal and

experiential requirements” in that they must both mark a conceptual boundary of a discipline and

entail that learners undergo requisite experiences in crossing that boundary (7).

On the face of it, O’Donnell’s criticisms might be perceived as a damning indictment

exposing the epistemological and ontological flaws in the grounds upon which proponents

warrant threshold concepts’ validity and usefulness. Many of his observations about threshold

concepts are valid. I agree that threshold concepts have an ephemeral and probabilistic nature,

that they have been inconsistently defined, that their existence rests on marrying two potentially

paradoxical requirements of learner experiences and practitioner-defined disciplinary thresholds,

and that all of these things prevent threshold concepts from providing empirical certainty in

naming what a field knows or how it knows it. What, I reject, however, is the presumption that

such empirical certainty is required, desirable, or even possible when attempting to understand

phenomena such as academic disciplines that exist solely as constructs in the minds and

behaviors of practitioners. As much as we may lament their rigidity, conservativeness, and

resistance to change, academic disciplines are inherently mutable, contingent, even paradoxical.

They exist individually within each practitioner, but also collectively through the shared

understandings that allow these practitioners to speak and write to one another in mutually

comprehensible ways. Each practitioner is also constantly reinventing for themselves the identity

of the discipline as they participate in it, and in doing so altering the collective identity of the

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discipline itself. No fiber of knowledge is shared with perfect identicalness among any two

practitioners, and yet threads of commonality in thinking exist. There are no universals in what

practitioners know, and yet there are patterns, and these patterns have significant consequences

for any practitioner hoping to remain in good status with the discipline. In short, defining what

academic disciplines know is, at best, a probabilistic venture, and for this work, researchers need

flexible—if messy—tools like threshold concepts that are comfortable working in this messy

realm.

To better demonstrate this last point, it’s worth stepping back for a moment to explain the

differences I see operating in the epistemological and ontological stances underlying

O’Donnell’s criticisms and those which undergird the arguments of threshold concepts’

proponents. O’Donnell’s criticisms only invalidate threshold concepts if we accept the–what I

believe to be—positivistic stance from which he writes. If writing studies’ previous work with

threshold concepts accurately represents the beliefs of its constituents, it is not likely that most of

us will. Since composition’s “social turn” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a constructivist

stance has animated most of its theories of reading and writing, a stance which Wardle et al.

assert is “foundational to many of the threshold concepts named in NWWK” (19). Continuing,

Wardle et al. offer concise summary of the differences between positivist and constructivist

epistemologies:

A positivist perspective “[assumes] an objective external reality, and focuses on

generalization and cause and effect linkages” (Baxter Magolda 2004, 32). Sociologist

John Law (2004), critiquing positivist methods of social science research, argues that this

perspective stabilizes existing processes and practices. This stabilization begins from

questions designed to explore what is extant and extends though the “framing

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assumption” of methodologies: “that there are definite processes out there waiting to be

discovered.” […]

In a constructivist perspective, however, methods and the process of exploration look

quite different: “Realities are multiple, context-bound, and mutually shaped by the

interaction of the knower and the known” (Baxter Magolda 2004, 35). From this

perspective, Law (2008) argues, “the argument is no longer that methods discover and

depict realities. Instead, it is that they participate in the enactment of those realities” (45).

(19-20)

O’Donnell’s subscribing to a positivistic stance is most directly evidenced in his pronouncement

that, regarding threshold concepts, “the normative trumps the positive” (7). He explains:

At its core, the TCH [threshold concept hypothesis] contains a conflict between positive

and normative issues in which persistent advocacy results in the normative winning out

over the positive. Taking the definition [of threshold concepts] in its correct

(probabilistic) form, threshold concepts are unidentifiable. If advocates then state that a

particular threshold concept is definitely a threshold concept, then it can only be their

desire (as teachers or researchers) that makes it so” (7).

Such a statement is intended to be a rebuke of threshold concepts’ validity, but to researchers in

writing studies who are invested in a constructivist stance, it can be read as an impartial

observation. From a constructivist stance, of course the normative trumps the positive because

there is nothing regarding disciplinary knowledge about which anyone can be positively,

absolutely, -for-all-time certain. All that researchers can attempt to know are the normative

patterns of how practitioners think and do. Thus, O’Donnell is troubled by the very premises that

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proponents of threshold concepts tend to espouse: threshold concepts are human constructs that

hold no consistent anchor in an objective, external reality.

I don’t think we in writing studies need to share in O’Donnell’s troubled-ness. A

positivistic perspective is looking to discover stable, pre-existing, empirically observable, and

externally verifiable phenomena. Constructivism, on the other hand, allows us to acknowledge

and make use of phenomena that are contingent, temporal, contextual, and even conflicting.

Further, a constructivist perspective allows us to recognize that there are intangible

phenomena—like disciplines and threshold concepts themselves—that have no reality external

from the people who believe them, practice them, or are impacted by them. These “constructs”

exist only because a community of people have (usually tacitly) instantiate them through their

continued participation in that community.

Just because a phenomenon is a construct, though, doesn’t mean that it isn’t “real” or that

it cannot have profound impact on people’s lives. Laws, for example, are constructs that do not

exist apart from the people who make, enforce, and are governed by them, but they most

definitely alter the ways in which people live—through court battles, prison, fines, and merely

the threat of these kinds of things. Certainly, laws can be written down, can be created in

legislative bodies, and can be enforced through courts and prisons, but these things aren’t

themselves laws. Laws are codified human behavior and thinking—people choosing to act

according to certain internalized normative directives, or not. Take away people and laws

disappear too. More importantly, if enough people stop tacitly assenting to any law, such a law

loses significance, even if it continues to “exist” in written codes.

So, there are things—like laws and disciplines—which exist only because humans have

socially constructed them, and these things nonetheless have significance and power over

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people’s material realities, but they can also be productively studied and understood, albeit

imperfectly. No researcher can observe and measure an academic discipline directly. No one can

download from the minds of all of a discipline’s practitioners what and how they think, or how

they perform their jobs, at all times. And even if someone could, who would be unable to distill

the massive bulk of this knowledge down to a form that would be of any use to the rest us?

Therefore, any knowledge to be had about what a discipline knows and how it knows it must be

built by piecing together incomplete and ever-shifting data—data often taken from the statements

of practitioners themselves. Researchers cannot claim to know anything about disciplines with

universal or absolute certainty. The best we can do when studying the realm of human

knowledge and how it affects the thoughts and activities of those who know it is to describe the

probabilistic patterns we believe we see and submit our findings to the scrutiny of our colleagues

for their assent, dissent, and revision. Within this probabilistic realm, threshold concepts—fuzzy,

inconsistent, and flawed constructs as they are—are an appropriate tool for attempting to name

what we know and believe about reading in our field.

But while I reject O’Donnell’s conclusions regarding the validity of threshold concepts,

his criticisms have nevertheless profoundly shaped the methods by which I have conducted this

project. Foremostly, his demonstration of threshold concept theory’s failure to live up to the

requirements of a positivist framework has caused me to deeply rethink the degree of certainty

with which threshold concepts can be claimed to name anything. They are, I believe, truthful

statements, but they are never totally, discretely, immutably truthful. Rather, they are partial,

contingent, morphic, contextual. This recognition requires a stance of humility and continual

openness to revision of threshold concepts. I have attempted to infuse this stance throughout this

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project, even as I have staunchly advocated for threshold concepts’ usefulness in teaching

reading to graduate students.

Secondly, O’Donnell’s list of concerns regarding inconsistencies in threshold concepts’

definition and application has given rise to more specific changes in the methods by which I

construct them. I don’t share O’Donnell’s level of alarm over these inconsistencies. It is the

inevitable consequence of language use and the constructed nature of making meaning with it

that terms, especially complex and abstract ones like threshold concepts, will shift in their

meanings as researchers reconstruct the terms for themselves, replicating them imperfectly from

their original meanings. I also believe it acceptable for researchers to purposefully modify the

boundaries of meanings of terms so long as they are transparent in explaining specifically how

and why they have done so. Nevertheless, upholding a degree of relative consistency in

terminological meaning is important to maintain mutually intelligible communication within a

discipline. For these reasons, O’Donnell’s concerns prompted me to adopt the following set of

guidelines when developing threshold concepts:

1. Each threshold concept must make a case for how it might meet each of Meyer and

Land’s five definitional criteria.

2. When relating a threshold concept to these criteria, I maintain their probabilistic and

conditional modifiers.

3. Threshold concepts need not satisfy all five criteria at the same time throughout the

learning process.

In practice, these guidelines required that, prior to finalizing any threshold concept’s place in the

list, I wrote a written justification in a research log explaining how it could be said to meet each

of the five criteria (see description of “definitional justification test” in “Inventing Threshold

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Concepts: Three Developer Narratives” below). I performed this task to maintain greater

consistency with Meyer and Land’s definitions, ambiguous and conditional as they are. In fact,

this conditional-ness is crucial in signaling to readers that I am operating from a constructivist

stance in attempting to create operative-for-now understandings about phenomena which cannot

perfectly be known, and which are subject to change. Conditional-ness is a feature of threshold

concepts, not a bug. Material adapted from such logs comprise portions of the three method

narratives that appear later in this chapter, and elements of these logs tended to be incorporated

into the final encyclopedia entries for threshold concepts appearing in chapter four. The third

guideline is an acknowledgement of O’Donnell’s point that the troublesomeness of threshold

concepts does tend to recede as the threshold is crossed—though not necessarily in inverse

proportion to the leaner experiencing the other criteria—and clarifies a point of ambiguity. Of

course, these justifications can be scrutinized and challenged, but that is exactly the point:

threshold concepts are predicated on naming useful norms in how a community thinks and does.

If they cannot achieve reasonable assent from the field, they aren’t likely to be of much use to it.

The test of that assent is ultimately how they are received by readers of this project.

2. Threshold Concepts Undermine the Constructivist Epistemologies that Guide Thinking

in Writing Studies.

If O’Donnell’s concern from outside of writing studies is that threshold concepts

constitute a form of theoretically unsound “wish fulfillment,” then concerns from within the field

tend in the opposite epistemological direction: in naming what we know, we risk calcifying

impermanent, constructed perceptions about how we think and do into prescriptive maxims and

objective truths. Wardle et. al explain:

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There is, then, a critique to be leveled regarding the method by which those of us

involved in the initial process of NWWK went about our work: it could be seen as

attempting to impose a particular kind of stability and order that privileges the past. To

complicate this possibility even more, it could be said that naming threshold concepts

may also suggest an objective social reality at odds with constructivist perspectives that

view reality as constantly in production and created by practices and beliefs. (19)

These concerns are especially poignant when we consider that constructivism is probably not the

default epistemological framework of most people. Humans are not born with the meta-

awareness that much of reality is in fact constructed through shared beliefs. In the absence of

multiple influential worldviews in their lives, individuals are likely to come to see the set of

material and social conditions they have inherited from their parents and their immediate

communities as the “natural order.” This would seem to be particularly the case for people who

have embodied racial, ethnic, or gendered privilege and for whom dominant ideological systems

may be congruent with or reinforce these inherited conditions. Further, institutions like school do

much to reify these systems and perpetuate their subjective “truth” as singular, objective,

absolute, “Truth,” discovered not made. Add to this that research writings are written by

experts—a type of authority figure within dominant ideological systems—and this host of

cultural factors might well prompt readers to interpret such writings, even those as saturated in

constructivism as Naming What We Know, as statements of unchanging fact rather than morphic

human-built constructs.

Recognizing firstly that knowledge is always constructed by somebody and therefore can

be deconstructed is itself a difficult threshold to cross, and not one for which the crossing can be

assumed for all of writing studies’ practitioners. Many in the field labor under suboptimal

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material and social conditions that I suspect limit their ability, time, or willingness to interact

with texts through a constructivist lens. Consider how many of the field’s practitioners—its

writing teachers—are adjuncts or non-tenured instructors. These time-demanding jobs are

typically oriented toward applying the field’s knowledge in teaching writing, not in creating

knowledge about writing, or participating in altering it. For these practitioners, when they have

time and motivation to read research, I would expect their first priority might be on using it to

solve real, immediate problems in teaching and learning, not necessarily to question its premises

or conclusions. In other words, their default orientation might be to accept this research as

established, completed truth, rather than viewing it as the result of an ongoing conversation in

which they might participate. Over time, if threshold concepts are taken up by practitioners in

this way, the discipline faces the problematic reality of their entrenchment and calcification—

that they become a dominant, unchanging disciplinary ideology (though this same problem exists

with anything the field writes). Wardle et al. note how their own writing on threshold concepts

can participate in such calcification: “naming [threshold concepts] and publishing them in the

form of a static book continues to enact and construct them, and thus to produce and reproduce

particular kinds of realities, and may make it difficult to integrate norms or imagine a different

kind of future” (20). If these reproduced realities become an ideology that gate out new ideas and

pathways of discovery, threshold concepts will indeed have ceased serving our practice, and

instead our practice will have come to perpetuate the hegemony of threshold concepts.

What, then, is to be done to prevent threshold concepts’ calcification? I think, it is clear

that we should not abandon the project of naming what we know altogether: our field harbors

patterns of belief about what we know and how we do, whether we choose to name these things

or not. Wardle et al. concur that naming what we know reifies and reproduces patterns of

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thought, but it does not bring them into existence in the first place: “threshold concepts were not

created by the participants in the NWWK project; those participants were trying to name and

explain the enactments of shared ideas as they had witnessed and participated in them across

time” (20). These “shared ideas” have profound impact on the thinking and careers of current

and future practitioners. To leave them unspoken is to leave graduate students and others in our

field to struggle with reading and writing it on their own. It would be something like asking them

to play the “game” of the academy for high stakes without telling them the “rules.” What’s more,

while I share Wardle et al.’s concerns that reifying threshold concepts by writing them down

may make it more difficult to challenge problematic norms in the field, I wonder how the field is

supposed to challenge such norms at all if it’s membership neither knows what they are nor

acknowledges that they even exist.

Instead, I think the path forward in preventing threshold concepts’ calcification is to

continue to name what we know and use this knowledge to teach our discipline, but we must do

so while issuing frequent reminders of threshold concepts’ limitations and embedding

opportunities in our research for new voices to shape them. Adler-Kassner and Wardle take great

care to remind readers of threshold concepts’ constructed, contingent nature, as I likewise do

here. But reminders in our research aren’t enough by themselves to empower most graduate

students, nor the many non-research focused members of our field, with the agency and access to

(re)author the ways of thinking and doing in our discipline. Instead, our teaching through and

about threshold concepts to students must enact a proactive stance toward encouraging their

revision. I try to incorporate this attitude of revision of threshold concepts in the suggestions

described for teaching graduate reading that comprise chapter five of this volume. In particular,

the reading journal that forms the heart of instructional activity for students asks them to link

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difficulty encountered during reading to disciplinary threshold concepts: either existing ones,

adaptations of existing ones, or completely novel ones they build themselves. The addition of the

option for students to adapt or craft their own threshold concepts allows them to place shared

ideas of the field in conversation with their own developing sense of how the field thinks. In

performing this assignment, students practice interrogating, revising, and constructing threshold

concepts for themselves even as they are analyzing their own reading difficulties. Once students

have this kind of practice working with and rethinking threshold concepts in the classroom, it is

important that they be included in efforts like those begun by Adler-Kassner and Wardle in

(Re)Considering What We Know to widen the circle of contributors of threshold concepts to our

field’s written research. Ultimately, the extent to which writing studies prevents the calcification

of threshold concepts is both a function of the vigilance with which we its membership remind

students and ourselves that the beliefs and practices of our field can/do/should change and the

consistency with which we empower as-yet-unheard voices with opportunities to enact that

change.

3. Threshold Concepts Reinforce Boundaries Between Communities of Practice Rather

than Promote Interdisciplinarity.

If threshold concept theory risks being misinterpreted as creating a set of immutable

objective truths about a discipline, and thereby constricting development of new ideas within the

community, it similarly risks being construed as erecting impenetrable boundaries around a field,

thereby cutting off productive dialogue between communities of practice. Concerns about

threshold concepts creating “silos” of disciplinarity have been raised from within writing studies

and without. Wardle et al. acknowledge that “naming threshold concepts can easily reify them

and contribute to a sense that boundaries between disciplines are rigid and impermeable” (17).

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Similarly, O’Donnell warns that “Currently, knowledge is not generally taught as a seamless web

but is compartmentalized into domains of specialization where most practitioners think and talk

like x’s, y’s, and z’s. […] The psychological impact is then disintegrative, not integrative” (9).

Our field’s multiple names (rhetoric and writing, rhetoric and composition, writing studies, etc.)

gesture to its history as a hybrid community amalgamated from practitioners drawn from many

disciplines. Cooperation and collaboration across fields gave rise to our own and continue to

push it forward. To lose this interdisciplinarity is to lose ourselves, so we must take these

concerns seriously.

I tend to agree, however, with Wardle et al. that threshold concepts theory lends at least

as much opportunity to catalyze interdisciplinary cooperation as to curtail it. Wardle et al.

contend that “naming threshold concepts can be useful precisely because they shed light on

boundaries that are often invisible, or at least difficult to see” (17). Wardle et al. acknowledge

that when scholars gather from multiple disciplines for a common project, progress can be

derailed by deep intellectual disagreements. Many of these disagreements arise from assumptions

shared by practitioners within a community but not across the communities working together,

creating unarticulated but opposing premises. Naming threshold concepts can help to map

divergent premises and guiding theories, as well as convergent ones, while providing a common

language for scholars to speak across these differences and move forward. Further, it is worth

noting that threshold concepts only become barriers to interdisciplinary work when they are

policed as boundaries rather than treated as portals that can be traversed. If we think of their

gateway nature as keeping things out rather than as letting things in, we will have succumbed to

the calcification of threshold concepts I have described previously, and they will have ceased to

be useful in pushing our discipline forward.

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Because this project is interested not only in naming what writing studies knows about

reading, but also what our related fields can tell us, issues surrounding the potential of threshold

concepts to promote interdisciplinarity are everywhere enmeshed in it. This project can be

viewed as a crucial first step prior to face-to-face interdisciplinary work on graduate reading. In

naming explicitly for ourselves what we know about reading, we prepare ourselves to more

consciously compare and contrast our guiding premises with those whom we might collaborate

with in the future. Further, many of the threshold concepts articulated here have their roots in

theories long ago borrowed from other disciplines. Taking some of the theories enmeshed in the

threshold concepts of chapter two as examples, Louise Rosenblatt wrote her transactional theory

of reading from a background in literary studies, James Paul Gee’s sociocognitive model of

reading shows the influence of his degrees in linguistics, and “schema theory” arises from the

work of multiple researchers in educational and cognitive psychology. These ties of theory

provide common starting ground to advance what all of us scholars across disciplines know

about reading.

4. Threshold Concepts (Re)Produce Dominant Disciplinary Ideologies that Privilege Some

and Oppress Others

This band of critique, adapted from Wardle et al., poses to me the most serious concern

about threshold concepts for our discipline: that the knowledge to which we give name may only

represent the dominant normative views of the segment of our field with enough power to give

them voice, and worse yet, that the act of naming itself codifies these views in a way that

silences others. Wardle et al. explain how threshold concepts pose this potential threat:

If realities are constructed, it follows then that when there is a consensus around those

constructions, consensus invariably reflect[s] the values and ideologies of a dominant

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culture. Other ideologies are not recognized as valid or perhaps even acknowledged at all

within dominant frameworks. Threshold concepts, whether articulated explicitly or not,

are ideas that have been reified by a dominant cultural group—some members of a

discipline and not necessarily others—those with the power to be heard. Those ideas are

reinforced through disciplinary practices that inherently maintain stability and propagate

particular values and points of view—classes, curricula, graduate programs, hiring

practices, peer review, scholarship, and so on. (22).

O’Donnell describes similar concerns: “Thinking like an x means thinking in the conceptual

categories foundational to the currently dominant discourse in x, and also practising x in the

standard ways. It then becomes contrary to one’s training to view the world through other lenses,

or even to do x in ways which depart from professionally sanctioned frameworks” (9). He adds,

also: “The view that there is a single set of threshold concepts in a discipline typically reflects

the view that a discipline only has one reputable school of thought. But many disciplines […]

have multiple reputable schools of thought, each with a school-specific set of core concepts. This

transforms the issue into one of power and control—which set is to prevail and who decides?”

(9). Clearly, naming what we know holds potential consequences on who can say and do in our

field and how they can say and do it.

I should clarify that threshold concepts hold potential to oppress—to borrow some

phrasing from Kate Vieira et al.—just as they hold potential to liberate. Because any set of

beliefs strongly and widely held can meld into an ideology, and because some ideologies

inevitably gain more power, influence, or significance than others—if for no other reason than

because enough people agree about something—we should not expect that we can eliminate

dominant ideologies completely from our field or any other aspect of human social existence. It

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is not given that all ideologies must oppress, nor that they must liberate, however, nor do either

of these things exclusively or universally. Take, for example, the following belief statements: all

people, regardless of race, sexuality, gender, or class have the right to live free of harassment or

harm in regard to any component of their identities, they have the right to equitable access to all

social and material capital necessary to live their lives, and they have the right to participate

equitably in the shaping of all decisions and power structures that impact them. These belief

statements, or versions of them, likely form planks in many of the ideologies of practitioners in

our field—ideologies that we believe are liberatory. Yet even these ideologies have, at least in

theory, the capacity to oppress (though if they do so, it would be in ways difficult to foresee).

Threshold concepts will always be tied to dominant ideologies, but as Wardle et al. have argued,

threshold concepts—and the ideologies to which they are tied—exist in our field, as they do

within all communities of practice, “whether we name them or not” (19). It matters less, then,

that we have ideologies or threshold concepts that name aspects of them, and more which

ideologies we participate in (re)producing through them, our dispositions toward reshaping

ideologies, and that every member of the field acquires agency to participate in this reshaping.

One of the most important things we can do to prevent threshold concepts from becoming

oppressive is to build into our stances toward constructing them the expectation that they be

flexible and open to change. Again, I invoke the reminders and invitations I describe in response

to the second band of criticism above. Threshold concepts’ risk of calcification into empirical

“truth” and their risk of perpetuating oppressive dominant ideologies march in lockstep. We must

not fail in our vigilance to remind each other of the temporal, observational, and contingent

nature of threshold concepts: they name patterns of what exists for now, not of what ought to

exist, or will exist. More importantly, we must act on these reminders, continually widening the

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circle of voices of contributors who name them, as Wardle et al. have crucially done in

Reconsidering What We Know.

Like Wardle et al., I proceed in advocating for threshold concepts because I believe the

potential benefits of naming what we know outweigh the risks (23). Wardle et al. undertook the

project of Naming What We Know because our field’s knowledge about writing needs to be

articulated as a counter to outside stakeholder groups who are all too willing to define what good

writing is in our absence. In doing so, these groups would, unconsciously, impose their own

dominant and problematic ideologies on the practice of writing. I persist in this project because,

to date, few have yet sought to define what reading looks like for professionals in our field, and

our graduate students need to explicitly learn how to wield the tools used in plying our trade.

They are already being judged by how well they learn these tools, whether we show them how to

use them or not. Threshold concepts afford us opportunity to interrogate our field’s dominant

ideologies, shining a spotlight on beliefs that would otherwise exist as shadows haunting the

edges of our collective consciousness.

In addition to the message of reminders and invitations toward the revision of threshold

concepts, the greatest methodological impact of this band of criticism on this project has been

it’s prompting the inclusion of a specific threshold concept of reading in chapter five: “4.3

Learning to Read a Discipline Holds Potential to Liberate and Oppress.” This threshold concept

is adapted closely from Kate Vieira et al.’s chapter of (Re)Considering What We Know. Their

work represents one of the most important efforts to date to widen the circle of contributors to

our field’s threshold concepts, not only because it sounds the voices of a large, diverse group of

scholars who have heretofore been unheard in threshold concept scholarship, but also because it

begins to name our field’s threshold beliefs about the interrelatedness of literacy, identity, race,

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and power in sketching out the problematic history of reading and writing’s use as tools of

oppression and empowerment. My inclusion of a similar threshold concept is a gesture to the

work needing to be done to articulate how our practices and assumptions about reading in our

discipline have power to oppress and liberate its membership and how this power has been

enacted differently on different bodies. My singular authorship and my privileged situatedness as

a cisgendered, straight white male make me woefully inappropriate to represent the experiences

of wide swathes of people whose situated positions are diverse and often vastly different from

my own. Therefore, this threshold concept is an example of the planned obsolescence we need to

build into our efforts to articulate threshold concepts—a placeholder until multiple new voices

take up the invitation to coin new threshold concepts and to alter existing ones. At the same time,

because academic disciplines are not inherent “Discourses” to anyone—not primary “identity

kits” as James Gee might put it—and because these disciplines are steeped in ideologies that

inform power structures which impact people’s lives, it stands to reason that anyone seeking

membership into said discourse community is exposed to some level of their potential to liberate

and oppress, regardless of situatedness. It is to this general potential that this threshold concept

will attempt to speak and gain resonance.

Inventing Threshold Concepts: Three Developer Narratives

Discussion now turns, finally, to narrating the processes by which I produced chapter

four’s list of threshold concepts. Discussion starts with a generalized description of the research

process and then proceeds to three “close-up” developer narratives of what happened to create

individual threshold concepts.

Stories of method, in the sense that they are finished narratives trying to concisely

communicate research processes after the fact, tend to “smooth” those processes considerably,

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eliding the fact that research practices, in part or in whole, usually must be invented and

reinvented as part of the research itself. Such smoothing might give the impression that the

development of threshold concepts for this project proceeded from a set of pre-established

protocols that were executed cleanly, linearly, mechanically. It did not. Instead, the process was

organic, iterative, messy. I think it important that colleagues and students catch a glimpse of the

actual messiness of research practices, even as researchers try to give clear accounts of methods.

I think this because our graduate students need to know that performing research requires making

nearly countless decisions, both big and small, for which there is no pre-determined path and for

which the outcome is uncertain. Part of taking on the identity of the researcher is developing the

sense of personal authority to make these decisions and the ideology that helps guide judgment

in doing so. We need to show graduate students our struggles to let them know that theirs are

valid and normal. For colleagues, narrating the messiness of research is a matter of ethos: in

seeing the fits and starts, the problems that arose, and how the researcher resolved them or not—

colleagues catch sight of the researcher’s judgment, insight that helps them determine the rigor

of thought behind the research practices themselves. So, I present smoothed narratives of my

research process, but with considerable gestures to the messiness happening behind the scenes.

The threshold concept construction process began with identifying the three strategies by

which I would name them:

1. Adapting existing threshold concepts from Naming What We Know and

Reconsidering What We Know

2. Extracting concepts implicitly from (other) disciplinary literature

3. Constructing new concepts as a result of analyzing personal reading difficulties

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But while I conceived these strategies near the project’s inception, I had little idea then of the

steps I would take to execute them. Instead, many of these developed organically as I performed

the reading required to build this project’s first two chapters. During this time, I created two

Microsoft Word documents as research tools. The first was a daily research log that provided

space to set out goals for the session’s work, reflect upon problems and questions I encountered

in the texts I was reading, and plot next steps in the research process (see “Figure 1” below). The

second was an annotated bibliography, or what I came to call the “quote farm,” a massive,

sprawling document of more than two-hundred pages chock-full of text summaries, hand-typed

quotes, and detailed notes of how I would use each source (see “Figure 2” below). For this

document, I also developed a system of three-letter codes or “tags,” attached to each

bibliographic entry to help me categorize the use of each source. For example, I used the code

“{TCE},” “threshold concept example,” to a mark a source which I felt contained an implicit

threshold concept, a tag particularly helpful when I was employing my second strategy of

generation. I likewise had a code for marking texts containing moments in which I experienced

reading difficulty, “{DIF},” which was useful when developing threshold concepts according to

my third strategy (see “Figure 3” below). But while this use of tags and annotations might

suggest a preplanned, quasi-scientific procedure, the truth was far more chaotic. The tags

emerged first as a peripheral thought, then became a necessity as the quote farm ballooned in

size and I needed a way to quickly search its overwhelming body of information. The kinds of

tags developed as I had need of them, as did the formatting and organization of the bibliographic

entries themselves, resulting in later entries being far more organized and purposeful than initial

ones as the direction of the project solidified.

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After having read, thought, and written about threshold concepts and our field’s reading

literature over a period of months, I set out to write a first-pass list of “proto” threshold concepts.

To maintain some consistency in their formatting, I chose to adopt the complete-sentence style

used in Naming What We Know (see “Figure 4” below). However, I chose not to methodically

comb my research log or annotated bibliography for material to sketch this first list. Instead, I

took a more impressionistic and wholistic approach, opting instead to write down the threshold

concepts that had most deeply lodged themselves in my memory. This did sometimes involve

consulting my research documents or Naming What We Know for reference, but the overarching

purpose was to capture threshold concepts I felt named roadblocks to graduate students reading

our field effectively, not to name every threshold practice and belief about reading we hold.

Adler-Kassner and Wardle themselves admit that “we do not believe it is possible or desirable to

try to name, once and for all, all such concepts” (8). I feared that in trying to capture all possible

threshold concepts, I might in the meantime forget the ones that most mattered for the project:

those whose learning would help graduate students read our field with greater ease.

In addition to my overarching purpose of identifying threshold concepts related to

disciplinary reading difficulties, the initial sketch for generating these concepts was informed by

a number of other guiding principles. I was inspired by Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia

Donahue’s assertions in The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty that “difficulty can be

understood” and that “difficulties can be explored in elemental terms” (xviii). These assertions

not only inspired me to use my own moments of reading difficulty as sites for articulating

threshold concepts, but also suggested the usefulness of developing a loose heuristic to better

generate and organize threshold concepts on the list. If difficulty can be broken down into

constituent elements of different kinds, then I reasoned it would be useful to categorize threshold

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concepts according to those different kinds. For such an organizing heuristic, I turned to the field

of linguistics, borrowing from it the paradigm of conceiving of language as a set of hierarchical,

inter-nesting levels—phonemes form words, which form syntactical units, which form writings,

which form discourses. Linguists subdivide these levels with some variance, but I ultimately

simplified the categories to three that I found most useful:

1. Lexical—the meanings of individual words.

2. Syntactical—the relational meaning of words within a syntactic unit—phrase, clause,

sentence—that combine to create a wholistic meaning of that unit.

3. Textual/Discursive—the wholistic meaning of a complete research work in context of

the discipline reading/writing it.

I reasoned that at each of these levels of language there existed unarticulated, discipline-specific

assumptions or practices about reading that could pose points of difficulty for graduate students

learning them. This schema omits and conflates several common levels linguists include in their

hierarchies. For example, I include no phonemic level before the lexical. This is because our

field does not appear to use the sounds or written symbols of the English language in ways

unique to itself. Additionally, there is no level for pragmatics—how social context shapes

meaning—because my assumption is that social context is inextricably intertwined with each

other level. These and other omissions do not mean there are no threshold concepts related to

these levels, but simply that I did not find them there. Additionally, not all concepts aligned to

one of these three categories neatly, but rather seemed to span between two levels. Finally, “one-

off” threshold concepts also occasionally developed, emerging from an entirely different

organizing paradigm. Such concepts were usually placed in a separate, “miscellaneous,”

grouping.

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Figure 1: Screenshot of daily research blog

Figure 2: Screenshot of annotated bibliography (i.e., the "quote farm")

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Figure 3: Screenshot of subject tag key from the researcher's annotated bibliography

Figure 4: Screenshot of a version of the working list of threshold concepts captured late in development

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Revision and development of proto-threshold concepts consisted of a number of

nonsequential activities. The most important of these was what I called a “definitional

justification test,” in which I made a written justification for how the threshold concept might be

said to satisfy each of the five criteria of Meyer and Land’s definition: transformativeness,

irreversibility, integrativeness, boundedness, and potential troublesome-ness (see “Figure 5”

below). My emphasis on “might” affirms threshold concepts’ probabilistic nature and entails that

the justifications are open to scrutiny and disagreement. I adopted this testing practice in

response to Rod O’Donnell’s criticisms regarding the definitional stability and validity of

threshold concepts. While I do not believe that definitions for theoretical terms can have

objectively true and perfectly static meanings, I do believe in the necessity of maintaining some

subjective, relative consistency in how we identify threshold concepts across the discipline to

preserve a shared understanding of the term and to keep them useful to us as teaching and

thinking tools.

Figure 5: Screenshot of an example “definitional justification test” for threshold concept M.1, “Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive"

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Each of the threshold concepts on the final list was tested in this way, and reference to such

justification tests appear as part of the three method narratives below.

Another development practice was to, whenever possible, triangulate threshold concepts.

For this project, triangulation meant finding evidence of the threshold concept’s existence and

significance apart from my personal experience. This was necessary to determine if the threshold

represented a phenomenon shared by the discipline or simply “wish fulfillment” on my own part

as a researcher. In some cases, triangulation was relatively easy, and its means were implied in

the method for crafting the threshold concept in the first place. For example, because all of the

threshold concepts created through the first method—adaptation from existing concepts—were

based on concepts that had already been scrutinized and accepted by multiple scholars,

triangulation was achieved through citation of the original concept and explication of the new

concept’s relationship to it. In other cases, triangulation was more esoteric, involving analyzing

statements from scholarship that had nothing explicitly to do with threshold concepts. And in

some rare cases, I found no immediate triangulation at all. These were threshold concepts for

which there was little or no acceptable documented evidence to cite, but which I strongly felt

represented threshold reading difficulties experienced by myself and my then graduate

colleagues as we were moving through our programs. I mark these threshold concepts as

“prospective” (with a superscript “p” following their titles) when they appear in chapter four. I

justify their inclusion based on the discipline-expanding practices of Adler-Kassner and Wardle

enacted in (Re)Considering What We Know whereby they include a number of threshold

concepts that are commonly recognized as such “within particular scholarly communities within

the discipline,” but “are not widely represented as taken for granted throughout the entirety of the

research literature of the field” (26). Triangulation for these threshold concepts, as ought to be

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the case for all, is an ongoing process taking place through their reception in this work and will

be determined by whether they find resonance in the shared knowledge and experience of our

field’s membership.

To format the entries appearing in chapter four, I analyzed and replicated the formatting

of threshold concept entries from Naming What We Know. I read them, paragraph by paragraph,

jotting down a quick note about the generalized rhetorical function of each. I determined that

entries usually performed the following functions, roughly in this order:

1. Definition of what the concept means.

2. Examples showing the concept in practice.

3. Explanation of the concept’s significance/what’s at stake for writing and the field.

4. Explanation of what might make the concept troublesome to learn.

5. Summary of the benefits to the learner of crossing the threshold.

6. Linkage of the threshold concept to other related concepts.

These items—with some alteration to reflect threshold concepts for reading rather than writing—

became the outline for generating and arranging the content of the encyclopedic entries for this

project. My set of threshold concept development practices—definitional justification testing and

triangulation—produced much content that overlapped these categories, making the job of

writing the final entries much easier and purposeful. Most threshold concepts changed

substantially in their wording, meaning, formatting, and list ordering as a result of these

development practices. Some were merged and others teased apart to finally produce the

finalized list appearing in chapter four.

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Having narrated the practices and processes of threshold concept creation in a general

sense, from start to finish, discussion now turns to the development of individual example

threshold concepts.

Method Narrative 1: Adapting Existing Threshold Concepts

The most common method of threshold concept invention I employed was to adapt them

from the robust existing list in Naming What We Know. Essentially this method involved

carefully reading threshold concepts from Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s collection and

reinterpreting their focus, meaning, and consequences as they might apply to reading in our field

rather than writing. These acts of translation are warranted on our field’s longstanding

commitment to the belief that reading and writing are inextricably linked, reciprocal, literate

activities (see “It Productively Deepens,” chapter one, this volume). Sometimes the translation

process involved tweaks or more significant changes to the wording of the original threshold

concept to reflect this shifted focus on reading, and sometimes it did not. Given the closeness of

reading and writing, it should be unsurprising that the wording of Naming What We Know’s

threshold concepts requires minimal change to create statements that apply as accurately to

reading as they do to writing. Several of the threshold concepts listed in that collection

encompass reading already, but reading is usually not the aspect of human communication that is

foregrounded or privileged. In fact, in many cases, one could simply substitute the word

“reading” for “writing” and still produce accurate, cogent threshold concepts. And I have

essentially done just that for a few of the threshold concepts I create. In this way, the wording of

the threshold concepts derived from Naming What We Know is the least novel thing about them.

Whether the actual wording of the original threshold concept was changed or not, translation in

all cases required writing new encyclopedic entries that both carefully gave attribution to the

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original source and presented completely new discussions reflecting the new threshold concept’s

shifted focus.

Of the three methods employed, this one offered the benefit of best honoring Adler-

Kassner and Wardle’s insistence that “any attempt to name what a field knows must be a project

taken up by numerous members of the field,” because it built upon threshold concepts that had

already been reviewed, contested, negotiated, and revised by many practitioners in our discipline

(“Naming What We Know: The Project of This Book” 3). In other words, it most closely tapped

into the well of established shared conceptions of our field. However, there were also two

tensions in creating threshold concepts in this way. First, there was the risk of my mis-adapting

threshold concepts to a degree to which they no longer represented shared beliefs of

practitioners. This was the danger of over-adaptation. The second tension was the inverse, under-

adaptation: in failing to adapt a threshold concept enough, I would have failed to say anything

novel or significant to our field at all. Ultimately, there were no resolutions to these tensions; the

extent to which I may have fallen to either extreme in my reinterpretations could only be judged

by outside readers after the fact. Rather, I had to proceed with lingering ambiguity, relying

instead on exercising careful judgment within the guiding principles of this project: make visible

the unseen practices of reading in our discipline to ameliorate the struggles of graduate students.

To see how these tensions played out in practice, I offer here the first of the three promised

narrative examples, this one describing the development of a threshold concept produced by

adapting existing threshold concepts.

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Example 1: Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words and the Communities of Practice

that Use Them.

Readers familiar with Naming What We Know will recognize that the second tension that

I described evidences itself immediately, as the first half of this threshold concept is verbatim

repetition of threshold concept 1.4, “Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words,” by Dylan

B. Dryer. The remainder of the statement following the conjunction, “and,” is a conglomeration

of ideas synthesized from several other threshold concepts under band 1.0, “Writing is a Social

and Rhetorical Activity.” Arguably, Dryer’s concept is already one of the most reading-centric

threshold concepts in Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s list in that he explains how a word’s meaning

alters and is altered by the context in which it is encountered, both in the meaning intended to be

evoked by the writer/speaker and the meaning reconstructed by the reader/listener. But this

threshold concept is situated within a book focused specifically on articulating threshold

concepts for writing and addressed to a discipline historically better attuned to concerns about

writing than reading. Given this context, it is all too easy to overlook the significant implications

for Dryer’s threshold concept regarding learning to read effectively in a variety of contexts,

particularly one as esoteric as an academic discipline.

I took up Dryer’s concept for my own to articulate just what those implications for

reading in the discipline were. After all, learning to comprehend discipline-specific words—both

novel ones we coin and common English ones to which we attach discipline-specific meanings—

is one of the first reading problems new graduate students are likely to encounter. Dryer is

correct in arguing that the meaning attributed to a word is composed “not just from nearby words

but also from the social contexts in which the sentence is used,” but there is more to be said

about the particular social context of writing studies as a community of practice that makes

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understanding certain of our words especially difficult (24; emphasis added). For example, I

think it important that our students understand that, as knowledge makers, scholars in our field

are constantly—sometimes consciously and sometimes not—engaged in coining new terms and

creating new meanings for old ones. Additionally, students need to appreciate just now densely

we accrete abstract, discipline-specific meaning to words, even otherwise common English ones.

Consider, for instance, what complex mental activities are actually implied when we use words

like “unpack,” “position,” and “situate” in our literature (and speech). For a variety of reasons,

students may not be able to initially access or build an effective schema for understanding these

words. These three particular words have especial significance to me because they are among the

list of academic jargon terms that took me a long time—probably a couple of years—to translate

into an internally understandable language. I recall being exposed to these terms in the first

semesters of my graduate program, and being able to recognize that the words were being used

in unusual ways, but not really being able to grasp the meaning they were implying: when an

instructor said or a researcher wrote “I position myself in relation to _________,” for example, I

understood that the writer or speaker didn’t literally mean that they were standing or sitting next

to the phenomenon in question. It took quite a long time to determine that when members of the

field write or say something like this, they are signaling something about how they categorize

their work, or that they are explaining some sort of abstract theoretical relationship between one

entity and another. I had no prior experience of seeing this sort of activity done before to map

that meaning on to the word. But in many ways, this difficulty was less troublesome than it could

have been. I could have just as easily assumed that the word was used in its common English

way and been even more confused by the contexts in which it appeared. Thus, being unable to

recognize that scholars are actively shaping the meaning of words in unique ways that are

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necessary to their work but largely incomprehensible to outsiders is not only a roadblock to

students’ reading comprehension, but to their professionalization as a whole because they too

will presumably be expected to shape the meaning of words through their own writings. These

are the kinds of implications for reading in the discipline that adapting Dryer’s threshold concept

allowed me to articulate.

In performing the definitional justification test for this threshold concept, I began with the

last characteristic of Meyer and Land’s five: troublesomeness. I determined that “Words Get

Their Meanings from Other Words and the Communities of Practice that Use Them” can pose

trouble for graduate students in a variety of ways. For starters, the threshold concept entails that

words carry more than one meaning, and this fact itself may prove an alien or startling revelation

to some, even though we as humans constantly, unconsciously use the same set of written

symbols to mean different things in our daily lives (and we even have terminology to name some

of these cases: homographs). I would argue that the default presumption is for humans to assume

that words have stable one-to-one relationships with their meanings. This is because, when we

speak, we usually hold confidence that we will be understood. The meaning of our words is self-

evident, we presume. Consistently altering this mindset to both accept and operate from the

presumption that word meaning is contextual is another hurdle for graduate students. Generally,

as human beings we proceed in conversation unaware of just how much we are reliant upon our

interlocutors to share the cultural and contextual knowledge necessary to interpret our actually

ambiguous words in ways congruent to what we mean. Thus, when graduate students sit down to

read and encounter a word that may look familiar from common English usages—say “position,”

to stick with the above example—they are not necessarily aware that arriving at the contextually

subjective but disciplinarily “correct” meaning relies not only upon likewise decoding the

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meanings of surrounding words, but also the meanings collectively accreted to the word by

members of the disciplinary community when using it in similar contexts. In the case of

“position,” a word that in common English, when used as a verb, means something like “to

arrange or place people or objects in a particular way,” graduate students are unlikely to know

initially that, in writing studies and related fields, the meaning of “position” implies quite a bit

more. While the disciplinary uses of this word retain connections to its common usage, the

people and objects being “positioned” are very often all abstractions, as are the surrounding

“landscapes” in which those entities are being positioned, as is the act of “positioning,” itself.

Working in the realm of abstract concepts rather than concrete objects further increases the

difficulty of developing an effective mental map of what a word means. And worse yet,

disciplinary uses of this word often signal that the writer has just, or is about to make, certain

complex, abstract rhetorical moves in their writing. For instance, if I were to say that “I position

myself in relationship to constructivism,” depending upon the words that precede and follow this

declaration, I may be implying that I am about to explain my relationship as a theorist to

constructivism—how and in what ways I agree or disagree with its precepts, how I employ them,

etc.—that I have just done this explanation, or that I leave it up to readers to infer this

relationship for themselves. Uninitiated, unguided graduate students are unlikely to pick up on

the rhetorical ques that words like these imply in their context, nor are they likely to have clear

mental maps of the rhetorical moves implied. When the breadth of what is implied in

understanding that the meanings of words are contextual is closely examined, it is fairly easy to

see how graduate students could find this threshold concept troublesome.

Having determined that this threshold concept could be troublesome to internalize and

operationalize, my test turned toward explaining the reciprocal characteristic, transformativeness.

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Once students integrate the understanding that “Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words

and the Communities of Practice that Use Them,” they possess a powerful explanation of why

the tangle of words in a research text might be incomprehensible to them, and they can begin to

disentangle this jargon by locating the words that do not make sense given their surrounding

context. At this point, they may be able to decipher a difficult word’s meaning from context

clues, or they may determine that they need to consult other resources such as a colleague or

faculty member. Increasingly, the internet is providing tools that can help as well, particularly

Wikipedia pages authored by members of the field defining terms that are commonly used in the

discipline. Even appropriately worded Google searches like "what does ____ mean in rhetoric

and composition? —can prove useful in a pinch. The point here is that this threshold concept can

help transform the ways students think about and attempt to rectify their difficulties in

understanding disciplinary words by reminding them that their default interpretation of a word

may not allow them to generate a coherent or appropriate understanding of an utterance and that

they may have to reconsider or substitute their interpretations in order to arrive at this

understanding.

Next in the testing process, the transformativeness of this threshold concept gestured to

its irreversibility. Once one has internalized the expectation that word meaning is contextual and

unstable, one tends to begin to substitute meanings on the fly as the context of the sentence is

built in real time, a skill not easily learned by any means, but also not easily forgotten. However,

the need for this rapid testing and substitution of meaning lessens considerably as readers draw

deeper into the field, crossing other thresholds and taking on more of the ways of thinking and

doing in the discipline as their own. Experienced disciplinary readers have likely encountered the

patterns of how words get used in the field enough to begin to anticipate how they are likely to

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be used in the future. However, even experienced readers in the field still must at times employ

their skills of contextual word decoding and meaning substitution, especially when first entering

into new areas of study outside of their usual specialties, or perhaps when reading graduate

student writing where usages of certain disciplinary words are more likely to be esoteric and

reflect an emerging understanding of how the field uses them.

Finally, this threshold concept’s last two characteristics, boundedness and

integrativeness, were found to be closely related. The threshold concept is integrative in that it

gestures to several other threshold concepts that must be collectively crossed for a learner to

operate like an “insider” to the field. Apart from the concept’s immediate derivation from

Dryer’s 1.4 in Naming What We Know, it is closely tied to any threshold concept that articulates

our discipline’s understanding of the relationships among writing, textual context, and

community, such as 2.3, “Writing is a Way of Enacting Disciplinarity”; 3.0, “Writing Enacts and

Creates Identities and Ideologies”; and 3.1, “Writing is Linked to Identity.” The

interrelationships among these threshold concepts persist whether writing is viewed from the

standpoint of its production, as it is in Naming What We Know, or from its reception and

interpretation through reading. Lastly, the boundedness of this threshold concept comes not from

any requirement of exclusivity to our field. Members of other fields, including linguistics, would

likely assent to the notion that word meaning is dependent upon the textual and discursive

context of its usage. Rather, this threshold concept’s boundedness is inscribed in the shared

ideology and constellation of concerns within itself and its sister concepts: meaning is unstable,

contextual, contingent, collective, constructed, and these factors matter for reading and writing.

It is the intertangling of beliefs that form the boundaries of our discipline. Any one threshold

concept is but a single thread within that tangle.

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Adaptation of Dryer’s concept was one of the first I generated for my own list, and

although the concept’s encyclopedic entry underwent substantial development, it was unusual in

that its wording changed little from its first writing. I owe this stability in large part to the

strength of Dryer’s original concept in its explanatory power and its relevance to uncovering

what we think and do regarding reading in our discipline. Because this was a concept adapted

from a preexisting threshold concept, the process of triangulation was accomplished through

articulating its relationship to the original. In terms of its placement in the finalized list, I chose it

as the header-concept for the “lexical” category described above, although its significance to

potential graduate reading difficulties spans multiple categories. I made this choice because I

wished to articulate several subtending threshold concepts naming specific ways in which we use

words and their meanings unusually in our discipline.

Method Narrative 2: Extracting Threshold Concepts from (Other) Disciplinary Literature

Of the three approaches employed to generate threshold concepts, this one will most give

the impression of looking for a needle in a haystack. Except, in this case, the metaphor is more

that I was already playing in the hay and occasionally something would jab me while doing so.

While reading a wide swath of the field’s literature on reading alongside crafting the initial

chapters of this project, certain passages would lodge themselves in my head as implying

something or prompting revelation about how we read in our field. As I encountered these

moments, I made note of them in my annotated bibliography to be analyzed later for potential

threshold concepts. These passages had no explicit relationship to threshold concepts, but their

underlying assumptions, practices, and belief structures did have something to suggest about

what we know about reading. That these kinds of passages might be analyzed for as-yet-

unnamed threshold concepts is inferable from threshold concept 3.4, “Disciplinary and

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Professional Identities are Constructed Through Writing,” in Naming What We Know. That

threshold concept’s author, Heidi Estrem, explains: “Disciplines have particular ways of asking

and investigating questions enacted through and demonstrated by writing. It is thus through

writing that disciplines […] are both enacted and encountered by writers—first as students and

then as professionals throughout their careers” (56). If, as Estrem argues, our writings are

locations in which we enact our discipline, artifacts of our underlying practices, assumptions, and

beliefs about reading must be embedded in that enactment somewhere. Thus, I concluded that

these artifacts could be mined, refined, and forged into threshold concepts through careful textual

analysis.

The tension, though, of fashioning threshold concepts this way revolved around

triangulation: how do I show through analysis of a single text that the ways of thinking and doing

reading implied in these passages represent disciplinary-wide rather than individual patterns?

This method moves further away from the relative safety of adapting threshold concepts from

Naming What We Know, the validity of which having already been established through Adler-

Kassner and Wardle’s crowdsourcing methods. Like all tensions, there was no clear and final

resolution to these issues, but I did make efforts to lessen them by attempting to corroborate a

threshold concept mined from one source with evidence or assent implied in others.

Let’s see how these processes, practices and tensions played out in the second of the three

developer narratives.

Example 2: Metaconcept: Reading is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is.

I begin this concept’s development story by explaining its “meta” prefix. Adler-Kassner

and Wardle organize their threshold concepts under several categories, all of which in turn fall

under an umbrella “metaconcept” that thematically ties our field’s knowledge together in a way

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that furthers their purpose. Adopting such an organizational device seemed appropriate here as

well because this threshold concept foregrounds the project’s goals of recognizing graduate

reading difficulties and helping to lessen them. I should note that this threshold concept was

under development long before it acquired the “meta” mantle, but once the idea to use a

metaconcept occurred to me, this concept became the natural candidate to fill that role.

The concept itself—or least the second half of it, “Difficulty with Reading Is

(Natural)”—originated from my having read Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue’s The

Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. Salvatori and Donahue not only presume the inevitability

of reading difficulty, but also position its analysis and negotiation as invaluable tools for

learning. They write: “This is a book that presents the identification (description and naming) of

difficulty as an important precursor to understanding, and it encourages students to see these

moments in their reading when they feel stymied as gateways rather than barriers to

understanding” (xi). If encountering reading difficulty is inevitable, as Salvatori and Donahue

seem to presume, it follows that difficulty must be the more “natural” response when reading

unfamiliar types of texts than instantaneous comprehension. Arguably, the tacit

acknowledgement that reading is naturally difficult suffuses much of our field’s research on

reading and its efforts to ameliorate students’ struggles. Ira James Allen, for instance, advocates

teaching “reading as a mode of negotiating uncertainty” (101; emphasis in original). Such a

statement presumes that students will encounter uncertainty, ambiguity, difficulty, as a matter of

course. As another example, Ellen Carillo offers her metacognitive “mindful reading” framework

to help students understand when and how to select, employ, and switch among various reading

strategies, each of which offers different tools for addressing their difficulties:

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Teaching within the metacognitive framework I am calling for means sensitizing students

to that particular context and encouraging them to reflect on the present moment, how far

a reading approach takes them, what aspects of the text it allows them to address, and

what meanings it enables or prohibits. […] Moreover, I also ask students to dwell on the

moments when a particular approach fails them and consider why it has, what this tells

them about the reading approach, the text, and themselves. (Securing 124)

Carillo’s framework not only presumes the inevitability, and therefore, “naturalness” of reading

difficulty by assuming students will have such moments to reflect upon, but also the limitations

of the various tools which students might employ to address those difficulties. The point here is

that, whether or not they are saying it explicitly, scholars who are seriously studying reading in

our field are not assuming that reading is natural. On the contrary, they begin with the

presumption that difficulty is natural and that improving one’s reading abilities requires

acknowledgement of and reflection upon that difficulty.

Elevating the idea that reading is difficult and unnatural to the level of a threshold

concept took a great deal of time and self-convincing, though. I expected some resistance to the

idea itself, let alone claiming it as a piece of knowledge held by the discipline as a whole. I fear

there are yet many colleagues who would question the need for teaching reading to graduate

students precisely because they do not subscribe to the notion that reading is naturally difficult

and that that difficulty is significant, even for learners as advanced as graduate students. Yet,

what ultimately convinced me to include it was reflection and analysis like that I performed just

above, which served as a means of triangulating the concept’s existence. Our field’s reading

researchers seem to subscribe to the premise that reading is naturally difficult in order to build

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their claims of how to help students improve their reading. This triangulation seemed sufficient

to at least put forth the concept prospectively.

I have thus far presented “Reading Is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is” as an

example of development through the second method of threshold concept generation, but it was

ultimately created through a hybridization of methods one and two. While the second half of the

concept was indeed derived from synthesis of scholar’s presumptions about reading difficulty,

the first half, “Reading Is Not Natural,” is again an adaptation of an existing threshold concept

from Naming What We Know. This time, I modified Dylan Dryer’s 1.6, “Writing Is Not

Natural.” Dryer’s concept suggested itself as a necessary corollary to saying that difficulty with

reading is natural. If difficulty with reading is inevitable and therefore natural, then it must be

because reading itself is not a “natural” activity—that is, it is not one humans are born with the

capacity to perform without years of sustained, active, directed instruction in how to do so. Dryer

has already established through threshold concept 1.4 in Naming What We Know that the

meaning of words is contextual, and thus it follows that for readers to gain access to appropriate

contextual meanings of words, they must have assistance in coming to understand the factors that

define those contexts. Furthermore, the unnaturalness of reading is evidenced by the fact that it

requires the same ability to decode the technology of written graphemes as required to perform

the activity of writing. Dryer explains:

While we usually reserve the word technology for recent innovations, any cultural artifact

that mediates activity is a technology, including those that have become invisible through

long use […] However, neither writing produced through technologies—all writing in

other words—nor written language itself can be said to be natural in the way that speech

is. (28)

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Once again, the grounds for my adapting Dryer’s threshold concept from writing to reading were

predicated on the inextricable linkage between these literate activities, specifically their mutual

reliance upon learners mastering the same technology to, as Dryer states, “translate speech and

thought into inscriptions” and vice versa (28).

Once explained, the seeming apparentness of this threshold concept, “Reading is Not

Natural, Difficulty with Reading Is,” posed a bit of an issue for testing its validity against the

troublesomeness characteristic of Meyer and Land’s definition. If this threshold is not

necessarily conceptually difficult to understand, what then makes it potentially troublesome to

learn? The answer is that Meyer and Land describe several categories of knowledge which pose

potential problems for learners apart from that which is conceptually difficult, and three of

these—“tacit knowledge,” “inert knowledge,” and “alien Knowledge”—would seem to apply to

this threshold concept. Meyer and Land describe tacit knowledge as “that which remains

personal and implicit (Polyani 1958) at a level of ‘practical consciousness’ (Giddens 1984)

though its emergent but unexamined understandings are often shared within a specific

community of practice (Wenger 1998)” (12). To the extent to which the notion that “Reading Is

Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is” remains only an operationalized but unarticulated

presumption of those who study reading, it is prohibited from having much impact on other

people’s thinking about the activity, and in the absence of such a threshold concept, competing

narratives about the nature of reading proliferate unchallenged. Principally, because American

schooling generally provides little direct instruction in reading beyond middle school or so,

notions that reading comprehension is both trivial (and trivial things are often seen as natural in

the sense that they are performed without much difficulty) and universal to all types of texts

problematically circulate among college faculty, students, and the public at large. Many faculty

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members expect students to be able to perform the kind of reading necessary in their classes as a

matter of course, even as they acknowledge that most students either do not read for their courses

or are bad at doing the kind of reading desired (see Jolliffe, “Who Is Teaching”; Jolliffe and

Harl; Manarin). That this threshold concept will likely have to compete against a preexisting

contradictory worldview in the minds of many students demonstrates its troublesomeness as

alien knowledge, or knowledge which David Perkins defines as “com[ing] from a perspective

that conflict[s] with our own” (39). Such a competing notion of reading makes it hard for faculty

across disciplines to recognize that reading is not natural, let alone the students we hope to

professionalize in our own field.

The category of “inert knowledge” also helps to explain how this threshold concept is

potentially troublesome. Perkins defines inert knowledge as that which “sits in the mind’s attic,

dusted off only when called for by a quiz or a direct prompt (Bransford et al. 1989; Bereiter and

Scardamalia 1989)” (37). Even if the notion that “Reading is Not Natural: Difficulty with

Reading Is” is not particularly difficult to understand, and even if it becomes explicitly

articulated and publicly circulated to the point of competing with other perceptions of reading

difficulty, learners still face the troublesomeness of internalizing the concept to the point at

which their actions are shaped by it rather than sitting idly in the background of their psyches.

Arguably, such a threshold concept has not yet been operationally internalized by many faculty

members, even in our own field. Otherwise, I reckon the ways in which we approach reading in

our classrooms would look very different.

Though difficult, internalizing the understanding that “Reading Is Not Natural: Difficulty

with Reading Is” can certainly transform the way learners look at their and others’ reading

struggles. Dryer notes in his original threshold concept that “writers tend to judge their writing

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processes too harshly, comparing them to the ease with which they usually speak” (29). In

similar ways, many graduate students too harshly judge themselves for not immediately

understanding the difficult disciplinary texts they read, but in this case, they often compare

themselves against the perceived facility with which they imagine their peers to be reading, or

against an arbitrary standard of how well they “ought” to be reading (see J.K.’s story, chapter 1,

this volume). Such judgment occurs because learners persist in the problematic belief that if

reading comprehension is a basic skill to be mastered by middle school, then failing to

understand a text once the learner has advanced beyond that level marks a deficiency in the

learner. However, recognizing that “Reading Is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is” shifts

the paradigm of dispositions toward reading difficulty away from self-blame and toward

productive problem solving and fostering curiosity. If written language is a technology that

imperfectly encodes thoughts into symbols, then learners adhering to this threshold concept

should come to expect that their efforts to decode those symbols back into thought will be

equally imperfect. They should especially take solace in the fact that efforts to encode thought

into writing in the first place are highly contextualized, and so readers coming from outside of a

text’s target audience likely do not possess knowledge of all the practices and assumptions

necessary to decode it in the “intended” way. Thus, by internalizing that “Reading Is Not

Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is,” struggling readers can shift their attention away from

questions of personal intelligence, worthiness, and self-blame, toward asking what tools they

might need to access the text effectively and how they might go about acquiring them.

Hopefully, they will also come to appreciate the journey of discovering these tools and strategies.

My testing of this threshold concept suggested that it meets Meyer and Land’s three

remaining criteria as well. The concept is transformative in that once the threshold is crossed,

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learners tend never again to feel despair when encountering reading difficulty. This is not to say

that they don’t still experience frustration or moments of defeat when struggling with reading at

times. However, even in these moments, they proceed from the belief that their struggles are

surmountable and temporary—that they can be analyzed, understood, and ameliorated. Most

importantly, they acknowledge that not understanding a text is not a failure of their intellect. The

threshold concept is bounded in that looking at reading difficulty as natural and inevitable

appears to be a viewpoint confined largely to researchers who have studied the subject in depth

and come to understand the complexity of what the activity of reading entails. Finally, the

concept is integrative in that it is subsumed in any other disciplinary threshold concept that

addresses an aspect of reading difficulty, including all of those listed in chapter four of this

volume. It likewise has connections to several more-reading-oriented threshold concepts in

Naming What We Know as well, such as 1.3, “Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to Be

Reconstructed by the Reader”; 1.4, “Words Get Their Meanings from other Words”; and, of

course, 1.6, “Writing Is Not Natural.” Together, these threshold concepts help to explain the

contextual nature of written language use, a key factor that makes reading and writing activities

unnatural and thus prone to difficulty, even for advanced learners.

Ultimately, the process of developing this metaconcept, taking place somewhere in the

middling stages of generating and revising threshold concepts was crucial in solidifying the

purpose and direction that the rest of the concepts served.

Method Narrative 3: Analyzing Personal Reading Difficulty for Threshold Concepts

This last method involved performing written reflective analysis of personal difficulty

while reading research texts for this project. This analysis took place through entries in my

research log responding to difficult passages of text. The goal of analysis was to attempt to

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understand the difficulties I was experiencing and investigate whether such difficulties indicated

the existence of threshold concepts about reading. To guide these responses, I adapted the

tripartite structure of Salvatori and Donahue’s Triple-Entry Notebooks in The Elements (and

Pleasures) of Difficulty. Drawing upon the work of Hans George Gadamer, Salvatori and

Donahue advise students to organize their responses to difficult passages using a three-column

approach, placing erkennen, or observations about the text in the first column; weiderkennen,

reflections on these observations in the second; and herauserkennen, or metacognitive

abstractions and applications of those reflections in the third (11). Using this approach, I as a

struggling reader could move in a directed way from isolating moments of difficulty, to

characterizing the nature of that difficulty, to ultimately extrapolating larger patterns regarding

what is required to read the text effectively in an academic context. Rather than maintaining a

strict separation among these three columns, however, I opted to adapt the three-column

approach into a single, organic stream-of conscious narrative—something that, in practice, came

to resemble a written form of think-aloud protocol. This alteration offered the benefit of making

the writing a little easier. Reflection is messy, recursive. A three-column method imposed, for

me, a misleading ordered certainty to the analysis that just doesn’t exist when someone is

attempting to make sense of nonsense. Though reflection can be organized to some extent, it

proceeds without a clear endpoint, and so I felt I needed to be able to engage in such messiness.

The alteration also allowed me to see my online processing of the text with all of its associated

tangential thinking. The drawback of such alteration was that it potentially obscured distinctions

between the three activities of the response, both for the reader and for me. To counter such

drawbacks, I developed three controlling questions—one corresponding to each of the functions

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of the three columns—to hold in the background of my mind and to which I would continually

refer as I wrote my responses:

1. At what moments am I having difficulty with the text? (erkennen/observation).

2. What seems to be causing my difficulty at these points? Words? Syntax? Something

else? (weiderkennen, reflection).

3. What might be required for me to know or do to understand this passage and others

like it? (herauserkennen/abstraction/metacognition)?

These questions served as guardrails, ensuring that any tangential lines of thought were

ultimately directed back to my purpose.

Overall, this method of threshold concept development was the least commonly

employed of the three for several reasons. Firstly, though I encountered many moments of

difficulty while reading, I performed explicit analysis of only a handful of them. Much of the

reading took place early in this project, a time in which my purposes for reading any particular

text were only vaguely defined and my research methods even more so. Many early moments of

difficulty I failed to bookmark at all. In fact, the example narrative I will shortly tell was the first

such analysis I performed, and the method was refined and developed through the process of

writing the response itself. Additionally, the longer I read in the discipline, and the more I

resolved the struggles I had, the fewer difficulties I experienced thereafter. Thus, by the time the

method was developed, candidate moments of difficulty were receding in number. And unlike

the two preceding methods of threshold concept development where I could return to key

moments of texts using a “Control+F” search of my annotated bibliography or scouring the texts

themselves, this method’s authenticity was tied to its timeliness. I felt that attempting to perform

analysis of difficult passages much after the fact lacked the genuine struggle to understand in real

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time. Time and distance—and probably the crossing of several conceptual thresholds—

themselves threatened to unravel any memory of prior difficulty.

The second reason I employed this method so infrequently, however, was probably the

greater deterrent: I was afraid threshold concepts produced by it would be least likely to be

accepted by practitioners in the field. Threshold concepts remain vulnerable to the criticism that

they can be invented arbitrarily by practitioners. Rod O’Donnell postulates that the ease and

frequency with which threshold concepts can be generated “derives, not from their deeper

insights, but from a lack of clear foundations which allows practitioners to do as they please in

accumulating instances under its umbrella” (6). Even after having rejected the positivist

epistemological framework from which such criticisms as this arise, the tensions raised by

O’Donnell’s arguments still held some weight in my mind: how would I know that any threshold

concepts I was personally coining weren’t generalizing from a sample size of me? And the

answer to this question was always that I wouldn’t, at least not with certainty, and not until after

colleagues had had opportunity to respond to them. At the same time, though, I wondered how

our field could move forward with the task of naming what we know if individual scholars were

not empowered to at least propose potential new threshold concepts for fieldwide consideration.

After all, even the concepts from Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s list, debated and assented to by

several dozen scholars through crowdsourcing, likely began as proposals from individual

scholars based upon patterns of thinking and doing in the field that they had personally

experienced or observed. Luckily, Wardle et al. seem to have anticipated this conundrum and

suggest a path forward in including “aspirational” threshold concepts in (Re)Considering What

We Know, ideas held to be such by certain segments of the field, but “not widely represented as

taken for granted throughout the entirety of the research literature in the field” (26). The

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inclusion of these aspirational threshold concepts, of course, already presumes the assent of at

least a portion of the field, but it seems an appropriate mechanism to invoke in justifying my own

attempts to propose any new threshold concept “that pushes on paradigms, that works from the

inside to broaden boundaries, not to reify them” (26).

In practice, though, much of the tension I just described in coining new threshold

concepts never fully materialized. This was because, during the few times I sought to mine them

from understanding my own reading difficulties, the means by which I began to make sense of

those difficulties always came from ideas borrowed elsewhere in scholarship about reading,

though sometimes from allied fields such as linguistics or education. As such, I was never really

identifying threshold concepts in intellectual isolation. Invoking such connections and applying

principles of scholarship to my own reading experiences thus became an important means of

triangulating the threshold concepts I was developing.

Let’s now see how these processes and tensions played out in the development of a final

example threshold concept.

Example 3: Comprehension Entails Building Mental Maps of What Words Add up to Mean.

The initial moment of difficulty that gave genesis to this threshold concept occurred

(ironically or fittingly enough, depending upon how you look at it) while reading a passage

quoted in The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. The particular words of the passage were

from Michel Foucault, which Salvatori and Donahue employ to explain how students prior

experiences and assumptions can sometimes interfere with students’ developing a productive

understanding of texts. Though comprehending this quote was not required to fulfil the purposes

for which I was reading, encountering Foucault here reminded me of previous difficulty I had

experienced in trying to understand his writing (and that of other contemporaneous French

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philosophers, for that matter) during graduate coursework. Seeing Foucault excerpted in a dense

but manageable chunk seemed a kairotic opportunity to practice the methods of difficulty

analysis described by Salvatori and Donahue and perhaps to achieve some catharsis from the

frustration and defeat I had experienced during previous readings.

I began the analytical process by carefully reading Foucault’s passage in Salvatori and

Donahue several times:

…we can briefly consider the problems that arise in the use of an author’s name. What is

the name of the author? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I will attempt

to indicate some of the difficulties related to these questions.

…an author’s name is not simply an element of speech (as a subject, a complement, or an

element that could be replaced by a pronoun or other parts of speech). Its presence is

functional in that it serves as a means of classification. A name can group together a

number of texts and thus differentiate them from others. A name also establishes different

forms of relationships among texts…. Finally, the author’s name characterizes a

particular manner of existence of discourse. Discourse that possesses an author’s name is

not to be immediately consumed and forgotten: neither is it accorded the momentary

attention given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather its status and its manner of reception

are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.

We can conclude that, unlike a proper name, which moves from the interior of a

discourse to the real person outside who produced it, the name of the author remains at

the contours of texts—separating one from the other, defining the form, and

characterizing their mode of existence. It points to the existence of certain groups of

discourse and refers to the status of this discourse within a society and culture. The

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author’s name is not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in

the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and

their singular mode of existence.... In this case, the function of an author is to characterize

the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society. (qtd. in

Salvatori and Donahue 111)

Next, I wrote the reflective journal entry while performing a second “live” reading of the

passage, structuring the entry according to the principles of Salvatori and Donahue’s Triple-

Entry Notebook in the ways described above. For the reader’s clarity, I have slightly reformatted

that entry into a transcript that better distinguishes between the passages I read and my response

to them. I have, however, retained several expletives from the original entry as these reflect my

genuine reaction while reading and served as important markers when my frustration with the

text built to a point at which I could identify a personal difficulty:

Read (R): “…we can briefly describe the problems that arise in the use of an author’s

name.”

Respond (P): Ok, so far so good. Foucault thinks that using an author’s name is a

problem, but how so?

(R): “What is the name of the author?”

(P): I don’t know, Foucault, which author are we talking about? Oh, we’re talking about

authors as a group aren’t we? And probably in some highbrow literary sense—THE

author. This happens too often in theory: talking about an abstracted group or category

without explicitly wording the sentence to indicate such. I’m guessing, by “author,”

Foucault isn’t referring to any old group of people who writes but rather famous ones

with reputations.

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(R): “How does it function?”

(P): Alright, now we’re talking about rhetoric, or at least I think we are. The name of an

author has some kind of effect on the reader or listener when the name is encountered.

What that significance is, I don’t know yet.

(R): “…an author’s name is not simply an element of speech […]. A name can group

together a number of texts and thus differentiate them.”

(P): Yeah, this definitely sounds like the rhetorical effect of an author’s name. But I don’t

know in what ways he means the name can classify and divide texts.

(R): “A name also establishes different forms of relationship among texts….”

(P): Ok, what does that mean? What kind of relationships? Between what kind of texts?

How about a fucking concrete example?!? Sounds like a moment of difficulty here. So,

what’s difficult about this passage? Is it the words? I don’t think so: It’s actually pretty

plain language, and yet it still doesn’t make sense. Everything is vague and unclear. I

know what each word means, and I don’t think there’s any particularly jargon-y uses of

common words here. Syntax also isn’t really the problem—a couple of prepositional

phrases, but only one clause that’s pretty easy to follow. But what he’s getting at when I

put all the words together doesn’t add up to anything for me. It doesn’t help that what he

is describing is super abstract—the rhetorical impact of a person’s name that has been

elevated to author status on how a text is received by an audience. But it’s like he’s

assuming that I already understand the nuances of what that impact is and entails. That

could be on purpose, of course, because I’m probably not part of his intended audience,

and there may be a lot of surrounding context to his argument that I’m not privy to. There

is also an ellipsis here, so it’s possible that some explanatory sentences got cut by

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Salvatori and Donahue to make the quote more manageable. It’s telling that they actually

start the quotes in mid paragraph—how hard would it have been to arrive at Foucault’s

main idea when reading this in its original printing?

Anyway, scanning the sentences around this, Foucault has a pattern of making abstract

claims. Sometimes he follows up a claim with an explanatory sentence, but never really a

specific example demonstrating what he means. The next three sentences, “Finally, the

author’s” to “ordinary, fleeting words,” do all relate to the special status afforded to

discourses that have been “authored,” but even this explanation is abstract generalities,

and I don’t quite have a mental picture of what he means when he talks about these

things.

Shit! That may be the key to a metacognitive takeaway or beginning of a threshold

concept: understanding text written in a discipline requires, among other things, being

able to generate a mental map or picture of what the words add up to mean. You can read

a sentence and understand the words individually, but still not understand what you’re

reading because the sentences imply some greater sum of meaning hidden behind,

between, or among the words that isn’t quite stated outright.

That raises the question, then: how does one gain access to these mental pictures? By the

way, as I’m thinking about mental pictures, I’m thinking of schema theory. How does

one build the appropriate schema to understand what Foucault is saying? I guess you kind

of have to be in his head, or you have to have shared some experiences of how a text that

has “authored” status has been received differently from other texts to know what he’s

talking about. That’s a pretty tall order, though, given how abstract and esoteric his topic

is. Seems to me that readers new to Foucault would have to have experienced readers

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help build the pictures he imagines in the first place, maybe by constructing concrete

examples that bridge the outsiders’ experiences to those of insiders. I think this lesson

would apply to reading any text written for a specific community.

His discursive pattern of making abstract claims about the function of “author” seems to

hold true for the rest of the passage—there’s not much explanation and no concrete

examples of what he means. Still, I’m starting to get the gist of his argument: the status of

the term “author” changes the way texts are received, classified, characterized, and

afforded importance in society.

Although this reflective analysis entry was formatted in such a way as to promote organic

stream-of-consciousness thought—including the expletives and frustrations that mark my

personal response to reading difficulty—its overall direction was clearly guided by the three

controlling questions derived from the Triple-Entry Notebook. Generally, I began by identifying

moments of difficulty (observation/erkennen), such as when Foucault asserts that the name of the

author shapes relationships among texts. I then attempted to categorize or characterize the nature

of that difficulty (weiderkennen), proposing that it arises from my not sharing a similar enough

mental map of the phenomenon Foucault describes to clearly understand what he is talking

about. Finally, I attempted to abstract or apply such analysis to a broader use (herauserkennen)

in beginning to formulate the threshold concept itself: “understanding text written in a discipline

requires, among other things, being able to generate a mental map or picture of what the words

add up to mean.” From this point, the threshold concept went through a substantial process of

revision as I attempted to refine both its wording and meaning.

The process of writing reflective journal entries like this one created a clear etymology of

my thinking and its origins, and, I think, provides a blueprint for a traceable and transparent

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method for proposing new threshold concepts about reading. I should note, though, that this

particular journal entry was exceptional in how quickly the threshold concept emerged in a

“eureka” moment. Other threshold concepts required several further rounds of reflective

journaling to arrive at a potentially useful proto-threshold concept.

In terms of triangulation, this threshold concept’s existence was supported by the body of

psychological research on schema theory intertwined with social constructivism (see chapter

two, this volume). The conclusion I reached was that, like individual words, written utterances—

phrases, clauses, sentences—are employed by authors to attempt to generate mental images—

schemata—of what they mean. When dealing with complex, abstract statements, the reader has

to possess or create a congruent mental map—a picture of what the author imagines—to fill in

gaps in understanding created by the ambiguous meaning of the words themselves. However, for

a reader to reconstruct a schema that is congruent to the author’s (something necessary to engage

in the written conversations of academic research) requires that the reader share a great deal of

the background assumptions with that person. That is, they must share the discourse community

in which these assumptions circulate. Without this shared membership in the discourse

community—or assisted initiation into it—much of what is collectively implied by the words

cannot be reproduced by the reader. The consequence of such a threshold concept is that

understanding the meanings of individual disciplinary jargon is not nearly enough to effectively

comprehend an academic text. Readers must learn how the words are used in conjunction with

one another within the community for which it was written.

Revising this threshold concept also involved testing it against the five criteria of Meyer

and Land’s definition. “Comprehension Entails Building Mental Maps of What Words Add up to

Mean” is potentially troublesome to learners because it can be difficult for readers to think of

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comprehension as involving building mental maps of larger segments of language than

individual words. As such, this threshold concept may be perceived as counterintuitive. As

readers, we tend to assume that we are supposed to be able to understand the meaning of a

sentence if we understand the meanings of all its constituent words. This assumption is untrue,

however. Words can be constructed to form sentences that imply significantly more than what

the individual words say explicitly. For example, Foucault does this in the above except when he

claims that the term “author” establishes certain relationships among texts without concretely

describing what those relationships might look like. The relationships he implies are based in

literary, rhetorical, and philosophical ways of thinking about phenomena which are not explicitly

described in the text itself—the ways in which audiences perceive, classify, and give meaning to

texts written by “the author”—and so for readers to be able to imagine similar kinds of

relationships requires of them to share some of Foucault’s ways of thinking. When writers

imagine their audiences, they constantly make assumptions about what that audience knows, has

experienced, or how they think. In situations where constructing an understanding of a text that

is congruent to the writer’s is necessary, as it often is in academic writing and reading occasions,

students risk getting stuck on the outside of a text when they lack access to the requisite ways of

thinking. And because these ways of thinking are inextricably tied to the discourse community in

which, for which, and to which the writer writes, graduate students risk getting stuck outside of

the community itself as well. Furthermore, it can be difficult for students to gain the

metacognitive self-awareness to recognize when their comprehension has broken down because

they lack the necessary discursive ways of thinking to appropriately reconstruct the meaning of a

text. Moreover, the task of beginning to construct new mental maps of disciplinary thinking is

itself arduous and time consuming. Professionalizing students in the ways in which a discipline

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thinks is a crucial component of graduate education, and this process takes multiple years.

Finally, while it is difficult enough for students to acquire the discourse-specific tools to build

mental maps of a text’s meaning in any one context, it is quite a bit more so for them to

consciously generalize this threshold concept as a strategy for identifying and ameliorating

reading difficulty across multiple contexts.

The threshold concept is transformative in that once learners have acquired the

community-based experiences and ways of thinking necessary to build effective mental maps of

textual utterances, they tend to apply these maps automatically, losing awareness of both the fact

that certain passages of text would have been difficult at some point in the past and of the

particular maps they employed to parse the utterance. The text is comprehended, and the reader

moves on. Only moments of difficulty prompt any occasion to pause. The transformativeness of

this threshold concept also gestures to its irreversibility. That learners lose awareness of their

prior states of struggle indicates the difficulty of unlearning the mental maps they have

constructed. More importantly, though, when this threshold is fully crossed, readers have a

powerful tool for managing difficulty in building mental maps of utterances read in new and

unfamiliar contexts in that they can at least locate when their understanding of a text breaks

down for this reason. And locating or diagnosing this kind of difficulty suggests certain tools for

addressing it. Being able to locate, for example, when Foucault is talking about an abstract

concept for which I lack a clear mental picture—like the function of “the author’s name,”—

might suggest—should I ever have the need—that I go looking for commentary to fill in the

contextual gap, or try to find an expert who could help me parse the passage, or that I might try

to read the passage in its original text and search surrounding areas for possible examples of the

concept in action. When their reading situation requires, readers who have crossed the threshold

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are more likely to understand the reason for their difficulty and to actively seek out the extra-

textual knowledge that will help them resolve it.

“Comprehension Entails Building Mental Maps of What Words Add up to Mean” is

bounded because building appropriate mental maps of utterances within disciplinary texts

requires readers to have access to the knowledge, experiences, and ways of thinking of that

discipline—literally its content and its boundaries. A universal version of this threshold concept

holds true for any reader reading any text written for any community, of course, but any mental

maps that are generated will themselves always be bounded in the ways of thinking and

experiences of the communities to which the reader has access. Finally, the concept is integrative

in that it intersects with any of our other threshold concepts that acknowledge how writers

imagine their audiences and tailor their writings to them (NWWK, 1.2, “Writing Addresses,

Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences), that explains how writing is imbricated in shared communal

ways of thinking (NWWK 1.0, “Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity”; 2.3, “Writing is a

Way of Enacting Disciplinarity”), and that describe readers’ efforts to (re)construct meaning

from texts (NWWK 1.3, “Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to be Reconstructed by the

Reader).

Once the threshold concept reached the point of triangulation and justification testing, the

direction of the entry as it appeared in chapter four was largely set. The exact wording of the

entry and of the concept itself, though, underwent numerous changes as the chapter was drafted

and revised, culminating in the present wording for concept 3.0 that appears therein: “Reading

Includes Building Mental Maps of What Words Add Up to Mean.”

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Chapter Summary

This chapter described in detail the methods and methodologies guiding the creation of

the list of threshold concepts comprising chapter four. It began with an overview of my methods

and methodological values. It then discussed the limitations and affordances of the theory-based

literature-review methods the project uses to construct its arguments. Next, it zoomed in,

articulating and responding to criticisms of threshold concept theory itself. It concluded with in-

depth description of the three strategies I employed to create threshold concepts, including

“developer diaries” chronicling the creation of a sample threshold concept produced each way.

The chapter, or rather, I it’s writer, made these moves in accordance with the purpose of

making my judgment—the thing upon which the validity of any theory-making enterprise

ultimately rests—transparent to readers. I have made my work vulnerable in discussing the

tensions inherent to making decisions about coining new threshold concepts. In doing this, I may

ultimately make my work more prone to dismissal, but I think—I hope—the effect will be rather

the opposite. Readers may seize upon the seams at which my methods are sutured together, but

such criticisms promise productive debate that moves forward long-needed discussion in the

field about theory-making as research method. And, in acknowledging the messiness of theory-

making, I help to demystify the act, particularly for new members of our field who may be

intimidated against engaging in this kind of research while also demonstrating the rigor and

relevance that theory-making still offers as a research method in writing studies.

The next chapter presents the results of the research methods and methodologies

recounted here: a list of fourteen threshold concepts for reading in writing studies and their

accompanying discussions.

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CHAPTER 4. THRESHOLD CONCEPTS FOR GRADUATE READING

Chapter Overview

Previous chapters have made the case advocating for explicit, sustained graduate-level

reading instruction, laid out the theoretical foundations of this project, and explained the methods

and methodologies it employs. They have also made the case for the usefulness of threshold

concepts as a tool to help members of the field make plain the practices for reading that they

otherwise engage in unconsciously.

This chapter begins to answer the practical question of how threshold concepts can be

employed pedagogically to improve graduate reading. Specifically, it articulates a list of

threshold concepts that address points of difficulty graduate students might encounter in their

professional reading. Together, the threshold concepts of this list form a reflective heuristic

incorporated into a model for graduate reading instruction discussed in chapter five of this

volume, the reading cycle sandwich.

Chapter Structure and Reminders

The remainder of the chapter is formatted like an encyclopedia, consisting of the

threshold concepts themselves and their accompanying narrative entries. Each entry:

1. Defines the threshold concept.

2. Provides example(s) of how it might be encountered.

3. Explains it’s significance to the discipline.

4. Describes how it may be troublesome to learn.

5. Summarizes potential benefits to the learner in crossing the threshold.

6. Links the concept to others existing in the field.

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Additionally, each entry title is followed by a superscript number (1-3). These numerals

correspond to the primary method employed to construct that threshold concept (see chapter

three, this volume, for description of these methods). The superscript might also contain the

letter “H” preceding more than one number. In these cases, the threshold concept was

constructed using a hybrid approach of the methods indicated. The first threshold concept that

appears in the list, “Reading Is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is,” is a “metaconcept,” a

thematic umbrella encapsulating the purpose which all others on the list serve: acknowledging

that difficulties with reading are unavoidable, normal, and useful and that working through

reading difficulties should be an explicit, open, and regularized practice in graduate instruction.

Finally, most of the remaining threshold concepts are subdivided into several subthemes or

“bands.” Band 1.0 elaborates on the multiplicity, contextuality, and variability of reading

practices that exist in the world and in the discipline of writing students. Bands 2.0 through 4.0

name threshold concepts that correspond to specific linguistic “levels” of textual organization at

which students might encounter reading difficulty. Band 2.0, for example, names threshold

concepts relating to problems students might encounter with reading and understanding

individual words in academic texts; and 3.0 names such concepts relating to the

sentence/utterance level of reading an academic text; and band 4.0 focuses on threshold concepts

necessary helpful for disciplinary reading at the whole text/discourse level.

A few reminders about the nature of threshold concepts are worth reiterating before

getting started. Firstly, the list here is far from exhaustive of all possible reading-related

threshold concepts. As Adler-Kassner and Wardle enjoin, it may not be “possible or desirable to

name, once and for all, all such concepts” (Naming 8). Naming too many threshold concepts can

become just as overwhelming and nebulous for learners as naming too few, or none. Secondly,

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most threshold concepts that appear in this chapter, while perhaps novel in their presentation,

don’t really describe ideas that are new to the discipline. Most often, they explicitly name ideas

that have circulated widely but beneath the notice of practitioners. Thus, as was explained in

chapter three of this volume, the threshold concepts here often intimately borrow and adapt those

built by others—principally from those developed by the contributors to Naming What We Know

and (Re)Considering What We Know—and I make every effort to acknowledge through reference

and citation the lineage of the threshold concepts that appear here. This process of synthesizing

existing ideas of the field into more direct statements is a fitting way to coin new threshold

concepts, as Wardle et al. offer reminder that they “can be hard and even feel revolutionary to

those coming to them and to the field for the first time. But they are not the cutting edge of

where the field’s internal work is happening.” (25; emphasis in original). Thirdly, threshold

concepts are only ever “final for now” and are subject to change as the thinking of the field

changes. Finally, to the extent to which some of the threshold concepts listed here represent

thoughts about reading primarily held in common by the field’s reading researchers and not

necessarily yet by the field as a whole, they may be considered what Wardle et al. have called

“aspirational” threshold concepts—something proposed that “pushes on paradigms” in the field

in hopes that the field as a whole will come to see their value (26). The threshold concepts that

follow are most useful in naming what we know about reading when these considerations are

held in mind.

M.0 Metaconcept: Reading Is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is H: 2,1

In the sense that written language is a human invention, it is a literacy technology rather

than a “natural” avenue of human communication. Writing mediates communication but is not

communication itself. As Dylan B. Dryer explains, “the symbols [that comprise written

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language] can do many things […], but they cannot ‘record’ speech or thought in their original

forms; they translate speech and thought into inscriptions. Others (if they know the code) must

then try to reactivate these symbols into meaning” (28). It follows, then, that any activity that

humans engage in to translate meaning into written language and back again—writing and

reading, respectively—are likewise not “natural” acts in the sense that they cannot be conducted

effectively without much direct, concerted effort to teach and to learn how to do them. Further,

things that aren’t natural to humans tend to naturally present some difficulty in their being

learned. Thus, while reading is not a natural activity, experiencing difficulty while reading is.

Dryer explains the unnaturalness of writing by comparing it to oral communication. “As

modern homo sapiens,” he writes, “we’ve been speaking to one another for nearly two hundred

thousand years. Our speech has been bound up in complex feedback loops with our physiology

[…] and our cognition […]” (27-8). This is not the case for writing, a much younger

development arriving only about 5000 years ago. Additionally, regarding oral language

acquisition, Dryer notes that “almost all children acquire expressive fluency in their native

language[s]” and the adults in their lives contribute to this process largely without being

conscious that they are doing so (28). Oral language acquisition processes contrast sharply with

those for learning how to read and write effectively: gaining fluency with print literacy involves

years of formal schooling and learners engaging in various forms of instruction and practice.

Reading and component subjects are explicitly present for at least the first few years of

schooling, and some aspects of reading instruction overflow into more advanced subjects as well.

Young students are often read to, led through sounding out words, guided through read-aloud

sessions, and facilitated in discussions of texts. Little of this direct instruction takes place in oral

language acquisition. And, unlike oral language acquisition, the vast majority of humans would

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never acquire print literacy at all without dedicated systems of education—systems which remain

unequally available and which are relatively new in achieving near universal rates of basic print

literacy. Given the significant differences in how these forms of communication are acquired,

humans have not “naturally” physiologically adapted to perform reading and writing in the same

ways they might be said to have in regard to speaking and listening.

Learners may find the notion that “Reading Is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is”

troublingly counterintuitive for reasons similar to that which Dryer implies in claiming that

“Writing Is Not Natural”: the fluency with which readers and writers interact with familiar types

of print texts masks the artificial nature of the technology. Oddly, becoming fluent in the use of

written communication can erode learners’ consciousness of the very processes and struggles it

took to become that way. Reading, though far from natural, may feel that way to some in

contexts where they are practiced enough to perform it without much conscious thought. Reading

a novel for pleasure, for example, may feel natural if readers have engaged with that kind of text

often enough before to be comfortable and competent performing that kind of reading. If one

were to expose a learner to a completely new context for reading, however, (say giving an

English major with no experience fixing cars an auto manual to read and the task of repairing a

combustion engine) and the unnaturalness of reading—its natural difficulty—suddenly

reemerges.

If reading is perceived as natural, this poses another potential point of troublesomeness:

things that are natural can be conflated with things that are perceived to be easy or trivial to

learn. When reading is viewed as natural and therefore trivial, it is not uncommon for learners

and those teaching them to attribute reading difficulties to a deficit of intelligence or diligence on

the part of the reader. Thus, if readers have internalized the notion that reading is natural and

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trivial, they may have a hard time acknowledging their own difficulties when they read. Even

more importantly, if they do acknowledge such struggles to themselves, they may feel too

embarrassed to seek help from others because they feel they should be able to understand and

make use of texts on their own. Learners inhabiting these problematic assumptions can

unwittingly help reify and perpetuate them among a community and thereby harm its members. I

fear that the perception that reading ought to be natural to learners like graduate students

pervades more of the discipline than is recognized. Invoking a set of regrettable memories from

my own graduate experiences as example, more than one of my colleagues publicly criticized

others based on perceptions that they read poorly, insufficiently, incorrectly. Worse, than this,

though, I am almost certain that I too have levied such insults. If we students had truly

internalized the complexity and contextuality of reading in academic contexts, and thereby

gained empathy for the struggles that the unnaturalness of learning to read poses for learners at

all educational levels, then I don’t know that it would have been possible for us to inflict such

intellectual cruelty on one another.

Arguably, the tendency to naturalize and trivialize reading is greater than it is for writing.

Writing is a tangible product that can be seen, analyzed, praised, and critiqued. This visibility

helps writing to be recognized as something that requires labor, skill, and time to produce. While

reading is no less a product of labor, skill, and time, the results of reading are less likely to be

visible to others because the “production” of reading, at least in academic settings, happens

mostly in private spaces and within the mind of the individual reader.

The notion that “Reading is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is” is a useful threshold

for learners to cross because it dramatically reorients the ways in which learners view their own

and others’ reading practices, opening them to greater empathy and patience with reading

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difficulty. Just as Dryer notes that “writers tend to judge their writing processes too harshly,”

readers tend to judge their own and others reading practices too harshly, but instead of

comparing these practices “to the ease with which they usually speak,” readers are often

comparing their reading practices against preconceived notions of what academic reading

“ought” to look like (29). Some of these preconceived notions assume the naturalness and

triviality of reading. These notions can be difficult to dislodge because they may have been

reinforced by years of experiences with reading in schools and other institutions. Once crossed,

though, this threshold concept assists learners in recognizing and decoupling from some of these

problematic notions. Crossing this threshold entails learners’ becoming self-aware of their

reading difficulties, their letting go of judgement and derision of reading practices—of their own

and of others’—and engaging sympathetically with the difficulty that reading occasions.

“Reading Is Not Natural: Difficulty with Reading Is” is imbricated with a host of other

threshold concepts for reading and writing. Firstly, this threshold concept adapts Dylan B.

Dryer’s concept 1.6, “Writing Is Not Natural,” in Naming What We Know to the activity of

reading. In addition to this, it is deeply intertwined with any threshold concept that gestures to

writing’s nature as a technology or that assumes that writers and readers construct meaning

through their interactions with texts. These threshold concepts include principles one, “Reading

Is Active Construction of Meaning,” and three, “Reading Is Socially Situated,” in chapter two of

this volume. They likewise include concepts 1.3, “Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to be

Reconstructed by the Reader”; 1.4, “Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words”; and 1.5,

“Writing Mediates Activity,” in Naming What We Know.

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M.1 Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive2

If, as the preceding threshold concept explains, reading is unnatural, and difficulty with

reading is natural, it follows that learners benefit from cultivating a positive, productive, even

creative disposition towards encountering difficulty. “Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive”

adopts from the work of Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue the belief that the

“identification (description and naming) of difficulty [serves] as an important precursor to

understanding” (xi). The very moments when readers most struggle to make sense and make use

of a text can—through careful reflection—be analyzed, classified, named, and comprehended.

This can be done not only to improve the readers’ engagement with that specific text, but also to

teach readers something more generally about the strategies they use to interpret texts. This

threshold concept bears some similarity to the common maxims, “learn from your mistakes,” or

“learn from your failures,” but, crucially, does not imply the moral culpability or agentive choice

involved in making a mistake, nor the after-the-fact finality of a failure. Encountering reading

difficulty is neither a mistake nor a failure. One doesn’t choose what one doesn’t understand.

Rather, difficulty is a consequence of humans adapting to using a technology in an ever-

widening array of contexts. No one can come pre-equipped to encounter all of them. Rather, the

idea here is that difficulty is inevitable but engaging with it actively—playing around with it—

can dispose learners toward making something from their reading struggles.

“Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive” is not implying that every point of difficulty a

reader encounters needs to be analyzed and understood, only that every point can be. Readers are

likely to encounter more moments of difficulty than they have time or attention to address.

Implied behind the set of threshold concepts on this list is the assumption that good academic

readers must gain the metacognition to evaluate their contexts for reading—the type of text, their

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purposes for reading that text, and the set of strategies they might employ while engaging it—

and to determine which points of difficulty must be addressed to meet those purposes for reading

and which can be let go of.

While not necessarily difficult for learners to understand, “Reading Difficulty Can Be

Instructive” can prove troubling to internalize and operationalize for a few reasons. That

difficulties with reading can be named, understood, and learned from is a notion that can linger

inertly in the background of a learner’s mind for quite some time without the learner applying the

concept to their reading difficulties. When learners are engrossed with or frustrated by a difficult

text, it can be difficult for them to take a reflective step back to ponder the nature of their

difficulties, to identify the strategies they have been using to engage with the text, and to ask

whether or not the strategies they employ are working for them. Such inertness can also be

caused by nearly opposite conditions: if learners are reading only in contexts with which they are

familiar and for which their pre-existing reading strategies are adequate, there may not exist

much occasion to consider the nature of difficulty until they encounter a new and more

challenging context for reading. Additionally, like many other threshold concepts on this list,

conflicting cultural perceptions of what reading is can interfere with acquiring this threshold

concept and cause cognitive dissonance among learners as they attempt to adapt their attitudes

and practices about reading. In particular, this concept must also contend with incorrect

presumptions that reading is natural and facile and that reading difficulty is an intellectual or

moral failure of the learner. Under such viewpoints, difficulty is often no more than an enemy to

be avoided, plowed through, or a cause for assigning blame and derision.

If the preceding threshold concept offers learners opportunity to dramatically reconceive

of their and others’ reading practices with greater appreciation and empathy for the complexity

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that learning to read entails, this threshold concept is important for learners because it allows

them to reconceive how they approach the inevitable difficulties they encounter. When operating

from the standpoint that “Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive,” learners’ struggles with

reading are transformed from frustrating enemies into occasions for learning that play with what

is not understood. The mindset becomes to work with or through difficulty rather than in spite of

or around it. Readers are less likely to place blame for struggles and are more likely to take stock

of what they do and don’t understand, and then get to work trying to fix it. This taking stock

helps learners to marshal the tools they have for making sense of and making use of texts in

order to rectify their difficulties. Being able to do something about difficulty, in turn, increases

learners’ confidence and agency for each time they read and encounter difficulty thereafter.

In addition to its correlative relationship to concept M.0, “Reading Is Not Natural:

Difficulty with Reading Is,” this threshold concept is connected to threshold concepts 1.6,

“Writing Is Not Natural,” and 4.2 “Failure Can Be an Important Part of Writing Development” in

Naming What We Know. While encountering reading difficulty is not the same thing as failure,

like threshold concept 4.2, the notion that “Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive,” seeks to

recast aspects of acquiring print literacy that are commonly perceived negatively as crucial

opportunities for learning and growth. “Reading Difficulty Can Be Instructive” is also imbricated

in disciplinary frameworks for reading that seek to develop learners’ reflective and

metacognitive capacities, including Ellen Carillo’s “mindful reading” and the methods of

analyzing reading difficulty outlined in Salvatori and Donahue’s The Elements (and Pleasures)

of Reading.

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1.0 There Are Many Types of Reading: Types Vary According to the Reader’s Context for

Reading2

For any text, there are infinite ways to read it. Reading written English always involves

decoding symbols into words, but what else can happen before, alongside, and after this

process—as well as which words get read and which don’t—varies wildly. Readers can read a

text verbatim from beginning to end, or they can read selectively and non-linearly. They can

survey texts—reading abstracts, titles, and section headings to try to get a sense of a text’s main

ideas before or in place of a verbatim reading. They can “hunt” for specific information,

consulting indexes, scanning tables of contents, and performing “Control+F” searches to locate it

by keyword. They can choose to read only introductions, conclusions, or even any random points

within a text. They might pause at points to ask questions of texts, to summarize what they

understand so far, or to make a response—whether silently in the mind, out loud, or written

down. They may reread certain passages multiple times or skip entire sections. They may even

stop or start reading in the middle of sentences. Readers can read slowly or quickly, carefully or

superficially, closely or distantly. And they can shift between any of these practices on the fly.

From an objective standpoint, none of these ways of reading are more or less legitimate

than any other. They are simply different ways in which one can make sense of and make use of

written text. Some ways, though, can be more or less useful depending on the purposes the

reader has for reading. Someone looking to evaluate texts for inclusion in a research project may

well begin by only scanning the titles of many texts in an online database or works-cited list.

This person might then locate and read abstracts of selected pieces whose titles suggest relevant

information. Only texts judged to be relevant would then stand any chance of a full read later,

and not all of these might be read verbatim. In contrast, someone reading a novel might best

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enjoy the story by reading a book in order from cover to cover, though there are alternatives here

too (consider the “choose your own adventure” format). How a reader chooses to read a text

depends ultimately upon the context for reading. This context includes the purposes the reader

has for engaging with the text, the type or genre of the text itself, the repertoire of experiences

the reader holds—both with reading and with life in general—constraints imposed by

stakeholder groups for whom the reading is being performed, and cultural expectations about

what reading is and does.

Some of these contextual factors bear further explanation. Firstly, purposes for reading

can include finding entertainment, seeking information, prompting thinking, and too many other

things to list fully. Readers can even read for multiple of these purposes at the same time.

Furthermore, purposes for reading can be entirely internal to the reader, imposed on the reader

by outside forces, or—more often—a mix of both. Academic readers are often reading for

purposes that are not entirely their own. For graduate students, much reading is assigned to them

by faculty through institutional structures like courses and comprehensive exams. Even though

students may find the texts they read for these occasions engaging and have their own reasons for

wanting to read them, that a text has been assigned by someone else who harbors expectations

for what that reading will lead to always has an impact on how students read. Even when reading

to produce research, for example, academics may be intrinsically motivated by their interest in

their topics as well as extrinsically motivated by factors related to job security. Secondly,

readers’ repertoire of prior experiences includes not only the set of tools or practices they have at

their disposal to make sense of and make use of texts, but also their worldviews and literally

everything else that has ever happened to them. Readers’ experiences tend to coalesce into

something that Kenneth Burke calls a “terministic screen”— a metaphoric word filter that

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“necessarily directs the attention to one field rather than another” (Language 1344). Like a pair

of tinted sunglasses letting in only certain colors of light, these filters let certain things into one’s

consciousness and keep others out. For example, an uncle of mine was an athlete and coach for

many years, and he tended to understand whatever he read, wrote, said, or heard through the

metaphor of “competition.” This metaphor prompted him to “see” very different things and make

different interpretations from texts than if his terministic screen had been “growth,” or “journey.”

Finally, communal expectations about reading include collectively held presumptions that

attempt to define what reading ought to be in a given context. There are no objectively correct or

morally superior ways to read, but this doesn’t mean that people don’t have subjective beliefs—

implicit or explicit—about how reading should be performed or that they don’t attempt to

influence one another’s reading practices and beliefs. Perceptions about reading can very much

matter.

Much of the potential troublesomeness that learners may encounter with internalizing the

notion that there are “Many Types of Reading,” stems from aspects of the reading context itself.

It may be hard for learners to recognize there are multiple ways to read or to experiment with

new ways if their prior experiences and communal expectations have collectively suggested that

reading is performed universally the same across all contexts. For example, a great deal of

reading that is assigned in school tasks students with the purpose of remembering “facts” to be

regurgitated for tests and quizzes. Because these assessments can test learners on any point of the

text, a possible assumption is that readers must read these texts verbatim to remember everything

they contain. If learners engage solely or primarily in this kind of reading in school contexts,

over time they may internalize the notion that verbatim reading and remembering of texts is the

“correct” or “honest” or “expected” or “only” way to read. This internalized notion can prompt

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resistance to learning to read in other ways—like reading selectively or skimming—even when

the context for reading suggests that different practices would be more beneficial to the learner.

In graduate school, I often felt guilty when I had to skim texts because I assumed that the honest

thing to do, in order to listen to the arguments their authors made, was to engage with them from

beginning to end. Additionally, several of my former graduate school colleagues have expressed

they feared not reading texts verbatim lest they would be called to remember specific

information from portions they skipped—even though our program’s course-level assessment

practices rarely, if ever, asked for this kind of recall. Compounding these anxieties was the fact

that, in my graduate experience, faculty only rarely stated their expectations for the kinds of

reading their students should be performing, and even when they did, such statements could

conflict not only with the prior expectations that students brought with them, but also with

expectations for reading implied elsewhere in the institution. In one sense, preliminary and

comprehensive exams are often examples of institutional expectations for reading misaligning

with instructor-level expectations. While compositionists have worked tirelessly over time to

evolve the conditions of these exams, their original incarnations were essentially timed writing

tests to demonstrate students’ recollection of knowledge—memorized from extensive and

presumably linear verbatim reading—of their fields. Today, although these tests often ask

students to do more and different things with their writing and can look very different from

program to program, their function of testing students on their reading and the knowledge gained

thereby has never totally gone away. Even the name comprehensive seems to imply academics’

knowing—from reading—everything. Thus, within an institution, students are likely to

experience mixed messages about reading expectations, and when faculty do not explicitly state

reading expectations for their classes, many students will reasonably assume that cover-to-cover

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verbatim reading is the only acceptable practice. Given these conditions, it is neither surprising

that learners might experience difficulty internalizing the notion that multiple legitimate types of

reading exist nor that learners might be reluctant to try them.

For graduate students entering their disciplines, one important takeaway of the notion that

“There Are Many Types of Reading: Types Vary According to the Reader’s Context for

Reading” is that academics, too, read in multiple ways and for multiple reasons, and these

multiple ways of reading can be equally ethical and rigorous as linear verbatim reading.

Academics do not solely read their disciplinary texts cover to cover. They also read selectively

and non-linearly: sometimes, they pick and choose only those portions of texts that they deem

relevant to their purposes. In fact, Davida Charney, studying the disciplinary reading practices of

a group of evolutionary biologists, found that the most experienced readers—those who had been

members of the discipline for longest—among her subjects were the most likely to engage in

selective and non-linear reading practices (212). In writing studies, too, academics do not always

read linearly. Faculty do not always tell or encourage students to read their assigned texts in

these ways. One possible reason for this is that faculty themselves may feel conflicted about how

they want their students to read in their classes and for many of the same reasons that students

feel such conflict. Even so, knowing that there are multiple good and effective ways to read that

depend upon context can help students to break free from restrictive perceptions of reading that

limit the range of practices they employ. Such breaking free will not lessen the need for graduate

students to acquire and apply a diverse toolkit of approaches to their disciplinary reading, nor for

them to develop the pragmatical and ethical judgment to discern for themselves when and which

types of reading are appropriate, but it might do much to bolster their confidence and agency as

they acquire these tools and make these decisions.

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This threshold concept, “There Are Many Types of Reading: Types Vary According to

the Reader’s Context for Reading,” because it espouses the multiplicity and contextual nature of

reading types, is connected to any other threshold concepts embedded in social-constructivist and

rhetorical theories of language. Such connections include principles three, “Reading Is Socially

Situated,” and five, “Reading Is Rhetorical,” in chapter two of this volume. These connections

likewise encompass concepts 1.0, “Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity”; 3.0, “Writing

Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies”; 3.1, “Writing Is Linked to Identity”: 3.2,

“Writers’, Histories, Processes, and identities Vary”; and 3.3, “Writing Is Informed by Prior

Experience,” in Naming What We Know.

1.1 Reading Involves Many Ways of Thinking About and Through Texts that Are Much

More than Decoding Words2

Closely tied to the many types of reading that exist are the many types of thinking that

may accompany them. Reading always entails much more going on in readers’ brains than

decoding symbols into words. If the preceding threshold concept acknowledges that there are

multiple things readers can do to read a text, this threshold concept acknowledges the multiple

ways readers can think while reading a text. Depending upon the context for reading, this

thinking can include, among other things, attempts at comprehension (understanding texts and

their intended messages), analysis (picking apart portions of texts and interpreting their

significance), synthesis, (putting together disparate pieces of information from across one or

several texts and identifying patterns), evaluation (judging the credibility, accuracy, and

usefulness of texts), and application/invention of ideas (applying or adapting the text to the

reader’s novel situation or writing). Collectively, these types of thinking are often referred to by

educators as “higher order thinking” and they correspond to categories of cognitive processes

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named in Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and the work of subsequent cognitive

psychologists (Anderson and Krathwohl).

To perform the various types of thinking that any reading context invites may also cause

the reader to perform different practices while reading. In other words, the types of thinking that

the reader engages in also alter and are part of the types of reading, or strategies, the reader

employs. For example, notating texts is often a useful practice to engage in while attempting to

comprehend, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, or invent ideas from texts. Like all aspects of reading

and writing, though, there is wide variation in notating practices depending upon the reader’s

context and which kind(s) of thinking the reader is trying to perform. If I’m trying to

comprehend an academic text’s main argument, for instance, I may be searching for a thesis

statement, marking it when I find it (underlining or highlighting the sentence(s) are my most

common ways), and then writing in the margin a brief translation of that thesis in my own

language. If there is no apparent explicit thesis for the piece—which isn’t uncommon—then I

may read the first few paragraphs or all of the piece’s introduction and then write a note

summarizing what I think is being argued. If I’m trying to perform synthesis or analysis, though,

what and how the text gets marked up looks quite different. In writing chapter one of this project,

once I’d located a story of reading difficulty in a piece of scholarship, the initial notation may

have simply been a code—“example of reading difficulty”—to mark a place to come back to.

Later re-readings might have then occasioned thinking that expanded that first notation: analysis

of the story to try to name the kind of difficulty it described or synthesis comparing its

similarities and differences to other stories I had seen elsewhere. It is also possible and common

for readers to switch back and forth among multiple types of thinking and multiple reading

practices in quick succession without much conscious awareness they are doing so. Regardless of

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the specific context, however, the point is that how one reads and how one thinks while reading

are closely linked.

It is not necessarily difficult for learners to conceptually grasp that “Reading Involves

Many Ways of Thinking About and Through Texts that Are Much More than Decoding Words”

and that these thinking activities are closely tied to reading practices. Probably most graduate

students enter their programs expecting they will have to engage in complex types of thinking

like analysis, synthesis, evaluation, invention, etc. What many will likely find troublesome,

however, is doing these kinds of thinking, whether while reading or writing. These kinds of

thinking aren’t easy or self-apparent. I remember while in graduate school often wondering

“what does analysis or synthesis look like? Am I doing these things? How do I do them, and how

would I know I’m doing them?” It’s certainly possible for this threshold concept to lay dormant

for a long time—something existing as a declarative statement in the mind of the learner but not

having operational impact on how the learner actually approaches and thinks about texts.

Another point of troublesomeness is that students might find it difficult associating complex

kinds of thinking with reading as opposed to writing. Many popularly circulating conceptions

narrowly define and confine “reading” to mean word decoding only. Types of thinking like

evaluation and invention are valued, to be sure, but are often not drawn within the circle of what

defines reading itself. Such perceptions can interfere with learners internalizing that reading

involves higher-order thinking. Thus, graduate students may expect that their writing engages in

higher-order thinking, but they may not quite make the connection that this thinking happens

during their reading.

“Reading Involves Many Ways of Thinking About and Through Texts that Are Much

More than Decoding Words” is an important threshold for learners to cross because it helps them

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to decouple from notions that reading is easy or trivial. When learners recognize that reading

involves many types of complex thinking, it can afford them more empathy when they and other

readers encounter reading difficulty because they know that higher order thinking is challenging

for everyone. Such empathy and understanding are crucial for compositionists interested in

teaching reading in ways that effectively locate and respond to points of student need.

Additionally, this threshold concept also prompts a useful point of reflection for all learners,

implicitly asking at what locations and during which practices in their reading, writing, and

learning they engage in which kinds of higher-order thinking and why.

This threshold concept draws heavily upon frameworks taken from educational theory

and cognitive psychology, and thereby has connections to any other threshold concept

acknowledging that reading and writing necessarily involves thinking. Thus, it an extension of

principle two, “Reading Is Cognition,” from this volume, which, in turn, serves as reading’s

equivalent of concept 5.0, “Reading Is (Always also) a Cognitive Activity,” in Naming What We

Know.

1.2 Comprehension Is a Complex and Moving Target2

Readers’ efforts to understand texts are neither simple nor perfectively definitive. Rather

than “discovering” pre-existing meaning and understanding from texts, readers are actually

engaged in the difficult and complex activity of constructing these things for themselves (see

principle one, “Reading Is Active Construction of Meaning from a Text,” in chapter two of this

volume). While it is true that writers attempt with varying degrees of conscious effort to write

their messages into their texts, they must first translate their thoughts into the medium of written

words and then this medium must be retranslated into thought by the reader. “Translate,” though,

isn’t really an adequate term to describe this process because that word implies that the meanings

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of the written words are somehow stable from one person to the next. They aren’t. Recall that a

readers’ set of prior experiences is an important part of their context for reading. Prior

experiences and associations—schemata—are what give meanings to words. When reading to

comprehend a text, readers attempt to activate appropriate meanings and to assemble them

together in a way that makes sense. Because experience can vary among individuals and among

different cultural groups, the meanings of words are not universal or stable. A writer and a

reader’s experiences are never exactly the same because they have not lived the same lives, and

this means that, inevitably, the interpretation of a text built by a reader will not exactly match the

one built into the text by the writer.

But not only is the act of assembling meaning from a text complex, the meaning the

reader constructs is unstable over time and can never be said to be finished. Readers’ experiences

are changing all the time, including through the act of reading a text itself. The understanding a

first-year master’s student builds of a disciplinary text, for example, is unlikely to remain

identical to one built if the text is reread even just a few weeks later. The purposes for which one

reads also have impact on the meaning that the reader constructs from the text. Reading for a

course assignment may only require the reader to build an understanding of a text’s overall

argument, particularly if the reader does not expect to use that text again in their own writing.

Reading that same text for incorporation into a research work, however, may require a more

intimate and nuanced construction of the text’s component parts or building an entirely different

understanding altogether. For these reasons, building understanding of texts is a never-ending,

iterative process.

“Comprehension Is a Complex and Moving Target” may pose troublesomeness for

learners because the term “reading comprehension” is frequently oversimplified and associated

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with negative connotations. Such misperceptions can prompt learners to take comprehension for

granted as something done easily and incur resistance to seeing reading comprehension in any

other way. One common misperception is that comprehension only entails remembering

“factoids”—snippets of decontextualized information like names and dates—to be regurgitated

for assessment. In some educational contexts, reading comprehension is indeed reduced to recall

and falsely implies that meaning is objectively located in a text. In the context of academic

disciplines, however, comprehending what a text means often involves nothing less than

attempting—always imperfectly—to reconstruct the author’s message from the author’s point of

view. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky have characterized this kind of reading, which

they call “reading with the grain,” as “to read generously, to work inside someone else’s system,

to see your world in someone else’s terms” (11). This kind of reading that attempts to listen to

the author can be intensely complex and difficult, not only because it requires the imagination

and humility of readers to try to think from another perspective, but also because readers’

existing repertoires of experiences may not overlap enough with that of the author for them to

build—at least initially—a reasonably faithful representation of their message. If reading

comprehension is perceived only as engaging the mental faculty of recall, however, it will be

troubling for learners to recognize such difficulties and complexities inherent to comprehension.

Though perhaps difficult to internalize, “Comprehension Is a Complex and Moving

Target” is a useful threshold for learners to cross because it transforms their disposition towards

textual comprehension. Not only can they gain a deeper appreciation for the difficulty inherent to

building understandings out of piles of words, but they also tend to see their comprehension of

texts as unstable, dynamic, and incomplete. This stance opens learners to revising their

understanding of texts as new knowledge and new perspectives enter into their repertoires of

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experience. Such a stance toward revision is crucial toward challenging existing trends of

thinking in an academic discipline and in moving its knowledge forward.

This threshold concept, in emphasizing the constructed nature of any understanding

derived from reading a text, proceeds from other threshold concepts based in constructivist

theory, including principles one, “Reading Is Active Construction of Meaning form a Text; three,

“Reading is Socially Situated”; and four, “Reading Is a Transaction Between Reader and Text”

in chapter two of this volume. Its basing in constructivist theories likewise connect this threshold

concept to concepts 1.3, “Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to Be Reconstructed by the

Reader,” and 1.9, “Writing Is a Technology through which Writers Create and Recreate

Meaning” in Naming What We Know.

2.0 Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words and the Communities of Practice that

Use ThemH: 1, 2

Dylan B. Dryer first coined this threshold concept as 1.4, “Words Get Their Meanings

from Other Words,” in Naming What We Know. Its reiteration and expansion here tease out a

few more implications specifically related to academic reading. Dryer writes that “words in a

sentence or paragraph influence and often determine each other’s meaning, and that “the

relations that imbue a sentence with particular meanings come not just from nearby words but

also from the social contexts in which the sentence is used” (24). The meaning of any single

word in a text is neither singular nor stable, nor does it have any intrinsic relationship to the set

of letters that comprise it. The meaning a reader constructs for a word is shaped by the meanings

of surrounding words in the text, the meanings commonly attached to that word by the

community of readers interpreting it, and the reader’s own repertoire of experiences. The

meanings of any word are thus multiple, contextual, and morphic in a variety of ways.

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All words, ultimately, have more than one meaning, and their meanings are shaped by

context. Take, as an example, the word “pill.” Perhaps the first definition that comes to mind is

something like “a hard, spheroid mass of medicine meant to be swallowed without chewing,” as

it is used in the statement, “Sheila gulped down her pills.” However, the same set of letters,

particularly when used as a verb, can refer to the process by which carpets shed balls of fibers, as

in the example, “Get the vacuum, Jake. The carpet’s pilling again!” There is arguably a core of

shared meaning between these two usages—something to do with small spheres, perhaps—but

each is significantly different from the other. One is hard, the other soft. One is ingestible in the

body, the other not. Which meaning is appropriate is determined by the context of the

surrounding words as well as the contexts of the people speaking/listening to/reading/writing the

word.

For at least two reasons, wading through the instability, multiplicity, and contextuality of

word meaning grows somewhat more complicated in academic contexts. Firstly, academics use a

lot of words differently from their common everyday usage—words like “unpack,” “situate,”

“position,” “locate,” and “discourse.” These discipline-specific contextual meanings frequently

aren’t written down in standard dictionaries or other common reference materials. In fact, a clear

and concise definition may not be written down anywhere. Instead, it is possible for a word’s

contextual meaning to be located only in the memories of individual community members who

share the understanding of the term. This can make it rather difficult for readers stymied by an

academic usage of a word to locate resources that contain a contextually appropriate definition.

Words comprised of the same set of letters can appear in dictionaries, but the senses described

therein may not match how the word is used in academic contexts, serving to deepen confusion.

Take an example word, “unpack,” for instance. In its most common everyday usage, unpack

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refers to the act of removing objects from a temporary container like a box or suitcase and

putting them away in a more permanent location. In academic contexts, though, it more often

refers to examining something (and very often that something is intangible—like an idea or

question) and explaining its component parts or assumptions. This meaning for “unpack” is less

likely to appear in standard dictionaries (although, happily, Google’s Oxford Languages

dictionary does have an entry for this particular meaning of “unpack”).

Secondly, when academic words do get defined in the texts in which they appear, they

are often defined through the use of other words with similarly contextually or disciplinarily

specific meanings. This situation can create a proliferating problem for readers new to a field:

unfamiliarity with the context that determines the meaning of a word can prove a stalwart

hindrance—an impenetrable wall—rather than an aid in understanding its meaning.

Paradoxically, for these readers, the key to determining the meaning of an unfamiliar disciplinary

word is to know the meaning of all the other unfamiliar disciplinary words surrounding it. How

often, for example, when academics discuss someone’s “situatedness,” is that word surrounded

by other complexly and contextually nuanced words like “subjectivity,” “constructs,” “power

relations,” etc.? It is worth asking how readers new to a discipline could reasonably be expected

to disentangle such a web of discipline-specific language without some sort of “Rosetta Stone”

or bridge language that helps them map it on to their own experiences.

While it can certainly be difficult for learners to determine the meaning of words used in

academic contexts because they are used differently than in other situations, it can prove just as

troublesome for learners to internalize the notion that words have multiple, contextually

dependent meanings. Even though a quick perusal of a dictionary would demonstrate that

individual words often have more than one definition, imagining the meaning(s) of any word as

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plural is arguably not the default epistemological position from which humans operate most of

the time. When humans speak, we generally assume that the meaning of our words is apparent

and stable—a one to one correspondence between the symbols that comprise language and the

meaning encoded in those symbols—because we usually expect our words to be understood by

the people with whom we are speaking. We are usually unaware, however, how much we rely

upon shared understanding and shared context with our interlocutors to lend stability to the

meaning of our words. Only when understanding breaks down and we must explain ourselves or

find alternative words to reach our listeners are we at all likely to recognize that the same word

could be interpreted to mean different things, and even these momentary recognitions of the

multiple meanings of a single word are not likely to lead to fundamental transformations in how

we conceive of language without active reflection conducted over time.

“Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words and the Communities of Practice that Use

Them” is a useful threshold for learners to cross because it transforms how readers are likely to

process unfamiliar words and because it enlarges their toolkit for determining words’

contextually appropriate meanings. Knowing that the meanings of words are multiple allows

readers to test multiple possible alternative meanings for uncertain words in real time as they

read. While the text in which such words are found may itself prove difficult (as is often the case

in academic reading) and thereby not offer much definitive understanding of the word, it

probably can at least rule out the possibility of certain meanings. When I see, “unpack,” in a

piece of academic writing, for instance, at least I know that the author probably isn’t talking

about taking clothes out of a suitcase. Furthermore, when learners know that the meanings of

words are contextual—not only in relationship to the other words that surround them in a text,

but to the communities that employ that word—they can get a better sense of which resources to

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consult for a definition when in-text context clues aren’t enough. For academic words, for

instance, I might query a colleague, or, if I’m in a pinch, I’ll search the term in Wikipedia or

Google (using the template “What does ______ mean in rhetoric and writing?”) and see if any

definition offered in the resulting hits matches the context of the text I’m reading.

In addition to this threshold concepts’ derivation from Dryer’s 1.4 in Naming What We

Know, its premises follow from constructivist theories of language, theories which animate most

of the threshold concepts therein. The meaning attributed to any word is ultimately arbitrary and

constructed—determined only by the understanding of that word built and shared by the people

who read, write, hear, or speak it—and these qualities of language are what enable different

people communicating in different contexts to construct multiple meanings from the same set of

symbols. This threshold concept’s connectivity to constructivist theories places it in closest

relationship to principles one, “Reading Is Active Construction of Meaning from a Text,” three,

“Reading Is Socially Situated,” and four, “Reading Is a Transaction Between Reader and Text”

in chapter two of this volume.

2.1 Academics Create New Words and New Meanings for Existing WordsH: 3, 1

New words and new meanings for old words don’t emerge fully formed from nothing.

Someone—or some group of people—has to create them. There are always new contexts for

speaking and writing—new ideas trying to be expressed by language users for the first time.

Language, luckily, is adaptable and adapted to meet these new contexts. Thus, if “Words Get

Their Meanings from Other Words and the Communities of Practice That Use Them,” it stands

to reason that communities are engaged in creating new words and word meanings as part of

regular communication in their shared contexts. Academics, being one type of community of

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practice, are thus engaged in the formation of new words and new meanings for existing ones,

often in the context of creating new knowledge through their research writings.

The boundary between inventing new words and giving a new meaning to an old one, it

should be noted, is quite fuzzy. In fact, at least some instances of giving new meaning to an

existing word are categorized by linguists as a form of word formation. This form, called “zero-

derivation” or “conversion” involves only a change in the word’s part of speech, like say how

“catfish” has taken on a new meaning in recent years in being shifted from a noun to a verb. This

is one reason why multiple dictionary entries might be provided for the same set of letters: each

entry and its associated meaning is actually considered a unique word.

Languages have a variety of ways of coining new words, many of which involve

modifying or combining existing words. Of these methods, “reuse” and “compounding” are

among the most commonly employed by academics. Reuse is simply giving a new meaning to an

existing word, not even necessarily with an accompanying change in part of speech. An example

of reuse includes “discourse,” which can in common usage refer to a single piece of writing, a

single conversation, or to all human communication collectively. In academic contexts, however,

“discourse” often takes on the nuance of referring to the set of patterns and habits a community

routinely uses to speak and write to one another. “Academic discourse,” for example, is usually

not just referring to the writings or speech acts members of an academic community produce, but

also invokes the enormous sets of thought patterns—things like citing sources, bracketing claims

with qualifying statements, fairly representing others’ ideas—that structure their thinking as they

do so. Compounding is exemplified in the term “discourse community” which combines the

academic sense of “discourse” with the word “community” to refer to the group of people who

share in common a certain set of patterns and habits for communicating. Though this compound

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contains two separate graphemes, it is arguably one indivisible unit of meaning. Take away

either “discourse” or “community” and the meaning of the utterance is changed significantly.

It is probably not conceptually difficult for leaners to understand that “Academics Create

New Words and New Meanings for Existing Words,” but it can be considerably more

troublesome for them to regularly apply this understanding and its implications when they read

academic texts. If learners don’t have much knowledge of how languages change over time or

how new words are created, for instance, it may not occur to them to expect to see novel words

or words used in novel ways when they first begin to read in academic contexts. This situation

can lead to their overreliance on previous understandings of words, understandings that can

inhibit their abilities to digest the text fully. Additionally, for the reasons discussed in the

preceding threshold concept, there is potential difficulty in students being able to “grok”—

understand intuitively—the meanings of these modified or new words. But before students even

get to this point of trying to understand academic words or academic uses of existing words, they

may have trouble identifying which words are new academic words. After all, certain jargony

words may look like common English words even when they are used in special academic

senses, and students may interpret a word though a common meaning and move on, perhaps only

realizing that their understanding was insufficient when they encounter difficulty making sense

of later portions of text that depend on the reader having understood the word. Furthermore,

learners may have trouble recognizing when academics are defining their novel terms.

Academics don’t always use explicit signaling (like, “x is defined as _____”)—or at least

signaling recognizable to readers outside of their fields—to introduce definitions to their readers.

Instead, they may insert a definition somewhat clandestinely where they would expect readers

experienced in the discipline to want one—very often shortly following the word’s first usage. A

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term and its definition are often placed in apposition—a phrase interrupting the regular structure

of the sentence offering restatement of the term and considered to be grammatically in parallel

with it (much like the content that follows the dash in this sentence). Also, academics may omit

or abridge definitions for a few reasons: (1) they usually are constrained by word limits for

publishing purposes, (2) to define all academic jargony words would be tedious and obscure the

writer’s main argument, and (3) they assume that certain terms are used commonly enough in

their field to be intuitively understood by their intended audience, an audience that does not

necessarily always include graduate students.

Knowing that “Academics Create New Words and New Meanings for Existing Words” is

an important threshold for learners because it transforms the ways in which readers expect to

interact with words when reading. Because they know that academics are constantly defining

new terms, they go into a text expecting to find words that are unfamiliar to them, an expectation

that can foster a more positive disposition toward the detective work that is often necessary to

decipher difficult words’ meanings. Instead of expecting word meaning to be self-evident,

determining word meaning becomes a matter of hypothesizing multiple definitions, testing them

against the context of the word’s usage, and remaining open to revising one’s understanding in

order to find the best fit of meaning.

This threshold concept has a deep correlative relationship with the preceding one in this

chapter, “Words Get Their Meanings from Other Words and the Communities of Practice that

Use Them,” and so likewise shares linkage to Dylan Dryer’s threshold concept, 1.4 “Words Get

Their Meanings from Other Words” in Naming What We Know. It is also indebted to the field of

linguistics and its conceptions about how new words are formed. Finally, because the creation of

new words and new meanings for words are ultimately constructivist acts, this fact connects the

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concept to principles one, “Reading Is Active Construction of Meaning from a Text,” three,

“Reading Is Socially Situated,” and four, “Reading Is a Transaction Between Reader and Text,”

in chapter two of this volume.

3.0 Comprehension Entails Building Mental Maps of What Words Add up to Mean2

One can understand the meaning of every single word in a sentence, paragraph, or larger

chunk of text and still not understand the overall message of the passage. In academic contexts,

readers often must synthesize the meanings of individual words into statements that make sense

to the reader but at the same time approximate the writer’s intended meaning. In other words,

readers have to build a “mental map” of what a text means. For example, if I read the sentence

“The fox entered the cave,” to understand the activity described by this sentence, I not only need

to have a mental picture of each of its important words— “fox,” “enters,” and “cave”—I also

need to have some conception—a map—of what is happening when the words are put together.

Thus, I might imagine a furry animal walking into a darkened opening in the side of a mountain.

Readers must do this map making or picture painting because writers must make assumptions

about what their imagined audiences already know or believe. In fact, without the reader and

writer already sharing some understanding and experience in common—like say, being more or

less fluent in the same language—linguistic communication isn’t very possible at all. The

writer’s guesses leave gaps between what a text says and the totality of what a text can mean.

The reader’s experience steps in while reading to fill these gaps, drawing a map, plan, or

“schema,” to give coherence and stability to groups of words that otherwise are unstable and

ambiguous. It’s worth noting that the reader’s experience steps in to fill gaps in the text—or at

least tries to—whether or not the reader is actively attempting to reconstruct the writer’s message

or whether or not the reader and writer share much experience and knowledge in common. The

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tendency for humans to want to make sense of a text in this way is a largely non-conscious,

conditioned response to the technology of written language.

While it is also necessary and important for academics to be able to read texts in ways

other than to attempt to understand a writer’s message—“to read against the grain, to read

critically, to turn back,” as David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroski name one such other way

of reading—academic writing relies upon citing, summarizing, discussing, and responding to the

ideas of others, and there is ethical obligation to represent these ideas fairly and accurately (11).

Thus, trying to understand an author’s perceived intentions—to read “with the grain” is one

important aspect of academic reading, one that often takes place prior to the reader developing

critiques or criticisms, and one that relies upon building certain types of mental maps that have

been tacitly authorized by the discipline (11).

To illustrate some of these points about mental map building, let’s look at one more

example. David Bartholomae famously writes that “every time a student sits down to write for

us, he has to invent the university for the occasion” (4). Readers new to the discipline might

understand the sentence’s meaning until the part about “invent[ing] the university”—arguably

the most important words in the sentence. They might struggle to imagine what inventing the

university looks like. Reading onward, they might find some clarification in the text itself: the

student in question must “learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar

ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the

discourse of our community” (4). But these readers might just as likely encounter further

bafflement: what do “speak[ing]” and “knowing” look like for members of this discipline? To

fully imagine just what Bartholomae describes requires readers to already have had experience

doing the things he lists. These prior experiences of thinking, knowing, selecting, and evaluating

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like members of a discipline provide the mental blueprints—the schema—that help fill in the

gaps of meaning within the text. Readers, of course, don’t have to try to understand what

Bartholomae is saying: they could focus their attention, for example, on noticing his pattern of

automatically applying the masculine third-person singular pronoun (he) to individual

hypothetical subjects, but reading this text in an academic context would usually also involve

readers attempting to faithfully understand his argument. For instance, other academic writers

responding to Bartholomae’s work could read to criticize whether writers do or should have to

“invent the university” in first-year writing classes (and have done so), but to make this argument

fairly, such writers first have to understand what he is trying to say, or else their own arguments

precede from false assumptions.

There is no guarantee that any specific reader will share any experience or understanding,

or embodied identity in common with the writer, or that readers and writers will share

assumptions in common at crucial junctures in the text. The reader’s resulting mental map will

often not much match the writer’s intentions. And it is at this point where many learners new to

an academic discipline are likely to encounter troublesomeness. Constructing a mental map that

is congruent to an author’s likely message is harder the fewer experiences a reader and writer

share in common. Because academic writers imagine audiences of experts already somewhat

knowledgeable about what a field knows and how it knows it, graduate students are at a

disadvantage to the extent that they lack this knowledge. Constructing such mental maps is also

made difficult because so much of the subject matter of academic writing is abstract rather than

concrete things and is thus harder to imagine in the mind’s eye. Further, many of the “gaps”

created by the language of academic texts require the reader to be “in on” tacit assumptions or

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ways of thinking shared by members of the field, a fact which makes said assumptions hard to

recognize and to communicate to learners new to a field.

“Comprehension Entails Building Mental Maps of What Words Add up to Mean” is an

important threshold for learners to cross because it transforms and enlarges reader’s conceptions

of what all is involved in making meaning from a text. Decoding individual words and

interpreting their meaning isn’t enough: larger segments of texts must be interpreted

wholistically and contextually. Writers combine individual words in such a way as to attempt to

provoke the creation of images or impressions in the brain that are greater than the sum of their

parts, and readers are conditioned to apply their own experiences in constructing those images or

impressions in ways that make sense to them personally. Learner’s crossing the threshold can

recognize when their understanding breaks down, not due to a lack of understanding of

individual words, but due to problems putting together a complete picture of what someone

else’s words—representing someone else’s thoughts—add up to mean. Knowing this offers

suggestions for how to ameliorate that difficulty—such as working through interpretation of

passages together with a colleague or attempting to generate alternative interpretations of what

the passage could mean.

This threshold concept has relationships to multiple threads of reading theory as well as a

host of threshold concepts. However, it is probably most recognizably connected to cognitive

theories for its reliance upon the terminology of “mental maps” or “schemata.” As such, it is

embedded in principle two, “Reading Is Cognition” in chapter two of this volume and is also

reciprocally entwined with concept 5.0 “Writing Is (Also Always) a Cognitive Activity from

Naming What We Know.

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3.1 Academic Syntax Names Abstract Relationships Between Complex, Abstract Terms3

When academic readers read in their disciplines, they aren’t only confronted with the

puzzle of making sense of difficult, abstract, discipline-specific words, but they must also

contend with the complex ways in which those words are arranged. In other words, they must

make sense of academic grammatical structures and syntax. When people speak in their common

dialects of English, something called subject-verb-object (SVO) syntax predominates the

statements speakers tend to make. Something (the subject) does something (the verb) to another

something (the object): “Chidi greeted Eleanor,” for example. There are variations to this order,

and it is possible to omit parts of the order when the speaker expects the listener to be able to fill

in the gaps, but the point is that many common human linguistic interactions are composed of

relatively simple syntactic units. Additionally, the relationships between ideas which the word

order implies are relatively concrete. These kinds of sentences don’t usually cause much

difficulty for readers to follow in imagining their main ideas. In the above example, for instance,

it’s not too hard to imagine Chidi waving “hello” to Eleanor.

Academic reading, however, tends be among the contexts in which syntax is quite a bit

more complicated. Academic writing is often comprised of sentences that contain multiple of

these SVO units, sentences that invert this order, and sentences that contain additional types of

syntactic units. Further, the relationships among a sentence’s words that are implied by this

syntax tend to be more abstract. These relationships are less easily imagined as concrete people

and objects performing visible actions. Take the sentence that begins this very threshold concept

entry. It contains no less than thirty-five words and four distinct clauses (syntactic units that

contain at least one subject and one verb). This isn’t even close to the length of some of the

longest sentences in academic texts, but it’s still long enough to lead readers astray. Not only

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this, those four clauses are constantly interrupted by and composed of other grammatical units—

things like prepositional phrases, gerund phrases, absolute clauses, infinitive clauses, relative

clauses, etc. So, the sentence is syntactically complex, to be sure, but some of these grammatical

units may also prove more challenging to imagine in the mind’s eye as well. Maybe the first

clause or so is easy to imagine: “when academic readers read in their disciplines” might prompt

one to envision a professor sitting down in a chair with a book. But what does one envision when

one reads the words, “they must also contend with the complex ways in which those words are

arranged”? Perhaps the same professor, this time with a cartoon thought bubble containing a

question mark above their head? This is not a bad or unhelpful image, but it’s not one that gives

the reader much idea of what it feels like to actually make sense of academic word order. A

reader’s ability to construct that image would rely upon their already having experienced some of

that kind of sense making for themselves.

It is not hard to see how learners new to an academic discourse community could

encounter difficulties understanding a text based solely on the complexity and abstraction of

relationships implied in its syntax. It is easy for readers new to a context like academic reading to

lose track of a sentence’s main thrust of meaning in a jungle of phrases and clauses. Perhaps

some readers also experience “information overload:” the very grammatical complexity of a

sentence overtaxes a new reader, requiring their memory to track too many concepts and their

nuanced interrelationships with one another. Keep in mind, after all, that readers new to a

discipline are also struggling with recognizing and internalizing the meanings of novel academic

words, so they can’t rely on operational familiarity with those words to help lessen the overall

cognitive burden of making sense of a text. Attention may be split too many directions, and these

readers’ understandings can fall apart, sometimes spectacularly. So, while it may be relatively

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easy to understand on a conceptual level that “Academic Syntax Names Abstract Relationships

Between Complex, Abstract Terms,” this threshold concept joins many others on this list in

being troublesome to internalize and apply.

The threshold concept is useful for learners to cross because it transforms their

understanding of the translation work that is involved in reading difficult texts. Not only do

readers have to translate unfamiliar words of difficult texts into others that make sense to them,

very often they also need to rejumble the syntax of sentences until it’s in a format that resonates

internally. This translation work is made all the more difficult by the fact that academics must be

vigilant that their translations faithfully attempt to capture the writer’s message. Still, learners

who have crossed this threshold tend to expect that they will likely have to perform at least some

of this kind of translation and are prepared to apply this skill—eventually without consciousness

that they are doing so—as the reading context requires.

“Academic Syntax Names Abstract Relationships Between Complex, Abstract Terms,” is

deeply enmeshed in multiple threads of reading theory—cognitive, rhetorical, and

constructivist—and thus maintains linkage to nearly every threshold concept listed in chapter

two of this volume. It is likewise connected to the other concepts in band 3.0 in this chapter in

attempting to account for reading difficulties involving chunks of texts larger than words.

Finally, the concept intersects with any threshold concepts from Naming What We Know that

acknowledge how writers imagine their audiences and tailor their writings to them (1.2, “Writing

Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences), that explains how writing is imbricated in shared

communal ways of thinking (1.0, “Writing is a Social and Rhetorical Activity”; 2.3, “Writing is a

Way of Enacting Disciplinarity”), and that describe readers’ efforts to (re)construct meaning

from texts (1.3, “Writing Expresses and Shares Meaning to be Reconstructed by the Reader).

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3.2 To Understand Difficult Texts, Readers Sometimes Must (Temporarily) Accept Not

Understanding2

Given the complex, contextual natures of reading and comprehension, readers may not

always be able to “follow” a text’s meaning word-for-word as they read. Instead, they may need

to continue reading past difficult segments of text while misunderstanding or not understanding,

suspending for a time their need to achieve closure in their comprehension. Mariolina Salvatori

and Patricia Donahue have urged that it can be valuable for learners to practice “suspending their

desire for instant clarity, learning instead that meaning unfolds (or is constructed) in time and

that the momentum of reading may be maintained by placing conundrums temporarily in

shadow” (52). Salvatori and Donahue’s “placing in shadow” has also been called “learning to

tolerate ambiguity” by Ann Berthoff (110). In either case, what is being described is the reader

becoming okay with not immediately understanding everything in a text, letting those points of

difficulty bubble in the background of the reader’s consciousness, and pressing on in reading

anyway. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky offer readers new to academic reading some

further explanation and reassurance in this matter:

You should realize that […], you will never feel, after a single reading, as though you

have command of everything you read. This is not a problem. After four or five readings

(should you give any single essay that much attention), you may still feel that there are

parts you missed or don’t understand. This sense of incompleteness is part of the

experience of reading, at least the experience of reading serious work. And it is part of

the experience of a strong reader. […] No reader, at least no reader we would trust, would

admit that he understood everything that Michel Foucault or Adrienne Rich or Edward

Said had to say. (8)

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Thus, not fully understanding texts on the first readthrough, as well as putting aside at least some

of those moments of not understanding, are normal and intelligent practices of academic reading.

The snippets of texts readers may need to place in shadow can vary in length from

phrases to sentences to paragraphs or more, and the reasons readers may need to place a text in

shadow can equally vary. Some of these reasons are implicated by other threshold concepts in

this chapter. For example, concept 3.0, “Comprehension Entails Building Mental Maps of What

Individual Words Add Up to Mean,” implies that sometimes readers new to a particular reading

context or type of text don’t possess the set of experiences or background knowledge the writer

expects them to. For readers to fill gaps in a text’s meaning in ways that build a coherent mental

map of the writer’s message, it may require their reading other parts of that text, or it may require

locating background knowledge from elsewhere. In academic contexts for reading, resolving

misunderstanding is often not possible in the first read-through: it may require readers

internalizing snippets of information from multiple texts in the field and then returning to the

shadowed text after having accumulated a body of knowledge. The text may simply contain too

many unfamiliar concepts or make assumptions that readers don’t yet have access to. As another

example, concept 3.1, “Academic Syntax Names Abstract Relationships Between Complex,

Abstract Terms,” suggests that the grammatical structure of academic writings might require

readers to place portions of text in shadow. If readers get caught up too much in trying to

understand individual words or phrases, for instance, they may slow their reading to a point

where it loses sight of the larger idea being presented in the sentence or paragraph. Members of

an academic discipline are describing complex things. Even for experienced readers in an

academic discipline, a writer’s idea often doesn’t start to take shape in their minds until they

reach the end of the sentence, and very often much longer after that. Whatever reasons readers

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must place a text in shadow, however, it is not necessarily in their best interest to try to

understand every part of the text if their purposes for reading don’t call for it. Many things that

get left in shadow don’t get resolved, and that’s okay too. Reading and understanding are

iterative, imperfect, non-terminal processes, and readers will have a much easier time when they

cultivate acceptance of these processes and with themselves working through them.

Cultivating patience and acceptance with not understanding texts, though, is probably the

greatest point of troublesomeness learners are likely to experience in acquiring this threshold

concept. It certainly isn’t intuitive to say that the key to understanding a text in the long term is

being okay with not understanding it in the short term. Also adding to learners’ potential

frustrations are always the interference of competing notions of what reading is. If reading is

perceived to be solely word decoding, then readers embedded in this perception might

understandably believe that they should be able to follow a text in-line if they know the meaning

of the words to be decoded.

“To Understand Difficult Texts, Readers Sometimes Must (Temporarily) Accept Not

Understanding,” is a valuable threshold for learners to cross because it transforms the practice of

how they handle moments of not understanding in their reading. Learners who have not crossed

this threshold might spend too much time and effort trying to understand moments of texts that

confuse them but are not profitable to their purposes for reading. Alternately, they might give up

reading the text altogether. Those who have crossed this threshold, though, tend to suspend

points of confusion, holding them in the background of their minds for later clarification (or not,

if clarification isn’t relevant to their purposes) while continuing reading the text.

Emphasizing the complexity, uncertainty, recursiveness, and messiness involved in

constructing meaning while reading, this threshold concept is deeply connected to any others that

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emphasize these aspects of literate communication. As such, it has reciprocal relationships to the

threshold concepts in band 4.0 “All Writers Have More to Learn,” in Naming What We Know.

The threshold concepts in this band emphasize the need for writers’ continual and varying

practice with writing and their acceptance of the learning opportunities embedded within all

moments of failure or confusion. This threshold concept extends these considerations to the act

of reading as well.

4.0 Reading Like Academics Implies Thinking Like Academics1

Preceding threshold concepts have established that reading practices are contextual: they

vary depending upon the purposes ascribed to reading and the communities within which and for

which that reading is performed (see 1.0, “There are many Types of Reading: Types Vary

According to the Reader’s Context for Reading,” above). They have also established that reading

is cognition—thinking (see “Reading Is Cognition,” chapter 2, this volume). From these

threshold concepts, it follows that reading performed within any social group is a form of

situated cognition—thinking that is shaped and constrained by the context in which it is

performed. Reading academic texts within academic communities to satisfy academic purposes

is one of these contexts. Thus, to read like an academic implies thinking like one also. This is not

to say that all academics read or think exactly alike, or that there is one way of academic reading

or thinking—far from it. However, communities always have patterns and boundaries—

worldviews or ideologies—on the ways that they think and perform their activities—some things

are more acceptable, some less so, and some not really at all. The very habitual actions of

members of a community implicitly discourage certain types of thinking and doing and

encourage others. For example, if one were to read the works of Jacques Derrida and interpret

their rhetorical significance as describing a recipe for making ketchup, and then submit an article

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to a professional journal arguing this interpretation, that person would find publication likely

impossible. Such a way of thinking and reading, perhaps even if the writer could make a

convincing case, lies too far outside the boundaries of the kind of work, thinking, and reading

that the discipline values.

The contributors to Naming What We Know have put forth in threshold concept 3.0 that

“Writing Enacts and Creates Identities and Ideologies,” but reading—and the thinking that goes

on during reading—likewise enacts and creates identities and ideologies. Contributor Tony Scott

explains:

[…] There is no general literacy: literacy is always in some way involved in the

negotiation of identities and ideologies in specific social situations. Vocabularies, genres,

and language conventions are a part of what creates and distinguishes social groups, and

thus learning to write is always ongoing, situational, and involving cultural and

ideological immersion. (48)

Because literacy includes both writing and reading, it is possible to perform a simple substitution

and thus to conclude that learning to read is always ongoing, situational, and involving cultural

and ideological immersion. Scott continues:

As we are immersed in discourses through reading and in dialogue with others, we begin

to name and understand through those discourses, internalizing the ideologies they carry.

Indeed, language learning and use is a primary means through which ideologies are

conveyed, acquired, and made to seem “natural” without obvious alternatives or need of

explanation. As ideological activity, writing [and reading are] deeply involved in

struggles over power, the formation of identities, and the negotiation, perpetuation, and

contestation of belief systems. (49, emphasis in original)

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All discourse communities carry with them expectations for how their members ought to behave

and think, including academic disciplines. To read within a discipline is thus to be immersed in

the belief systems to which that discipline ascribes—to be tacitly pushed toward thinking in

some ways (within its ideological boundaries) and not in others.

The boundaries of disciplinary thinking, reading, and doing are neither static nor

impermeable, however. In fact, every act of reading and writing performed by members of the

field contributes to authoring and reauthoring how the field thinks. It is possible for members—

to paraphrase Scott—to resist, to negotiate, and to contest belief systems as well as to perpetuate

them. Boundaries can and do get challenged and expand as a result, but even though they may

change, disciplinary and ideological boundaries are never totally eliminated.

One way in which “Reading Like Academics Implies Thinking Like Academics” may

prove troublesome to learners is that it challenges the perception that literacy learning is

ideologically neutral activity. Learning to read and write are usually publicly perceived to be

positive endeavors, but not ones that immerse readers in the particular worldviews of the texts

that are read and the communities for which they are read. Learners might experience cognitive

dissonance in coming to terms with the fact that their reading has always had persuasive effects

on their thinking and learning. Learners may also develop conflicts between the ideologies they

carry with them from their prior experiences and those they start to notice within certain of the

texts that they read. These conflicts can be significant if the learner finds themselves at odds with

ideologies valued by a community to which they seek membership.

“Reading Like Academics Implies Thinking Like Academics” is a useful threshold for

learners to cross in transforming aspects of their metacognition and critical thinking as they read.

Understanding that ideologies are “written” into texts and enacted through the reader’s

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immersion into them is a necessary recognition prior to being able to critically evaluate texts.

One cannot determine one’s relationship to a text’s or discipline’s worldview if one doesn’t first

recognize that these things are trying to influence the reader. This threshold concept is also an

important one specifically for graduate students, making it plain that to read and think in a

discipline is to be immersed into—and to be expected to internalize to some extent—disciplinary

ideologies. Knowing this expectation grants graduate students the awareness to decide the extent

to which they will assent to the process of academic enculturation, to decide which aspects of

academic ideologies they might internalize as well as to identify those they would seek to resist

and change, and to determine whether entering academic communities suits their wishes at all.

This threshold concept applies Naming What We Know’s assertions about the

relationships among ideologies, identities, and literate activity to reading in place of writing. As

such, it maintains close relationships to all threshold concepts from band 3.0, “Writing Enacts

and Creates Identities and ideologies,” in that volume.

4.1 Academics Read to Learn, Think, and Write in Their Communities2

Because all reading is done for a purpose (even when that purpose is simply to entertain

the reader), it is important for learners new to a discipline to understand why academics read.

Much of academic work is comprised of inventing new knowledge—through conducting

research—and sharing that knowledge—through teaching, publishing, and presenting the results

of that research. When academics sit down to read, they are reading to learn what has already

been “said” about a topic by others in the field, to think through what they believe or know about

that topic—what they agree and disagree with—and to prepare for what they want to “say”

(write) back to the community. A metaphor, the “academic conversation,” is often employed as a

shorthand for this practice of asynchronous written communication between scholars. Gerald

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Graff and Cathy Birkenstein write that “writing well means entering into conversation with

others. Academic writing in particular calls upon writers not simply to express their own ideas,

but to do so as a response to what others have said” (xvi). However, joining this academic

conversation, they caution, “begins not with an act of assertion but an act of listening, of putting

ourselves in the shoes of those who think differently from us” (xiii). The “listening” to which

Graff and Birkenstein refer is more often experienced while reading the ideas of others than

literally sitting and hearing what they have to say (although that happens too). Thus, the

academic conversation starts with reading, rather than writing. Academics do read academic

texts for other purposes as well, but participating in “the academic conversation” is one purpose

for which many academic writers will assume academic readers are choosing to engage with

their texts.

It’s worth noting that the purposes and motivations for which academics read are not

always identical to the purposes for which students read, even graduate students. These

differences between purposes can be both in kind—like say when a student reads a text only to

satisfy the conditions of a school assignment—or in degree. All academic readers read to learn,

for instance, but the degree of learning and the kind of learning that graduate students engage in

can look quite different from that of faculty. Broadly speaking, students and faculty are at

different stages in their journeys of inhabiting their disciplines. “Reading to learn” for an

experienced academic might mean reading a text to understand what new is being said about

topic x, a topic with which the academic may have already been familiar for multiple years. On

the other hand, reading to learn for a graduate student new to a topic of study more often

involves trying to understand what that topic is about or what the discipline as a whole is about:

what conversations exist within that topic, how academics tend to talk about those conversations,

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or even what an individual text is saying. Faculty can experience “flashbacks” to students’

reading to learn experiences if they are branching out into new topics of the field or reading

student dissertations or theses on topics with which they are unfamiliar, but even these moments

are tempered somewhat by the greater repertoire of general reading experiences they possess

from having been in the discipline longer.

Experienced academic readers likely intuitively know the reasons that they read in their

fields, but they aren’t always consciously aware of those reasons. Even more importantly, the

reasons academics read aren’t always articulated to students explicitly, and even when they are,

they don’t necessarily prompt students to reflect upon and internalize their own versions of these

reasons, nor do they prompt reflection about how students’ purposes for reading within their

programs may be somewhat different than the reasons established academic readers read. Thus,

“Academics Read to Learn, Think, and Write in Their Communities” is not necessarily a

conceptually difficult threshold concept, but it is a presumption that may lie troublesomely tacit

and inert for many learners for a long period of time.

It is also possible for learners to encounter this threshold concept with troublesomeness

because the concept is foreign to them or conflicts with prior perceptions of reading. Throughout

much of schooling, teachers only rarely explain the reasons for which they ask their students to

read. Except for perhaps a vague reference to “canon” here and there, I can’t remember my high

school English teachers ever explaining any reasons why we read any novel they assigned.

Similarly, my history and science teachers never explained why I should be reading the assigned

textbooks. The assumption among many students, if anything, was that reading was necessary to

honestly perform the work of the class and to pass it. Situations like this one can cause learners

to conclude that reading in school is done only to satisfy other people’s requirements, and this

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extrinsic purpose for reading can depress learners’ abilities to develop intrinsic reasons for

reading. Graduate school then poses an interesting conundrum for these learners: to some extent,

the purposes for reading are still being imposed on learners by outside authority figures—at least

during coursework—but at the same time, these authority figures expect learners to develop their

own specific reasons for reading the texts assigned to them in their classes, an expectation that

grows more significant after graduate students enter thesis and dissertation phases of their

programs and gain greater choice and responsibility over what they will read. Reading to learn,

think, and write in one’s communities are very broad purposes for reading. Individual readers

must learn to fill in the gaps, inventing for themselves far more specific reasons for engaging

with any text—usually related to what they’re interested in researching or learning about—and

this is a troublesome transition that many learners do not make easily.

“Academics Read to Learn, Think, and Write in Their Communities” is a valuable

threshold for learners to cross because knowing one’s purpose for reading allows one to better

select the strategies and practices for reading that will enable one to achieve that purpose.

Readers who know what they are trying to learn, think, and write about can make more informed

decision about which texts to read in the first place, and they can apply mental filters while doing

so that selectively apply attention to certain aspects of texts that are relevant to what they want to

know while ignoring those which aren’t. Moreover, this threshold concept can empower learners,

letting them know that they have the agency to define for themselves what they want to learn,

think, and write about as well as how the texts they choose to read serve those purposes.

This threshold concept attempts to explicate the broad purposes for which academics are

engaged in reading. Understanding and negotiating purposes—those that the writer would seek

to enact on the reader, those that the reader would seek to enact through reading, and those which

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outside stakeholders might impose upon the reading context—is a crucial component of

rhetorical theories of reading. These theories connect this threshold concept to principle five,

“Reading Is Rhetorical” in chapter two of this volume. That academic purposes for reading are

shaped and constrained by community contexts likewise connects this threshold concept to

principle three in that chapter, “Reading is Socially Situated.”

4.2 Effective Academic Reading Includes Classifying Apparently Different Ideas and

Dividing Apparently Similar Ones2

An important aspect of the higher order thinking that goes on while academics read their

disciplinary texts is classifying and dividing phenomena into categories. Reading for research

often involves noticing similarities between seemingly unlike or unrelated things as well as

recognizing subtle differences between things that initially appear to be the same. Finely

distinguished classification and division are often the first steps in analyzing and synthesizing

ideas. For example, in chapter one, I combed through many research texts, extracting stories of

faculty and student reading difficulty to identify aspects of writing study’s relationship with its

reading practices. Calling the snippets pulled from these texts “stories” is itself an act of

classification implying that the snippets possessed some related set of characteristics and

messages. These “stories” served very different rhetorical purposes in their original documents.

While examining them side-by-side, however, I began to notice their similarities in pointing out

potential problems with how reading gets done in academic settings. Only later, when I needed

to analyze and explain those similarities in greater detail, did their categorical name—reading

difficulties—get written down. Thus, classifying and dividing ideas happens during writing, to

be sure, but some amount of noticing, interpreting, and thinking about categories of things also

happens when readers read.

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The importance of the activities of classification and division to rhetorical work date back

at least to antiquity. Plato, writing in The Phaedrus, has his character Socrates explain both the

need for wise and just practitioners of language to understand distinctions between types of

things and the difficulty of classifying certain kinds of things whose characteristics are unclear or

contested:

[Socrates] Everyone is aware that about some things we are agreed, whereas about other

things we differ.

[Phaedrus] I think that I understand you; but will you explain yourself?

[Socrates] When any one speaks of iron and silver, is not the same thing present in the

minds of all?

[Phaedrus] Certainly.

[Socrates] But when any one speaks of justice and goodness we part company and are at

odds with one another and with ourselves?

[Phaedrus] Precisely.

[Socrates] Then in some things we agree, but not in others?

[Phaedrus] That is true.

[Socrates] In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has rhetoric the

greater power?

[Phaedrus] Clearly, in the uncertain class.

[Socrates] Then the rhetorician ought to make a regular division, and acquire a distinct

notion of both classes, as well of that in which the many err, as of that in which they do

not err?

[Phaedrus] He who made such a distinction would have an excellent principle.

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Ultimately, Plato’s Socrates says that “unless a man […] is able to divide all things into classes

and to comprehend them under single ideas he will never be a skillful rhetorician even within the

limits of human power.” After all, how can someone talk knowledgeably and ethically about

anything if that person doesn’t understand the thing itself or how it is similar or different to other

things? Clearly, though, some things are easier to divide, classify, and define than others. Things

that are tangible—like iron and silver—seem to be easier. Things that are abstractions—like

justice and goodness—are much more difficult because there are competing value systems

seeking to define them using different sets of criteria and characteristics. Academic work,

especially in the discipline of rhetoric and writing, is very often working with the latter type—the

“uncertain class”—of things. Moreover, academics in this discipline are very often engaged in

trying to understand distinctions between uncertain classes as they read.

Categories, it should be acknowledged, are always human constructs. The material

world—plants, animals, all physical objects—doesn’t categorize similarities and differences

between its things. Humans invent categories to make sense of the material world, and these

categories have no intrinsic relationship to it other than what humans perceive that relationship to

be. This caveat is important because it acknowledges the human fallibility, mutability, and

messiness of categories: they are not some unchanging, preexisting organizational scheme of the

universe, as Plato might have believed. Any name or category applied to a set of objects tends to

emphasize certain of their qualities and ignore others. The category “metals” may be applied to

both iron and silver and might emphasize their hardness, their ability to reflect light, and their

malleability, but the category “nutrient” might only apply to iron because of its value as a life-

sustaining substance, a characteristic not attributed to silver. Further, the boundaries around any

category tend to blur with enough scrutiny and can change over time and context. Is mercury a

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metal, for instance? It is often classified as one both in scientific communities and the public at

large, yet it doesn’t have all the qualities that might be stereotypically associated with metals.

Mercury reflects light like iron and silver, but it would be difficult to categorize its liquid nature

(at room temperature) as “hard” like other metals.

That “Effective Academic Reading Includes Classifying Apparently Different Ideas and

Dividing Apparently Similar Ones” can prove troublesome for learners for precisely the reason it

is difficult for people to agree on what is “just” and what is “good”: some things are more

difficult to classify, divide, and define than others—or are more contentious. While it might not

be difficult for learners to understand the concepts of classification and division in a general

sense, performing this mental activity in the context of an academic discipline is another matter.

For one, in academic contexts, it is often readers themselves who decide what is worth

classifying and dividing in a text. There is no pre-prepared list of things to categorize. For two,

deciding what is worth categorizing is a complex activity that not only depends upon what the

reader finds significant in a text, but also the purposes the reader has in reading the text as well

as the topics that other members of the discipline might find to be significant. For example, let’s

say I’m studying a group of assignments written for a first-year writing class and I take notice

that many of them have somehow worked references to llamas into their writings. Just noticing

the pattern of references probably wouldn’t be enough to lead to any research work thought to be

significant to the field. I would have to find a way to talk about—classify and divide—those

references in ways that the discipline thinks are important. Learning what things a discipline

thinks are important is also not an easy task since most of those things fall into the abstract class

that Plato’s Socrates identifies—things like the definition of “rhetoric,” “writing,” or “reading.”

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Other factors making this threshold concept difficult to internalize include the

interference of competing conceptions of reading. It may be difficult for some learners who have

internalized the notion that reading is only word decoding to accept that reading entails noticing,

comparing, and contrasting various phenomena that they read about. Furthermore, though

academics tacitly perform classification and division in their reading all the time, they often

don’t consciously recognize when they are doing it, and such tacitness makes it difficult for

existing members of their fields to discuss or model this activity for new members of the field.

Nevertheless, “Effective Academic Reading Includes Classifying Apparently Different

Ideas and Dividing Apparently Similar Ones” is an important threshold for learners to cross

because it transforms an aspect of the higher order thinking that learners perform as they read

texts. Learners who have crossed this threshold are more attuned to notice finer but significant

patterns and discrepancies within and across the texts that they read. Arguably, this noticing,

which leads to attempts to classify, divide, define—to understand—the patterns and

discrepancies encountered, is a crucial component of what David Bartholomae and Anthony

Petrosky have called “reading against the grain.” Reading against the grain is, in their words, “to

read critically, to turn back, for example, against [the author’s] project, to ask questions [readers]

believe might come as a surprise, to look for the limits of her vision, to provide alternate

readings of her examples, to find examples that challenge her argument, to engage her, in other

words, in dialogue” (11). Reading against the grain is one way—though not the only one—in

which academics put the texts that they read in service to their own purposes for reading.

Learners who have crossed this threshold tend not forget their sensitivity to the kind of noticing

implied by this threshold concept. In fact, it is not uncommon for readers’ noticing skills to spill

over into reading non-academic texts as well. On several occasions, for example, re-readings of

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novels I once enjoyed before entering academic life suddenly revealed problematic—sometimes

racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic—representations of people and events, representations

I could only name after mentally noticing, classifying, and dividing details encountered in the

text.

Classification and division of things is an integral component of rhetorical and

communicative acts, and for this reason, “Effective Academic Reading Includes Classifying

Apparently Different Ideas and Dividing Apparently Similar Ones” is a threshold concept

connected to any other that emphasizes the rhetorical nature of language. These connections

include principle five, “Reading Is Rhetorical,” in chapter five of this volume as well as

threshold concept 1.0, “Writing Is a Social and Rhetorical Activity,” in Naming What We Know.

4.3 Learning to Read a Discipline Holds Potential to Liberate and Oppress1

To the extent students entering academic disciplines must learn to read differently from

how they have been accustomed—according to the set of shared beliefs and practices of that

disciplinary group—in order to gain full membership into that discipline, this learning holds

potential to liberate and oppress. Kate Vieira et al., in arguing that “Literacy Is a Sociohistoric

Phenomenon with the Potential to Liberate and Oppress,” provide the grounding upon which this

threshold concept is based. They explain: “Whether we are cognizant of it or not, when we

intervene in people’s literacy development as educators, administrators, researchers and writers,

we are also intervening in history, aligning ourselves with particular ideologies of literacy and

distancing ourselves from others” (36). Acquiring the literacy practices of any group—whether

for reading or writing—is part of acquiring that group’s “identity kit,” and these identities are

always rooted in particular ways of seeing the world (Gee 124). Learning to read effectively in

academic contexts involves immersion into and internalization of at least some of the ways of

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thinking of that academic group. Membership is unlikely to be granted to learners if they can’t or

won’t do this. Taking on the practices and ways of thinking of that group very often means for

the learner giving up or transforming something about themselves that already exists. Such

changes can be insightful and liberating for the learner if they result in expanded access to social

and material capital, greater equity, and deeper understandings of the phenomena that members

of a field teach and research. However, disciplinary practices enacted through reading can also

normalize viewpoints of dominant groups while excluding others, and their internalization can

alienate learners from their loved ones and community members who think and act in ways very

different from academic disciplines. Therefore, learning to read a discipline always holds the

potential to oppress as well.

This is not to say that learners don’t hold some power to dissent and diverge—to reshape

their academic communities, their practices, and their beliefs as they enter them. They do, but

this power is uneven and subject to very real constraints. Cultural practices are often inextricably

tied to power structures. Realistic, meaningful change takes great collective effort over time that

can come up against resistance from entrenched members of the community. Those already

enjoying membership in the cultural group are usually better positioned within its power

structures to effect change, but having acculturated to the group’s ideologies and practices, they

can be least motivated to seek change.

The potential and potential magnitude of oppression increases the further away a learner

is socio-culturally situated from positions of privilege. The American institution of the university

is historically descended from European universities founded in the Middle Ages. These

universities have been populated and administrated for much of their existence largely by white

males with the financial resources to afford a long and costly education. This history implies that

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the language, practices, and ideologies of the institution have been historically aligned to and

embedded in this group. While many academics at today’s universities have worked hard to

evolve the institution to make space for the voices, cultures, perspectives, and languages of all

peoples, work towards equity is iterative and unending, and much of the institutional structures

and ideologies of dominant groups remain deeply entrenched.

Though the potential for disciplinary reading practices to be oppressive is greater for

those further distanced from privilege, because academic disciplines are not the primary or

natural community of anyone—i.e., no one is born into academia, and everyone must undergo at

least some transformations to enter it—some potential for oppression exists for all learners

regardless of their race, class, gender, or sexuality. If not necessarily always rising to the level of

oppression or liberation, it is certainly not uncommon for graduate students to at least harbor

ambivalent feelings about the literacy transformations that occur as part of completing their

graduate programs—feelings that something has been lost while something else has been gained.

This threshold concept can prove troublesome to learners because it contradicts how, as

Lauren Heap and Kate Vieira put it, “literacy is so often touted as an unconditional good” in

public discourse (37). It can be difficult to internalize that literacy is capable of causing harm:

the pursuit of learning is generally figured as ennobling and as a benefit for the access it grants to

material and social goods—money, jobs, cultural status. But literacy can be employed to deny

access; to shape public perceptions in hateful and destructive ways; to codify racism, sexism,

homophobia, and other forms of bigotry into law; and to close off ways of being to some, even as

it grants access and freedom to others. Heap and Vieira offer copious historical examples of how

literacy has been employed as a tool of oppression:

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People and institutions have taken up literacy to colonize the Americas (Mignolo); to promote

the interests of corporations above those of ordinary readers and writers (Brandt 2001; Graff

1991); to racially engineer social groups (Prendergast 2004); to reinforce global educational

inequities (Stornaiuolo and Leblanc 2016); to regulate the movement of people of color across

borders through immigration papers (Vieira 2016) and otherwise perpetuate immigrants’ “legal,

economic, and cultural exclusion” (Wan 2014, 35); as a stand-in for anti-African American

racism, thereby promoting white supremacy (Young 2009); and as a punishable offense,

particularly for enslaved African Americans who learned to write (Cornelius 1991).

It can be especially difficult for learners coming from positions of privilege to imagine how

literacy learning can hold potential to oppress. Privilege is a shield that keeps such learners from

having to recognize the experiences of others. Human beings tend to generalize about the world

based on their personal experiences, and learners who have experienced relatively little systemic

oppression and have had relatively little interaction with people unlike themselves can have great

difficulty imaging life experiences and perspectives that differ dramatically from their own.

“Learning to Read a Discipline Holds Potential to Liberate and Oppress” is a useful

threshold concept for learners to acquire because it transforms how they reflect on their journeys

of acquiring literacy as well as how they participate in others’ journeys. Learners having crossed

this threshold concept tend not forget that their process of enculturating to academia, including

learning the ways that their discipline reads, is always a double-edged sword: something has

been given, and something has been taken; some pathways have been opened, and others closed.

This critical awareness allows learners to question whether their disciplines’ ways of reading are

ethical and equitable for themselves and others. It allows learners to identify which practices and

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presumptions liberate and oppress whom, and it positions learners with the knowledge necessary

to begin to work to change those practices which are problematic.

This threshold concept, being an application of many of the principles espoused in Vieira

et al.’s band of threshold concepts in (Re)Considering What We Know, derives not only from that

band, but the host of critical and cultural theories upon which that work is based. In addition, this

threshold concept, in acknowledging how the potential for disciplinary reading to liberate and

oppress is tied to one’s sociocultural situatedness, holds connection to principle three, “Reading

Is Socially Situated,” in chapter two of this volume.

Chapter Summary

This chapter articulated a list of fourteen threshold concepts for graduate-level reading in

writing studies. These concepts focus on naming practices and presumptions of disciplinary

reading with which graduate students are likely to struggle. They do not comprise all possible

threshold concepts for reading, nor should they be interpreted as unchanging statements of

objective truth. Rather, they are contextual and contingent representations of what writing studies

claims to know about its disciplinary reading.

In the next and concluding chapter of this volume, discussion turns toward explaining

how the threshold concepts listed here might be applied in the classroom to promote graduate

reading within a broad framework for instruction, the “reading sandwich cycle.” Within this

framework, threshold concepts provide reflective heuristics for students to name and analyze

their reading difficulties.

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CHAPTER 5. PUTTING THRESHOLD CONCEPTS INTO PRACTICE: A FRAMEWORK

FOR TEACHING GRADUATE READING AND REFLECTIONS ON THE ROAD AHEAD

FOR INTEGRATING READING INTO WRITING STUDIES

“If we are teaching reading, we must give some examples of how it is done” (170).

—Robert Scholes, “The Transition to College Reading”

Chapter Overview

Preceding chapters have discussed writing studies’ relationship with reading, made the

case for sustained, explicit reading instruction at the graduate level, and named lists of threshold

concepts for disciplinary reading that might serve as useful tools in support of that instruction.

Together, these discussions have laid a foundation for consolidating much of what the field

already knows about reading.

This chapter focuses on applying that foundation of knowledge in the context of graduate

education. Specifically, it describes one configuration—one model—of graduate-level reading

instruction that positions threshold concepts as a heuristic through which students may identify

and reflect upon their reading difficulties. This model of reading instruction also integrates

students’ learning about difficulty through threshold concepts with additional strategies and

approaches for reading instruction drawn from writing studies and its sister field of education.

The model, which I call the “reading cycle sandwich,” imagines reading as a wholistic process

that “sandwiches” the reading of assigned course texts between focused pre- and posting-reading

activities that assist students in both preparing to read prior to doing so and in reflecting on what

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they have learned from their reading afterward. This “sandwich” is then repeated cyclically for

each reading assignment students undertake during a semester.

As something like an attached epilogue, the concluding portion of this chapter reflects

upon important implications of the project, the successes and limitations of what it has

accomplished, and directions for future research on reading in writing studies, at the graduate

level and beyond.

On the Need to Describe Pedagogical Practices in Scholarship

It is, to me, comfortingly familiar that our colleagues in K-12 education have often

conceived of reading and reading instruction as “processes” in much the same way as we in

composition have historically conceived of these things for writing. As an example of this

conceptualizing reading as process, one k-12 reading textbook advises its readers that “The

description of a reading process here will help you to become a better reader of all types of

materials. Remember this is one process, not the process. Reading is a personal process through

which you make meaning using your own experiences, knowledge, and abilities” (Burke, Klemp,

and Schwartz 38, emphasis in original). What is crucial to the value of this statement is the

acknowledgment that in providing a process for reading the authors are not prescribing the

process for reading as if there was only one way to objectively, truthfully read a text. Rather,

there is a nod here to the multiplicity and contextuality of learning to read and teaching someone

to read. Similarly, in describing a set of practices for teaching reading to graduate students in this

chapter, I am outlining a process—one possibility among probably infinite choices—and not the

process. Outlining such a process is intended to provide one concrete roadmap for assisting

graduate-level instructors (who may or may not have ever much thought about or attempted

teaching reading in their graduate classes before) in imagining what sustained, explicit,

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purposeful instruction could look like. It is a starting point supporting movement toward

widespread adoption and discussion of a range of sustained, explicit reading pedagogies at the

graduate level. It is also, I hope, a way of making the lives of graduate faculty who have not

taught reading before easier so that they don’t have to “reinvent the wheel” of reading instruction

prior to experimenting with it in their courses.

The set of qualifications just made are necessary because there is a history of

compositionists expressing hesitancy to describe specific teaching models alongside their

proposed pedagogical frameworks. As an example of this hesitancy, Ellen Carillo writes:

As I imagined this book, I found myself hesitant to include assignments that demonstrate

how I put into practice the mindful reading pedagogies I outline just above. I certainly did

not want to fall into the trap that Berthoff describes as “recipe swapping” wherein

instructors diminish the theoretical aspect of teaching by simply showing

decontextualized assignments and practices with each other. (Securing 130-31)

The broader set of fears that Carillo, Berthoff, and other conscientious scholars have intimated

seems to be not only that any proposed model for practice can become divorced over time from

its theoretical grounding and context, and thus become a debased “recipe” of arbitrary teaching

strategies, but also that the proliferation of such recipes can cause them to accrete into

prescriptive norms or “traditions” that push out diversity and innovation in instruction. I share

these concerns with Berthoff and Carillo. The discipline must constantly guard against

retrenchment of practice into dominant regimes of unquestioned authority, and the theory and

thinking behind pedagogical practice—the “why” of teaching—must not be lost in the doing of

teaching—the “what.” Where I disagree, though, is in the presumption that sharing specific,

concrete outlines of pedagogical models in practice necessarily or inevitably leads to their

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reduction to recipes. Nor do I believe that omitting descriptions of teaching models in research

will ultimately prevent retrenchment, atheoretical recipe swapping, or prescriptivism.

Rather, the choice to include a concrete pedagogical roadmap in this chapter—the

reading cycle sandwich—was motivated by what I consider to be a more immediate concern: if

writing studies is truly committed to the teaching of reading and writing and not just creating

knowledge about these subjects, if we in the discipline are dedicated to the idea that what we

know and learn ought to impact action in the world beyond the circles of the academy, then we

must have ways for communicating our ideas with one another and to those outside the field that

have a reasonable chance to achieve that action. To me, these “ways” require more than

providing abstract theoretical frameworks for teaching reading. I wonder, for example, how

many of writing studies’ pedagogical frameworks break through to writing instructors, especially

newly trained graduate students? How much are they internalized by teachers to the point of

significantly shaping the choices they make versus how many of these frameworks are

effectively “dead on arrival”? Being a new teacher of writing is a stressful and chaotic time,

often one in which the quest to decide what to do in the next course period is of far more

immediate importance to the instructor than asking why any specific practice might be used, or

which pedagogical goals and values that practice serves. How many theories for teaching reading

and writing might be discarded during this time, never to be seriously considered again because

they did not provide what the instructor needed—a clear roadmap for how to implement

instruction—when it was needed? Furthermore, few of us teachers are endowed with the

unbridled creativity and contextual foresight to invent effective teaching practice completely

from scratch. For the most part, we borrow, adopt, and adapt practices that we have seen or

heard—experienced—rather than having read about in an abstract sense. Instructors need tools,

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examples, blueprints and conditions to imagine a range of possible ways that their teaching

might progress. Holding to the kitchen metaphor invoked by Berthoff’s use of “recipes,” it may

be that most of us begin our teaching careers more like cooks than chefs, reproducing “short

order” teaching from existing recipes rather than innovating new dishes of instruction from raw

ingredients. And if this be so, then I would rather equip new instructors with well-theorized

recipes than have them turn to less reputable sources of direction while laboring in the

pedagogical kitchen on their own. For many of these instructors to seriously consider using

theoretically sound pedagogical frameworks in their classrooms, they must be accompanied by

descriptions—and demonstrations—showing how the frameworks might be implemented in

practice. In the words of Robert Scholes that form the epigraph of this chapter, “If we are

teaching reading, we must give some examples of how it is done” (170, emphasis added).

It is this concern for providing practical support for new teachers of reading and writing

that prompts Carillo to ultimately overcome her own hesitancy in describing practices informed

by her mindful reading framework. She writes:

Still, one of the most prevalent comments made by first-year writing instructors during

my interviews with them was that they longed for help, for support, as they imagined

how to better integrate attention to reading into their writing courses. […]

Because this book is intended to help reanimate composition’s interest in reading

pedagogies and offer support for these first-year instructors who are already integrating

attention to reading in their classes, I feel compelled to briefly share some of the ways I

have put into practice the mindful reading pedagogy I describe. (131)

I agree with Carillo that the need to support new teachers of writing in becoming effective and

mindful practitioners must ultimately overcome concerns against sharing teaching practices. I

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would add, though, that the sharing of practices doesn’t solely offer benefits to new instructors,

but to established ones as well—particularly those who may be teaching in content domains new

to them (like reading) or who are looking to compare, contrast, and hybridize existing practices

with new ones. If pedagogical theory “tells” through generalized abstraction what might be

taught and for what reasons, then narrating the specific course activities and assignments used to

implement such theory “shows” through examples how that theory might be put into practice.

Most learners learn better when examples are present than when they are absent—by being

shown rather than told

While the field should rightly continue to worry that the knowledge circulating within

it—theoretical, practical, or otherwise—not be left to calcify into prescriptivism, this is not to me

compelling enough reason to omit practical roadmaps for reading instruction. To me, the place to

prevent this calcification is to model dispositions toward teaching knowledge that the field

values in the everyday experiential activities of its membership. If we want established and new

instructors alike to question established teaching methods and to develop thoughtful rationales

for the methods they choose to implement, then this cultural activity needs to be reflected in the

lifeblood of our discipline. Such dispositions need to be modeled and encouraged throughout

graduate programs, and not just during teacher training. They need to be present in the ways

teachers of reading and writing talk to one another about pedagogy in the formal spaces of

conferences and scholarship and in the informal conversations we have with one another about

pedagogy. In many ways, the discipline is already supplying new teachers with recipes for

writing instruction as a matter of course—in the form of sample syllabi, assignment sheets, and

activity descriptions delivered in teacher training classes. These suggestions are probably

necessary to give new teachers of writing reasonable hope of survival given the minimal time

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program directors typically have to train them prior to their teaching debut. Some instructors

may be inclined to cling to any advice given to them like a life raft of prescriptivism, but I

believe there is much that could be done to help them reorient to any teaching advice they

encounter with inquisitiveness to uncover its theoretical precepts, with critical scrutiny to

question those precents, and with playful creativity to revise and innovate from them. In short,

the field’s concern should not be that recipes for teaching exist or are swapped—these things are

probably inevitable—but rather what its membership is empowered to do with these recipes once

they have them.

For all the reasons above, I believe it important to provide a detailed description of one

process by which threshold concepts might be integrated into explicit, sustained, graduate-level

reading pedagogy.

A Model for Graduate-Level Reading instruction: The Reading Cycle Sandwich

The process of instruction detailed in this section is perhaps better understood as both a

“sandwich” and a “cycle.” It is a sandwich in that out-of-class reading assignments are

“sandwiched” between purposeful pre-and post-reading activities in the classroom. The process

is cyclical because the sequence of pre-reading, reading, and post-reading activities is repeated

routinely for each weekly reading assignment. Thus, the “reading cycle sandwich.” In all three

stages, some activities place greater and lesser onus of instruction on students, others on

instructors. The goal of prereading activities is to prepare students for active, meaningful

engagement with the text to be read by defining the purposes for reading it and supplying

students with important context for the piece. The middle stage of the cycle sandwich not only

entails students reading the text, but also any procedures or tasks that the instructor assigns (a

reading journal or response, for example) or students invent (text marking or notation strategies)

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that support their active engagement in directed ways. Post-reading activities assist students in

consolidating and synthesizing what they have discovered through and offer opportunity to

reflect upon reading difficulties they have encountered. This cyclical process is imagined to be

“droppable” into existing graduate courses on nearly any disciplinary subject matter, allowing

the content of the course to be engaged in through thoughtfully orchestrated reading activities.

“Droppable,” though, doesn’t necessarily mean that the reading cycle sandwich can be

incorporated into curricula without significant changes: the activities about to be described take

up significant class time and may constitute in some cases a fundamental reorienting of the place

of discussions about readings. Rather, within this droppable cycle sandwich is space for

instructors to map and address the content around which their courses are themed.

The remainder of this section proceeds by first describing a few pedagogical tools that

figure heavily throughout the reading cycle sandwich—things like modeling, read-aloud

protocols, a reading journal assignment, and the place of threshold concepts among these

activities. It then moves to discussing activities that are helpful for instructors to scaffold into

their curricula at the beginning of a semester to prepare students for engaging in the reading

sandwich cycle. Next, it narrates each stage in the sequence of the cycle, describing the shape of

the activities taking place within. It concludes with discussion of the caveats and limitations of

using threshold concepts as a pedagogical tool.

Tools of the Reading Cycle Sandwich

Modeling of Reading Strategies

Modeling, as a term and as a practice, is ubiquitous to K-12 education, but is probably

less uniformly known to college-level instructors (though not necessarily less-used by them).

Modeling refers to a broad array of pedagogical techniques that teach new content, skills, or

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approaches to learning, through a combination of teacher demonstrations and guided practice

activities. A common phrase among K-12 educators for describing this sequence is “I do. We do.

You Do” with the “I” referring to the instructor and “you” referring to students. This sequence

has also been called “gradual release of responsibility” (GRR). Historically, the term “modeling”

has sometimes only been applied by scholars to the first stage in the GRR sequence—teacher

demonstrations—as it was P David Pearson and Margaret C. Gallagher when they coined the

GRR terminology in 1983. In the everyday parlance of many K-12 teachers, however, “gradual

release of responsibility,” “I do. We Do. You do.,” and “modeling” interchangeably refer to the

entire sequence. Pearson and Gallagher describe GRR as follows:

When the teacher is taking all or most of the responsibility for task completion, he is

“modeling” or demonstrating the desired application of some strategy. When the student

is taking all or most of that responsibility, “she is “practicing” or “applying” that strategy.

What comes in between these two extremes is the gradual release of responsibility from

teacher to student, or what Rosenshine might call “guided practice” The hope in the

model is that every student gets to the point where she is able to accept total

responsibility for the task […] But the model assumes she will need some guidance in

reaching that stage of independence and that it is precisely the teacher’s role to provide

such guidance. (337-338)

Generally, a modeling sequence begins with direct instruction: the teacher introduces the concept

or approach to provide necessary context and then demonstrates that concept or approach as an

example of what it looks like to be used in practice while students observe. Often this

demonstration is accompanied with oral explanation of what the instructor is doing and why they

are doing it. The next stage, the “We do,” is guided practice, a stage in which teacher and

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students collaborate to apply the concept or approach to further examples. The final stage, the

“You do,” is independent practice in which students are tasked with applying the new learning

on their own, usually with the instructor providing some form of feedback or evaluation of their

progress. Depending on the learning context, including the relative difficulty of the content to be

learned in relationship to students’ prior knowledge and experience, the stages of the modeling

sequence can be expanded—to more gradually relinquish instructor scaffolding in support of

struggling learners—or contracted—to push forward students who seem to have grasped what is

to be learned. Sometimes stages can be elided together or omitted. To spend more or less time in

any stage of the modeling sequence is a judgment call of the instructor based on the observed

progress of students and the importance of the content to course goals.

Modelling is nearly infinitely flexible, however. It need not always proceed sequentially

as described. On occasion, for instance, it may prove advantageous to start the learning process

in the guided practice stage, or to ask students to attempt a strategy independently to diagnose

their prior knowledge of it. Additionally, stages of the sequence can be iterative, repeated as

needed, and built upon. Sometimes, for example, instructors return to teacher demonstration and

guided practice if independent practice shows students are still struggling to grasp a concept.

Regardless of the particular instantiation modeling takes, its value as a pedagogical process lies

in its capacity to promote learning through demonstration, practice, and the mimicry of positive

examples—through showing and through doing rather than through telling or lecturing on a

subject—and by providing support until student progress demonstrates they no longer need it.

While the term “modelling” and the activities it describes may or may not reside in the

general teaching consciousness of most writing instructors—i.e.it may not be a tool of which

most of us are aware and consciously choose to use in our teaching—it is certainly a practice that

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already exists in most of our pedagogies. Any time instructors demonstrate something to

students—how to write or revise an example sentence for a particular effect, for instance—and

then ask students to apply what was demonstrated to their writings is at least a truncated form of

modeling. In fact, any time writing instructors ask students to examine example papers to

identify their rhetorical features, analyze those features, and apply or mimic those features in

their own writing, they are engaged in a form of modeling.

Even more than this, though, examining sample writings to identify and mimic rhetorical

features is a form of modeling that is least as embedded in reading as it is in writing and has, in

being descended from the classical sequence of imitatio, been a component of rhetorical

education since ancient times. Ellen Carillo has previously made this claim in writing that

“modeling has long been understood as a version of imitation, albeit one of the most flexible

variations” and “That instructors locate imitation or modeling within the context of rhetorical

reading is perhaps nothing new as imitation—imitatio—is a well-documented aspect of classical

rhetorical education” (Securing 39-40). Edward P.J. Corbett defines imitatio as “the rhetorical

notion of copying aping, simulating models” (243). During the sequence, learners would have

been presented with examples of “excellent” written orations that teachers and students would

read aloud together, discuss, analyze, and manipulate in various ways. Corbett adds that “the

motto of imitation was ‘observe and do likewise.’ Imitation asked the student to observe the

manner or pattern or form or means used by a model and then attempt to emulate that model”

(244). Even in this brief description of imitatio, similarities can be seen between that ancient

practice and more modern forms of modeling, such as GRR, particularly in that both include the

key components of demonstration and guided practice.

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Furthermore, Elizabeth Kalbfleisch has argued that “discussions of imitatio in writing and

literature scholarship tend to conflate imitatio and writing exercises, like the progymnasmata,

thus obscuring the explicit attention to reading instruction that imitatio offers” (40). She explains

further that “instruction in imitatio is oriented toward reading—for comprehension, for

argument, and for extracting linguistic tools of future language production” (41-42). In other

words, imitatio, in Kalbfleisch’s view, is reading rather than writing pedagogy and was intended

to provide students with the tools necessary to make sense of and use of texts rhetorical strategies

prior to producing their own writing that mimicked those strategies. Indeed, closer review of the

activities included in the imitatio sequence would seem to confirm the program’s emphasis on

cultivating the learner’s repertoire of strategies for comprehending and interpreting texts

alongside recognizing and manipulating their rhetorical features. Summaries of Quintilian’s

Institutio Oratoria (Christiansen 72-81, Corbett 243-246, Kalbfleisch 41) indicate that the

sequence included the following activities:

1. Lectio (reading) of a model text aloud by the instructor or an advanced student

2. Praelectio (analysis) of the model text, led by the instructor and designed to identify,

as Nancy Christiansen puts it, “not only the main ideas, but also the authorial

decisions, both macro and micro, pertaining to the principles the students are to learn

and apply (74)

3. Memorization of the model text to cultivate a repertoire of “thought patterns,

subjects, and procedures ready for extemporaneous use” (Christiansen 75)

4. Transformation of the model, a variety of increasingly complex writing activities

that involved students reproducing and manipulating model texts in various ways,

including:

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a. Transliteration of the text from one language to another

b. Translation of the text into a higher or lower register of the same language

c. Paraphrase of the text’s words into the student’s own

d. Metaphrase of the text’s genre from poetry to prose and vice versa

5. Recitation—public oral performance—of students’ transformed texts from memory

or read aloud.

6. Public Correction—evaluation/feedback—given to the student by instructor and

peers.

Within this elaborated list of activities, there is more specific evidence for the similarity of

instructional frameworks undergirding both GRR and imitatio: like GRR, the early activities of

imitatio—lectio and praelectio, especially—place the onus of responsibility for learning chiefly

on instructors while the later activities increasingly shift this onus to students, asking them to

perform gradually more complex tasks with the texts they read while instructors move into the

role of providing feedback. There are, of course, many differences between the ancient practice

of imitatio and modern instantiations of modeling/GRR, not the least of which include very

different presumptions about the power relations between students and instructors implied in

terms like “public correction” versus “feedback,” or GRR’s probably greater emphasis on the

middle stage of “guided practice” between instructor demonstrations and student independent

practice. The intent in comparing imitatio to GRR is not to suggest the wholesale resurrection of

that ancient practice nor that such a resurrection would be a good idea. Rather, the point here is

twofold: (1) that there is a long history of sustained explicit reading instruction in rhetorical

education, and (2) that there is a continuity of useful educational principles that have been

carried forth in time from imitatio to GRR/modeling that can meaningfully inform practices of

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reading instruction in graduate classrooms. Specifically, both GRR and imitatio suggest the value

of reading practices being demonstrated to and practiced by students, and they both suggest the

value of instructors carefully scaffolding the transition of responsibility for learning from

instructors to students.

Read-Aloud Protocols: A Vehicle for Modeling Reading Strategies

If modeling, though, is an important tool in the reading cycle sandwich proposed by this

project, several questions about it remain. Firstly, what form might that modeling take and what

might its activities look like? Secondly, what learning about reading, exactly, might be modeled

and when does it take place in the reading sandwich cycle? Finally, what role do the threshold

concepts this project has articulated play in that modeling?

In answer to the first of these questions, this project envisions that the object of modeling

be the very reading practices that established disciplinary members use to make sense of and

make use of disciplinary texts, including the difficulties they encounter while reading and how

they respond to them. Essentially, what instructors need to model as part of the reading cycle

sandwich is the very thinking they do when they read academic texts, and probably the kind of

thinking that is most useful to students to see is precisely the thinking that established academics

are least aware of: where they supply assumptions or reasoning from their experiential reservoirs

of having worked in the discipline to fill gaps in a text’s meaning; or how they employ various

strategies for working with a text, set and maintaining purposes for reading, switch among

meaning-making strategies, etc.

One form this modeling might take is to have instructors (and students, depending upon

the stage in the modeling process) read course texts aloud in class and to have them name and

talk about the strategies and thinking they use in-real time as they read. In practice, this

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communal reading and talking about reading looks something like a combination of lectio and

praelectio—public reading and commentary alternatingly side-by-side—although the reader’s

practices in reading a text would be at least as much of the subject of commentary as the

rhetorical features of the text itself. Also, the dispositions and relationships between instructors

and students are ideally animated far more by collaborative cooperation, playful inquisitiveness,

problem solving, and experience sharing than the unidirectional power dynamic of the master-

apprentice model of classical imitatio. The instructor’s goal in modeling is not to correct

students, but to share their wellspring of experience with academic reading as models of thought

patterns that students might learn from mimicking and iterating upon. In reading aloud,

instructors are also making their reading practices vulnerable and open to suggestions and

questions from their students Similarly, when students read aloud and talk about their thinking

while reading, they too are sharing their experiences alongside making their reading vulnerable.

These reading-aloud and commentary sessions, which have sometimes been called “read-

aloud protocols” (Nowacek and James, Sommers) are also closely related to the think-aloud

protocols employed in cognitive research on reading in studies like those conducted by Christina

Haas and Linda Flower (“Rhetorical Reading Strategies”) and Davida Charney (“A Study in

Rhetorical Reading”). In these studies, participants were given a text to read aloud and asked

also to speak aloud any thinking about that text they engaged in while reading it. The resulting

data streams were patchworks—snippets of the printed text read back frequently interspersed

with participant’s efforts to organize and interpret those snippets. Think-aloud protocols allowed

these researchers to gain deep insight into what these individuals actually do when they sit down

to read.

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Such think-aloud or read-aloud protocols have not only yielded useful research on how

members of academic disciplines read but have also already been employed in undergraduate

classrooms as tools for teaching reading offering a variety of benefits to students. Alice Horning,

for one, has suggested that “one way to help students understand the kind of reading expected of

them is to model it by reading aloud, showing students what they can and should be doing,”

adding that, “In reading aloud, teachers can illustrate how to analyze, synthesize, evaluate, and

apply ideas” (Writing and Reading 82). Similarly, Rebecca Nowacek and Heather James have

suggested that “a real-time read-aloud protocol might give students insight into how their

mentors choose and actually read articles” (309). In terms of classroom use, Theresa Tinkle and

her colleagues employed real-time instructor and student-collaborated read-alouds in the

recitation sections of their large literature survey courses to help teach practices for close

reading. Jeff Sommers has performed read-alouds of his own reading practices to help teach his

students “point-driven understanding” of their course texts. Expressing surprise by the frequent

stuttering, stopping, and starting that accompanied his efforts to model reading and thinking

about texts to his classes, Sommers shares “that letting students see his own struggles with

reading encourages them to feel greater confidence and eases the way for productive

interventions in the process” (298). Sommers’ experience suggests that an important benefit of

read-aloud protocols as a modeling strategy is that in laying bare the messiness, the vulnerability,

and the struggles of their own reading practices, instructors powerfully destigmatize and

acknowledge the commonness of reading difficulty to students. Dan Keller, himself inspired by

Sommers, employs instructor read-alouds in his composition classes, building into his oral

readings the asking and answering of questions designed to model meta-cognition and self-

monitoring strategies: “What is my understanding of this part of the text?” he might ask, and

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“what are important ideas in the context of this class?” (“A Framework” 48). In addition, Keller

writes: modeling a reading experience can give students a language for thinking about reading

and a sense of what we value when reading in college.” Keller’s last statement gestures to the

value of read-aloud protocols for demonstrating how members of the discipline think through

and about their discursively situated texts, supplying students with terminology to give name to

their thoughts as they read, and providing examples through which students might begin to

imagine mimicking this kind of thinking for themselves. Finally, John Majewski has played

taped sessions of his reading aloud to model how historians interpret, and struggle to interpret,

primary source documents (Adler-Kassner and Majewski 198). Thus, as pedagogical practice,

think-aloud protocols show much promise in validating student reading difficulties, modeling

metacognition, and visibly demonstrating examples of disciplinary thinking patterns.

In the reading sandwich cycle, though, read-aloud protocols are not solely activities

conducted by the instructor. Mapping read-aloud protocols onto the GRR sequence, they can

sometimes be teacher demonstrations—especially in the early weeks of the semester or during

pre-reading activities when instructors wish to model the use of a new strategy or technique—but

they are just as often guided practice. During such practice sessions, teachers and students work

together, alternating reading aloud and articulating their thinking through the text, perhaps while

applying a reading strategy (like thinking through a reading difficulty using threshold concepts)

previously demonstrated by the instructor. Teachers and students thus share the burden of

instructional responsibility. And, especially as the semester progresses, the burden of

responsibility is shifted even more in the direction of students, who can be tasked to lead these

sessions with each other while the instructor increasingly recedes into the background, offering

timely feedback, making observations, asking probing questions, or offering guidance as needed.

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The direction of instructional responsibility is thus always towards fostering student

independence and, to some extent, interdependence, in the sense that read-aloud protocols

encourage cooperation and collaboration among students in making meaning from texts.

While read-aloud protocols are a useful vehicle through which to scaffold reading

instruction, they also possess several limitations worth considering. One such limitation is that

reading texts aloud as a group and stopping to think about what has been read is most definitely

slow reading, and it can often involve students rereading portions of texts they have already been

expected to read in a first pass on their own. Instructors should not expect to plow through large

swathes of text in read-aloud sessions. The point of these sessions is for students to engage

experientially in various ways of thinking about and through texts and to practice these ways of

thinking for themselves in a structured environment. If this work has been done in a session, then

the goal of the activity has been met and the exact amount of text the group has worked through

is irrelevant. In scaffolding reading instruction in this way, the instructor is very much sacrificing

quantity of text read for quality of engagement with what is read.

Read-aloud protocols’ emphasis on quality of engagement with texts over quantity is very

much in keeping with the spirit of calls made by Dan Keller that first-year writing instructors

consider assigning less reading so that students have more time to reread and engage

meaningfully with a smaller group of texts. He writes:

What I want to offer in this essay is a framework for integrating reading into first-year

composition in a way that promotes clearer articulations of reading practices. First, I

argue for assigning fewer readings so that teachers and students can engage in rereading,

returning to texts to emphasize different purposes and strategies that also give students a

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more sustained experience with individual texts. Making this space for rereading provides

opportunities to articulate, model, and practice reading we expect in composition. (45)

Read-aloud protocols are one instructional activity through which the practices of reading

academically in a discipline may be modeled, and the kind of modeling Keller describes is just as

valuable at the graduate-level of instruction as it is in the first-year writing classroom. Thus, I

think that focusing on providing graduate students with longer, more meaningful reading

experiences that articulate and model specific practices (in the ways that read-aloud protocols

conceivably can) offer greater benefits in supporting students’ professional reading development

than asking them to engage briefly, quickly, or shallowly with a large quantity of texts.

A second limitation of read-aloud protocols, connected with the slow pace of reading

they encourage, is an issue of engagement: longer sessions of read-aloud protocols can cause

students’ attention to flag, especially if the class size is larger and students must wait longer

between their turns to participate in reading or discussion. Much surrounding this issue can be

managed through a combination of careful time management, articulating specific goals for the

session, and setting some guidelines that encourage participation from multiple students. In

leading a read-aloud protocol, I might cap a session at no more than half an hour, set a clock, and

be prepared to wrap up the activity when the clock goes off. I might also articulate my goals by

telling students what aspect of the text I’m looking for them to think about and respond to. I may

also place some restrictions about when I want students to respond. As an example of these

considerations in practice, my directions at the beginning of a read-aloud protocol session could

sound something like this:

Last class session, we talked about a reading strategy described in Carillo’s “A Writer’s

Guide to Mindful Reading”—the “Says/Does Approach”—and I showed you how I

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applied that strategy to a text we read for today. This session, I want to practice that

strategy a bit more, but focusing on how you all might apply it to the reading. So, here’s

what I’d like us to do. We’re going to reread a few paragraphs from the text. I want you

all take turns reading aloud—read just two sentences before passing to the next reader.

Hold your comments and thinking until the end of each paragraph. At that point, I want

us to focus on answering two questions: (1) What is the content of this paragraph—what

does it say? (2) What is the job of this paragraph in making the writer’s point—what does

it do? Keep track of other things from the text that interest you too. When we reach the

end of the allotted time (25 minutes), our goals will be to synthesize what we’ve

discovered about the text through this reading approach, what we’ve discovered about

ourselves as readers, and the benefits and drawbacks the strategy offers to us. From there,

we’ll transition into talking about the issues, interests, and concerns you all found with

the text while reading.

These example directions indicate a tightly focused reading activity that is bounded within a

definite timeframe and establishes parameters for student participation that are tied to the

explicitly stated goals of the activity. At the same time, there is also space for students to engage

with the readings through their own methods and terms. There are an infinite number of ways

instructors might structure read-aloud protocols, but their holding in mind these considerations

while planning and implementing such sessions can dramatically increase the likelihood of

generating productive conversations about reading.

Another consideration important to implementing read-aloud protocols in graduate

curricula is that, like nearly any other pedagogical technique, their benefit to students will

probably be limited unless they are used routinely and iteratively throughout the course of a

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semester and beyond. One-shot sessions of read-aloud protocols can be helpful in giving students

some experience with specific reading strategies or exploring particular aspects of academic

texts, but if the goal is to foster meta-cognition of a range of conventions of academic texts,

students’ difficulties encountered as they read, and an array of strategies for reading that address

those difficulties, then this metacognition will need to be fostered over time.

A final concern about read-aloud protocols, and modeling strategies more generally, is

the potential to engender resistance among students. While graduate students may not be unused

to reading aloud, they may find it uncomfortable, daunting, or foreign to narrate aloud their

thinking as they read in real time. This kind of thinking is by its nature messy and incomplete

because it requires the narration of thought even as those thoughts are nascently taking shape.

Academic writing values carefully formulated and nuanced arguments, and it may be hard for

some students to decouple themselves from believing that such fully formed thoughts should

define their in-process thinking about how they read as well. Resistance may also come from

other internalized prior conceptions of what these students believe reading in academic

disciplines ought to be—conceptions like the archetype of the solitary genius discussed in

chapter one of this volume. These concerns may prevent students from wanting to make their

reading practices vulnerable in the ways that the public performance of read-aloud protocols

entail. Furthermore, it takes time to become consciously aware of how one reads, let alone to

develop a vocabulary for speaking that consciousness publicly, so students may struggle simply

to describe how they are thinking about their reading in ways that are satisfying to them. Finally,

because reading aloud is a teaching technique most often associated with learning in the primary

grades, some learners may think the activity juvenile or beneath them.

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Instructors, though, have a number of tools for addressing potential student resistance to

read-aloud protocols. The first of these tools is the ability of instructors to powerfully model the

dispositions—the attitudes—they want students to take toward these activities, even as they use

read-aloud protocols to model strategies for reading and ways of thinking about a text. Especially

in the early days of a semester, instructors using read-aloud protocols to demonstrate their own

reading practices have opportunity to establish a tone of safe expression of reading

vulnerabilities and playful exploration of reading practices. They may set this tone by narrating

their difficulties with reading alongside their practices, by narrating these practices messily and

imperfectly as their in-process thinking takes place in real-time, and by acknowledging and

validating to students the messiness and difficulty inherent to the reading they have just

performed. This seems to be just the tone that Jeff Sommers has achieved in his undergraduate

classes in using read-aloud protocols (see above). When the authority figures, the “experts,” in

the room humble themselves and are willing to play with their reading in such a way, they

experientially imply that it is permissible, acceptable, normal, desirable for everyone else in the

room to do likewise. A second tool instructors have for dispelling potential resistance to read-

aloud protocols is to regularly and explicitly tell students the purposes behind modeling

activities. This statement of purpose can go a long way in reminding students that these activities

aren’t frivolous but rather relate to specific and important instructional goals for the course and

for students’ professional development. An example of a more generic version of such a

statement might read as follows:

In reading aloud, in thinking about reading out-loud, and in talking about that thinking,

we give name to, learn about, and practice the strategies at our disposal for making sense

of and making use of the academic texts we must read. We do this so that whenever we

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must read in academic contexts, we may do so more mindfully, purposefully, and

productively and with less struggle over the difficulties we will inevitably encounter.

A third tool available to the instructor, should students express concern that read-aloud protocols

are “too juvenile,” is to acknowledge to students that while read-aloud protocols are useful in a

variety of learning contexts, the kinds of thinking that are being modeled and practiced in using

them at the graduate-level are quite different from those modeled in primary grades.

Let us turn now to the second question posed at the outset of this section: What learning

about reading, exactly, might be modeled and when does it take place in the reading sandwich

cycle? Indeed, what kinds of thinking can instructors and students demonstrate and practice

through participating in read-aloud protocols? The short but not very illustrative answer to this

question is anything related to how members of the discipline make meaning from texts. A better

answer, though, might include any and all of the following:

Model-able Reading Strategies and Types of Thinking

1. How readers identify their purpose(s) for reading a text.

2. Where certain generic features of academic texts are often found (thesis, meta-discourse,

claims, supporting evidence, citation conventions, etc.); what functions these features

serve for the writer; how these features can help readers orient toward the piece; what

clues help readers to identify and locate them.

3. How readers survey texts prior to reading (e.g., scanning titles, headings, charts, reading

summaries or background commentary, etc.), and how these pre-reading activities can

assist readers.

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4. How and when readers make, evaluate, and revise predictions about a text’s content,

form, tone, purpose, or argument and thereby construct for themselves their

understanding of its main points.

5. When, how, and why readers “fill in gaps” in the text to bolster their understanding:

when and how they apply inferences drawn from their repertoire of prior experiences and

commonly held disciplinary beliefs to make interpretations about a text’s meaning.

6. Where, how, and why readers engage in translations and transliterations of a text’s

words—i.e., where/how/why they rearrange difficult or unusual syntactical structures or

rephrase portions of a text into language that makes sense to themselves but still attempts

to remain faithful to the perceived intentions of the writer.

7. Where, how, and why readers substitute the meanings of difficult or unfamiliar words

with synonyms or definitions and what sources they consult for making contextually

appropriate substitutions.

8. Any of the strategies for reading that Ellen Carillo describes in chapters one through three

of her textbook on mindful reading, A Writer’s Guide to Mindful Reading.

9. Where, how, and why readers analyze, synthesize, and evaluate portions of texts during

and after their reading.

10. How readers address difficulties encountered while reading the text or while performing

any of the above functions, including how readers identify and name their difficulties

with reading, how they inventory and select tools from their repertoire of reading

strategies, and how they ultimately resolve difficulties or no.

11. How they apply and reflect about their reading using threshold concepts to gain meta-

cognitive awareness of moments of text with which they struggle.

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It would likely benefit students to have modeled for them and to practice as many of these kinds

of thinking as can be mustered in the space of a semester—though addressing all of the items on

the list in that time, or even most of them, is probably unrealistic. Exactly which items might be

addressed and how many is a decision best left to individual instructors in consideration of their

teaching contexts, philosophies, and course goals. As for the corollary question—when does

modeling take place during the reading sandwich cycle? —the answer is during both pre- and

post-reading activities. Read-aloud modeling sessions are more likely to be teacher

demonstrations during the pre-reading phase of the sandwich and are more likely to take the

form of guided practice in the post-reading phase.

Regarding item eight on the above list, Ellen Carillo has already gathered together many

of the approaches to reading texts that circulate writing studies and offered them as a repertoire

of strategies taught under her “mindful reading” framework. This framework seeks to teach a

variety of approaches to reading while equipping students with the meta-cognition to monitor the

effectiveness of these approaches as they are used in real-time and with the agency to switch

among them as needed as they read. Many of these approaches to reading overlap and intersect

with other named items on the list above.

Though the reading sandwich cycle proposed by this project has been described as a

standalone set of strategies for reading instruction, it needn’t be. In fact, it is intended to integrate

with Carillo’s mindful reading framework. Regrettably, a thorough accounting of how this

integration may be achieved is beyond the scope of the current project. In short, however, the

reading sandwich cycle describes one vehicle for teaching various reading strategies suggested

by the mindful reading framework, and it shares with the mindful reading framework the goals of

fostering student metacognition of their reading practices.

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Threshold Concepts: Reflective Heuristics for Reading Difficulties

It comes now to the third question posed at the outset of the previous section: What role

do threshold concepts play in the modeling of the reading sandwich cycle? As might be inferred

from their inclusion at the end of the list above, threshold concepts are one of the ways of

thinking—one of the reading strategies—that read-aloud protocols can model to students. As a

reading strategy, threshold concepts serve a heuristic role in helping students to reflect upon and

give names to difficulties they might encounter as they read. Students read and learn about

threshold concepts in the very early days of a course employing the reading cycle sandwich, and

over time these threshold concepts become a reservoir of explanations for—a language to think

about and through—the difficulties they encounter. Like the other items on the above list, the use

of threshold concepts for reflecting on reading difficulties is first demonstrated by the instructor

and later practiced by students. In the version of the reading sandwich cycle that this project

envisions, the use of threshold concepts as heuristics for reflecting on reading difficulty receives

the most attention of any strategy. This is because it is believed that students must be able to

diagnose their reading difficulties if they are to be able to select other strategies to ameliorate

them.

The use of threshold concepts in the reading sandwich cycle emphasizes probing and

reflecting upon difficulties with reading as pathways to learning. This emphasis has been carried

forward from the work of Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue, who have conceived of “the

identification (description and naming) of difficulty as an important precursor to understanding,”

and these processes “as gateways rather than barriers to understanding” (The Elements xi).

Touting the benefits of reflecting on reading difficulties, they assert that “when difficulty is

presented in the positive terms suggested by this book, it becomes a point of departure for a long

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and satisfying journey of the mind. Students are able to discuss how much they already know.

They are able to acquire the confidence to explore new terrains, to take intellectual risks” (xxv).

When students are able to name, categorize, label that which they don’t understand, they gain

both a measure of agency over that difficulty by placing boundaries on it and a starting point on a

pathway for working through it.

One of the early road-blocks students are likely to experience on the road to naming

difficult moments in their reading is the struggle to develop a language—a lexicon, or a set of

propositions—through which to meaningfully describe those difficulties. While to some extent,

students must develop their own internally significant language for naming their difficulties, this

process can be greatly ameliorated by exposing students to threshold concepts for reading, which

represent accumulated observations about reading from past generations of travelers on the

disciplinary reading road. Imagine a student reading a recent article in College Composition and

Communication, or Kairos, or any other journal in the field. Said student plods through the

article as assigned by a course instructor, but they struggle to gain a sense of the point being

made or why that point might matter, and they can’t quite put a finger on why the point alludes

them. Sometime later, they come across the list of threshold concepts in chapter four of this

volume, and certain aspects of those threshold concepts resonate with their experience. Perhaps

concept 2.1, “Academics Create New Words and New Meanings for Existing Words,” sticks

especially strongly, and the student realizes that key terms from that journal article never quite

made sense, and now they have a hypothesis for understanding why. Maybe the student resolves

to reread that article with the newfound consideration in mind, aiming to examine more closely

the article’s key terms for their nuanced disciplinary meanings. Maybe they store the knowledge

for the next time they read. In either case, they have learned something from the discipline’s

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collective knowledge about reading to help them name and address a reading problem. Thus,

introducing and guiding students through a ready-made list of threshold concepts for reading

provides them with some of the language necessary for naming their difficulties so that they need

not invent it entirely from scratch.

An important implication of the scenario just presented is the assumption that students

will be formally introduced to threshold concepts for reading as part of the reading sandwich

cycle. This is a significant curricular addition being proposed, as it probably requires the

instructor to swap out a week of their course’s content readings in place of readings on threshold

concepts and to devote an early course session to their discussion. It should be noted that it is

entirely possible to employ the other elements of the reading sandwich cycle while omitting

threshold concepts entirely—to focus for instance, on read-aloud protocols and other activities

that model any of the other ten items from the above list. Employing the reading cycle sandwich

with this omission could even still offer benefits to students, but I think it would overlook two

important issues. The first is that reflecting on reading difficulties through the use of threshold

concepts serves as an important pathway to helping students in cultivating metacognition about

their personal and disciplinary reading practices. There are likely other approaches to doing

this—perhaps simply modeling a variety of reading strategies will suffice—but few other

frameworks approach metacognition so purposefully and so intimately focused on the experience

of the leaner. The second issue is that reflecting on difficulty through the heuristic of threshold

concepts gives graduate students things which I think many of them desire: explicit, meaningful

acknowledgement that academic reading is hard; opportunity to address moments of not

understanding and misunderstanding as part of the curriculum; a chance to reorient positively

and productively to difficulty and struggle. Pulling reflection on difficulties out of the reading

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cycle sandwich removes many such opportunities and I think makes the reading sandwich cycle

less responsive to learners.

Assuming instructors are willing to make the sacrifice of curricular reading space, I

recommend introducing students to threshold concepts (as well as the reading sandwich cycle)

early in the semester—ideally in the first two weeks. Perhaps the instructor may wish to

introduce the themes of the course’s content in the first and then the framework for reading and

discussing texts in the second. As assigned readings, I recommend a combination of readings that

attempt to define threshold concepts and those which present them. For definitional material, the

first chapter of Meyer and Land’s Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding is the primary

source, but excellent summaries and commentaries are offered in the first chapters of Naming

What We Know and this volume (see “Threshold Concepts as Tools for Graduate Reading

Instruction”) as well. As for lists of threshold concepts, Naming What We Know lists threshold

concepts for writing, but currently chapters two and four of this volume are the only lists of

disciplinary threshold concepts specifically dedicated to reading in writing studies. Discussions

of these assigned readings might focus on helping students to understand threshold concepts in a

general sense, orient them to how they will be used throughout the semester (see below), and

probe students’ initial impressions and discoveries about them.

Reflective Reading Journals

Once threshold concepts are introduced, reflective interactions with them can be

scaffolded into all stages of the reading sandwich cycle—pre-reading, reading, and post-reading.

In the version of the reading sandwich cycle presented here, though, all of these interactions

center abound a reading journal assignment that students keep throughout the semester. Students

make entries in this journal weekly while they are reading their assigned course texts outside of

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class. This reading journal assignment is an outgrowth of the journaling method I used to coin

novel threshold concepts for this project and is thus also descended from Salvatori and

Donahue’s “Triple-Entry Notebooks,” an informal assignment designed to help students

methodically reflect upon and give name to the difficulties with reading they experience (see

“Method Narrative 3,” chapter three, this volume). The sample assignment sheet below

illustrates the assignment as it could appear in a classroom:

Reading Difficulty/Threshold Concepts Journal

One of the goals of this course is to help you to cultivate a broader repertoire of mindful

and effective practices for reading disciplinary texts. One place where we can foster these

practices is where we experience difficulty. All good readers experience difficulty at

times—to varying degrees, for varying durations, for varying reasons—but we all

struggle to understand and use what we read at least sometimes. This journal will help

you to give names to your reading difficulties, a first step in learning something from

them.

Directions: Using the demonstration I performed in class as a guide to the process, for

each reading assignment this semester, choose one of the two following methods for

cataloguing and reflecting on your reading difficulties. You may reflect on as many

difficulties as you like or are useful to you. However, reflection is intense, time-

consuming work, so I’m only asking you to reflect on one difficulty per week.

Method 1: Graphic Organizer/Three Column Method

Complete your reflection by filling the requested information into a three-column table.

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1st Column: “Observations”: Record the moment(s) in the text where you

experienced difficulty—just a quote of the difficult part is usually enough here,

though you may want to summarize a longer passage.

2nd Column: “Reflections”: Record your hypotheses about what makes this

passage difficult for you, explain why you think these hypotheses are valid, and

discuss possible courses of action. Are there individual words for which you don’t

know the meaning? Which ones? What do you know about these words already?

What context clues/resources outside the text might be able to help you figure

them out? Is the sentence’s syntax causing you problems? Where does

understanding break down and why? How might you rewrite the passage to make

it more understandable? Do the authors seem to assume you’re in on knowing

something that you don’t? If so, what might that be? This is also the column to list

any tools or strategies you might employ for addressing your difficulty. There are

many more ways to label your difficulty than the suggestions provided here, so

feel free to use your own words or to seek inspiration in describing it from the

lists of threshold concepts we’ve discussed in class (Reading Our Writing

chapters two and four, Naming What We Know).

3rd Column: “Metacognitive Abstractions/Applications”: In this column, your

task is to connect what you’ve observed and reflected upon in your personal

difficulty to larger patterns of what you think it might mean to read in the field of

writing studies (no small task!). It’s very likely you’re not alone in struggling with

the kind of difficulty you’ve just described. In fact, in experiencing your

difficulty, you may have arrived at one of the very “thresholds” of the threshold

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concepts for reading we’ve been talking about in class. Probably the easiest way

to connect your experience to wider patterns of reading in the field is to select one

of the threshold concepts from the lists already available to you and explain how

your difficulty exemplifies it, extends it, or complicates it. If none of these

threshold concepts seems to fit your difficulty, though, you can always try writing

a novel “prospective” one from scratch or patching multiple existing ones

together like a Frankenstein(‘s monster)!

Method 2: Question-Driven Narrative

Complete your reflective entry by combining the content of the three columns above into

one continuous piece of prose. You’ll still be performing the same work as above, but

you can write it in a way that may feel more natural to your stream of consciousness. Try

to work sequentially in your narration through the content of the three columns. You can

also be guided in your response by attempting to answer the following three clusters of

questions, which boil down the essence of each column a bit more succinctly:

1. At what moment(s) am I having difficulty with the texts?

2. What seems to be causing that difficulty? How do I know this? How might I

go about/what tools do I have for addressing it?

3. What might be useful for me to know to better understand this passage and

others like it? What threshold concepts does this difficulty seem to exemplify,

extend, or complicate and how?

Please do make sure your response addresses each of the three parts. The valuable

reflective work is taking place mostly in parts two and three.

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The “triple-entries” of the reading journals refer to the tripartite or three-column

responses students are asked to produce. In the first part or column, students are asked to record

difficult moments encountered in texts—often, but not exclusively, quoted passages. In the

second, students write reflections on their observations. In this portion of the assignment,

students are attempting to isolate causes for their difficulties and to give them tentative names. Is

it particular words in the passage causing difficulty? Which ones? How so? Is something getting

lost in the passage’s syntax? At what point? Why? Could the author be assuming the reader

knows something to which the student is not yet privy? Students write down the causes of their

difficulty and explain why they think them to be so. In the third part/column, students attempt to

link their local difficulties encountered in the text to a larger, more abstract metacognitive

pattern—a broader principle or understanding of what may be expected from reading texts in an

academic discipline. It is at this point that threshold concepts step in to perform their reflective

functions. Because it can be a daunting task for students to “invent” a broader abstract principle

on the spot, let alone for them to parse what instructors mean when they make such a request,

threshold concepts, serving as meta-statements of what the discipline already knows and believes

about reading, can be substituted into this role by the student wholesale or piecemeal. Wholesale

or piecemeal are key words here, though, because students are explicitly given the choice to

apply threshold concepts to their reading difficulties ready-made or to tinker around with them—

to adapt and change them to better reflect the difficulty they are experiencing. They can even

choose to take on the challenge of inventing new prospective threshold concepts. Like the work

of Adler-Kassner and Wardle before it, this project does not claim to know, once-and-for-all, all

possible threshold concepts for reading in writing studies. Threshold concepts are by nature

tentative and contextual, and so the directions for the reading journal assignment encourage

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students to play with and invent threshold concepts for themselves. The list of established

threshold concepts is present as a tool for opening students to a range of ways of thinking about

their reading difficulties, ways that prior travelers on their literacy journeys may have found

useful.

The sample assignment sheet purposefully provides multiple options for formatting

student entries in their journals to accommodate some different ways that students may wish to

approach reflection. The first option more closely resembles Salvatori and Donahue’s original

journal format (minus integration with threshold concepts). The second more closely reflects

how I adapted Salvatori and Donahue’s assignment to perform the reflection necessary to create

novel threshold concepts (see chapter three, “Method Narrative 3,” for a description of this

process).

That there are multiple formatting options for the journal entries is a small reminder that

all of the activities of the reading sandwich cycle are intended to have multiple possible

instantiations and can be adapted to suit the needs of instructors and students in a variety of

contexts. As a slightly greater reminder of these principles, there is space within the reflective

reading journals for instructors to add a second task to the assignment that reflects their course’s

specific goals and content. The following is an example of a generic addendum to the assignment

sheet serving this function:

Part 2: Isolating a Moment of Interest

When you’ve finished reflecting on a difficult passage from the week’s reading, pick a

second passage from the text—one you feel you understand well and that interests you.

Record the moment in a quote, summarize its surrounding context, and discuss why it

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piqued your interest. Your response might address any of the following questions, or

questions of your own choosing:

1. How did the passage help you to see the piece’s argument or content?

2. Where do you stand in relation to any of the claims being made in the

passage? Why?

3. What questions does this passage raise for you?

4. What do you feel the writer has not considered in making the statement you

selected?

This second task can take any shape, but the example above asks students to explore passages

which they feel they have understood as a means to validate successes in their reading and as a

reminder that reading is not always a struggle.

One concern, though, instructors might have about this assignment is what to do with

students who claim not to have experienced any difficulties with their reading at all. Salvatori

and Donahue acknowledge this eventuality in describing their implementation of their version of

the reading journal:

Other students, especially those so-called “good” students who have been rewarded for

representing themselves as knowledgeable, may say they cannot find anything difficult in

what they are reading. And yet other students might be hesitant to identify what might be

difficult because they feel embarrassed, or ashamed, as if the identification of difficulty

were an indictment of their abilities. (The Elements xiv).

While it is the position of this project that all readers experience difficulty at least occasionally

and that graduate students are more likely to experience serious difficulties more frequently with

their disciplinary reading as they take their first steps towards acculturating into their academic

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communities, there is no guarantor that students will struggle with any particular text. I agree

with Salvatori and Donahue that “different readers do indeed name and take note of different

difficulties, because these readers possess different personal and academic backgrounds,

different repertoires, that make them notice as ‘unfamiliar’ different features of a text” (8). So

not all students will necessarily struggle. At the same time, however, as chapter one of this

project established and the words of Salvatori and Donahue just reiterated, students can harbor

powerful reasons to resist acknowledging difficulties with reading to others, and potentially to

themselves. If a student claims not to have experienced any difficulty with a text, how does an

instructor know that student is acting in earnest? Fortunately, it is not the instructor’s role in the

reading sandwich cycle to suss out whether students’ introspections are honest. Rather, their role

is to invite, model, and cultivate dispositions of openness, vulnerability, empathy, and playful

inquisitiveness in helping students to name, develop, and share their academic reading practices.

Students who claim not to have experienced difficulty for themselves can still be invited

to participate in cultivating these dispositions by being given a slightly modified version of the

reading journal assignment. In this version of the assignment, students go through the same three

reflective steps of difficulty analysis as everyone else while taking on a slightly different

perspective: that of talking to and giving advice to an imagined colleague with “different

personal and academic backgrounds, different repertoires,” for whom they imagine the text

might pose difficulty. Sample directions for this alternative version of the assignment might read

as follows:

If You Do Not Experience Difficulty

Imagine you are trying to assist a colleague who has come to you for help understanding

and making use of one of this week’s assigned reading—you might even sketch a

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fictitious persona to better imagine who you could be talking to. Pick a passage from the

text that you think this colleague might struggle with and then work through the three

steps of the reflection process using either of the two methods above. Your aim is to

model for that student the thinking processes you would use to identify and analyze their

difficulty, much like how I modeled my processes of difficulty analysis to the class.

This modified assignment again borrows from the wisdom of Salvatori and Donahue, who, as

part of their implementation assignments that analyze reading difficulty, task those claiming not

to have experienced difficulty with assisting those who have. They write: “In their role as

“teachers,” these students are asked not to provide answers or interpretations, but rather to give a

detailed description of the mental moves that might have enabled them to come up with those

answers, to construct those interpretations” (The Elements 11, emphasis in original). The student

or colleague being assisted in the alternate reading journal assignment is, in this instance,

fictitious, but Salvatori and Donahue’s advice also proves useful for follow-up in-class

discussions of students’ reading journals, wherein the colleagues would be real. In either case,

students performing the alternative version of the assignment are likely to find it more

challenging than the default, since they still have to perform the reflective work of articulating

their thinking about how they understand a passage of text, but they must also take on the

perspective of an imagined someone else, sketching in their minds what someone with different

experiences than themselves might find difficult about the passage. Added to these two tasks,

these students must also cultivate a language that effectively communicates their experiences of

making sense of a passage to this imagined someone else in a way that could be helpful.

This modified assignment equally engages students who genuinely experience no

difficulties reading the assigned texts and those who do but claim not to have. For the latter

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group, this assignment offers a degree of psychological distance from which they may more

safely probe the prospect of reading difficulties. For whatever reasons some students might hold

for resisting acknowledging personal reading difficulties, this alternative assignment can allow

them to approach such difficulty more gradually by letting them transfer that difficulty to an

imagined persona for a time. For the former group, the modified assignment presents opportunity

to extend learning goals beyond self-reflection and metacognition of personal reading difficulties

into the realms of teaching and empathy building. Teaching about how one understands a

passage of text is not only one of the most powerful forms of learning for the teacher, but also a

way of putting the knowledge individuals gain about how to read in service to others. Arguably,

for writing studies to overcome the history of neglect reading and it’s teaching has received in

the field, it is not enough for its practitioners just to know their own habits, practices, and

patterns of thought when they read: we must learn how to communicate and teach these things to

others, how to empathize with our own and others’ struggles, and how to listen to and grow from

one another’s reading practices.

As a matter of strategic course design, however, I would recommend having this

alternative assignment prepared at the beginning of the semester, but not offering it as an option

to students until they themselves raise the issue of not encountering difficulty. The activities of

the reading sandwich cycle aim to promote dispositions of vulnerability and introspection of

personal difficulties with reading as well as curiosity and playfulness to explore it. Giving

students this alternative assignment right off the bat risks short-circuiting these aims somewhat

before they even attempt to probe their personal difficulties. It is important not to undercut the

message that everybody has difficulty with reading sometimes, that it’s okay to be honest in

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acknowledging those difficult moments, and that something creative and productive can arise

from those moments when they are explored rather than ignored.

There is yet one more alternative format to the reading journals to be suggested, although

instructors may likewise wish to defer introducing it until later into the semester. This alternative

is inspired by the work of Chris Anson, who advocates for, among other things, “lower-stakes

writing-to-read assignments” that are carefully aligned to instructional goals but are also

remediated into creative genres (31-32). As part of crafting such assignments, he suggests giving

students the opportunity to experience “playing with fictitious personae and contexts” (32). The

idea is that students might more meaningfully engage with texts if formative reading assignments

were less strait-laced and more creative in how they ask students to give evidence of the deep

critical thinking instructors want them to perform in their reading. Indeed, the influence of

Anson’s suggestions can be seen somewhat in the preceding alternative reading journal

assignment. As another example of Anson’s kind of creative low-stakes assignments, I suggest

the following alternative to the reading journal assignment:

Letter of Complaint or Praise to the Author

Write a letter to the author of one of the pieces you read this week evaluating how

effectively they communicated their messages to you, or alternatively, whoever you

identify as the target audience. If you’ve ever felt frustration that an author didn’t seem to

be communicating clearly to you—or gratitude that they did—now’s a chance to express

those emotions. The author’s never going to see your letter, so let it rip! You also need

not limit your emotions to anger and gratitude. While expressing your emotional

experience reading the text, however, remember also that your goal is to try to teach the

author something about how their work has been received by a reader, so your

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complaints, praises, emotions also need to illustrate a point that the author might be able

to understand. To do this teaching, you letter should include the following “moves”:

1. Description of at least one moment in the text that was difficult to understand or

could have been if the author hadn’t done something in their writing to make it

easy.

2. Explain what was difficult about the passage or could have been if the author

hadn’t made the particular choices they did. Was it the passage’s words, syntax,

assumptions made about the knowledge of the reader at issue? Something else

entirely? Feel free to consult the lists of threshold concepts we’ve discussed in

class for ideas on how to name the difficulty/avoided difficulty the text created. If

the author avoided causing you difficulty, explain the choices they made in their

writing that helped you to understand.

3. Connect the potential difficulty to a threshold concept, either from the list of those

we’ve read about or by inventing your own. Explain to the author how the choices

made in the text’s writing reflect bigger patterns in how the discipline reads. Help

them to see which patterns were necessary to employ to successfully read the

passage. If they didn’t do well at communicating to you, make suggestions for

how they could rewrite the passage to better fit your needs as a reader.

Like all preceding versions of the reading journal assignment, this one asks students to move

through the same three stages of reflection—albeit with a few twists—culminating in their

connecting an experienced difficulty (or what could have been one) to a threshold concept

naming a wider pattern of reading practices.

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This version of the assignment, though, offers a few further benefits. For one, it attempts

to engage students affectively with their emotions as a motivating force for writing about their

reading. I think that when reading is engaged with deeply, especially with the stakes for writing

that reading in academic contexts usually entail, it can’t help but at least sometimes be an

emotional experience because readers have invested a portion of themselves in what a writer has

to say. I, for example, frequently get angry and curse at texts whose meaning eludes me or whose

ideas I find repugnant. I tear up when texts are sad or when ideas are presented in movingly

eloquent ways. I get stressed when academic texts convincingly establish issues in the field

worthy of consideration but are hard to address. I am grateful when someone writes something

wise from which I can learn. There are few outlets in graduate curricula for expressing and

validating the emotions that attend to reading academic texts. This assignment provides one. For

two, this version of the activity gives students agency in their reading in ways slightly different

from the preceding versions. The fictitious context of the letter of complaint or praise allows

students to speak back directly to the authority figures behind the texts they are assigned to read.

Though this version of the assignment offers unique benefits, I suggest instructors hold

back giving it to students for a few weeks. Again, I think it important that students first be given

the message that acknowledging and engaging with reading difficulty directly is not only

acceptable, but encouraged, and the creative distance that this version of the assignment affords

perhaps distracts from communicating that message. Also, this version assumes students have a

bit more familiarity with the kind of reflection spelled out more specifically in the other versions.

Even if the reading journal is the nexus point of activity integrating the reading sandwich

cycle’s modeling strategies to the reflective capabilities of threshold concepts, there are no less

important activities that surround the reading journal during the pre- and post-reading stages. As

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the very first version of the assignment described above suggests, the reading journal is most

effective if the instructor first demonstrates to the class how they would complete it by reading a

sample text and applying the three steps of the reflective process to their thinking as the class

observes. This initial demonstration is important not only to give students a model of how to

proceed with the kind of reflection and analysis the reading journal assignment invites, but also

to set the course’s tone of dispositions toward open vulnerability and playful creativity in

exploring one another’s reading practices and difficulties. In fact, it might be beneficial for

instructors to perform such demonstrations more than once, perhaps prior to a new night’s

reading assignment. They might focus on illustrating their thinking through different texts,

different types of difficulty, and different threshold concepts to illustrate a range of directions for

reflection throughout a semester.

Important work happens post-reading as well. Students’ reading journal responses

become the launchpad for discussion about texts. Class discussion focuses first on sharing

students’ experiences of difficulty that they wrote about in their journals and their workings

through those difficulties. It is also a space for students and instructors to ask questions, seek

assistance, compare experiences, and share strategies for addressing the difficulties they

encounter. This communal work—essentially a form of guided practice and synthesis of the

reflection performed in the reading journals—establishes where students are at in their

relationships with the assigned texts, provides opportunity for their experiences of reading to be

listened to, and builds a foundation of understanding from which the instructor can transition the

class to more direct discussion of texts’ content or themes as their course goals direct.

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Caveats and Limitations of Threshold Concepts as Teaching Tools

As useful as threshold concepts are as heuristic devices for promoting reflection about

students’ difficulties with reading, it is worth examining a couple issues that Adler-Kassner and

Wardle raise regarding using threshold concepts as teaching tools and how this project has

attempted to work through or around them.

Firstly, Adler-Kassner and Wardle caution against threshold concepts being used as a

formal assessment device to measure learning in the way that course outcomes have often come

to be in first-year writing classrooms. They enjoin that “threshold concepts should in no way be

used as a checklist for the development of curricula, for instance, or to check students’ learning

(Naming What We Know 8). Explaining further, they write that “threshold concepts are liminal,

and learning them happens over time at varied levels of understanding. They often cannot be

taught directly by explication but must be experienced and enacted over time with others before

they are fully understood” (8). Because learning outcomes measure learning at regular,

institutionally convenient, but arbitrary-for-the-student “end points,” it would be deeply

unethical and punitive to assess student’s acquisition of threshold concepts—which are learned

iteratively, messily, unpredictably—like learning outcomes. Heidi Estrem, though noting many

of the positive and useful aspects of outcomes statements, adds to concerns about their potential

conflation with threshold concepts:

Because they are assessable in some way beyond the context of the course, outcomes can

quite seamlessly become competencies, which can be used in turn to give college credit

for student learning beyond the course credit hour. In an era of significantly declining

funding, higher education in general and state institutions in particular face additional

pressures to certify student learning by other means than actual college classes. (92)

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In addition to concerns that threshold concepts become formalized, ossified assessment practices

over which compositionists quickly lose control to outside stakeholders, Estrem’s scenario raises

caution over reinforcing said stakeholders’ misperceptions that what is learned in writing studies’

classrooms is merely a set of discrete, decontextualized skills, a misperception that prevents

deeper understanding about writing and undermines the agency of our field as caretakers of

writing knowledge. Threshold concepts inhere the very real risk of being reduced to the “next

assessment trend” with all of the same problems of misuse associated with outcomes statements.

I like to think that the model for how threshold concepts are used in this project has

avoided the assessment trap Adler Kassner and Wardle describe fairly well. In the reading

sandwich cycle, threshold concepts are reflective devices that students use to think about and

through their difficulties with reading. Their interactions with threshold concepts in no way

constitute measurable pedagogical goals. In fact, there is purposefully no formal assessment of

students’ interactions with threshold concepts anywhere in the model. There is some argument

that informal assessment takes place throughout the model: instructors should be monitoring

their students’ interactions in class and their reading journal assignments for evidence of

engagement with threshold concepts. Instructors should likewise seek to catalyze students’

meaningful interactions with threshold concepts through the modeling activities that have been

previously described. However, they should harbor no expectations for what the results of

students’ meaningful engagement with threshold concepts might look like. Some students may

take to threshold concepts rapidly and quickly intuit their use as tools for naming how they think

about and do disciplinary reading. Others may struggle to understand individual threshold

concepts—or even the concept of threshold concepts—throughout the entire semester and

beyond. Either of these outcomes, or anything in between, is perfectly acceptable. Instruction

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with threshold concepts plants and nourishes seeds of learning that grow and bear fruit in the

students’ own seasons.

Secondly, Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s caution that threshold concepts resist being

“taught directly through explication” is cause for some concern (8). Do they mean to imply that

threshold concepts cannot be taught, or cannot be taught directly, or that direct instruction with

threshold concepts does not correlate to students learning them immediately, or something else

entirely? Given the context of this comment in a volume that seeks to name threshold concepts, I

don’t think their statement should be interpreted as a proscription against the explicit teaching of

threshold concepts or using them to inform curricula (though it could understandably be read that

way). In fact, Doug Downs and Liane Robertson advocate in the same volume precisely for

making “threshold concepts the declarative content” of a first-year writing course (105). Rather,

I interpret Adler-Kassner and Wardle as saying that explication—instructor provided explanation

of threshold concepts and their meaning—is not enough for students to learn them: they must be

experienced and worked through by students over time to become internalized statements that

hold any meaning. And I think this interpretation is consistent with the second half of Adler-

Kassner and Wardle’s own statement: “[threshold concepts] must be experienced and enacted

over time with others before they are fully understood” (8). While I think that explanation and

explication do hold some role in the process of learning threshold concepts—especially to

initially introduce them to students—I would agree that the bulk of learning about and through

threshold concepts happens through experience. In keeping with these considerations, the model

for reading instruction described in this chapter provides a variety of scaffolded, provocative,

experiential encounters between students and threshold concepts: through the instructor’s

demonstration of reflecting on reading difficulties, through students’ practicing of this kind of

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reflection on their own in their reading journals, and through discussion of these reflections in

class.

Tools in Motion: A Sequential Walkthrough of the Reading Cycle Sandwich

Discussion has so far focused on describing a number of the pedagogical tools used by

the reading cycle sandwich to teach reading at the graduate level, but even with these

descriptions, many instructors would likely find it difficult to envision how these tools work in

conjunction with each other throughout the cycle’s sequence of instruction. This section lessens

that difficulty by outlining what might happen in the initial weeks of a semester to prepare

students for the work of the reading cycle sandwich as well as the activities that take place

routinely in each phase of its instructional routine—pre-reading, reading, and post-reading.

The Start of the Semester: Preparing for the Reading Cycle Sandwich

The aims of the reading cycle sandwich’s activities taking place within the first two

weeks or so of a semester are (1) to communicate the course’s reading goals to students, (2)

acclimate students to the routines of the reading cycle sandwich, and (3) introduce threshold

concepts as a framework for reflection about students’ reading difficulties and practices.

Explicitly communicating the course’s goals to students regarding reading is crucial for

cultivating the dispositions of making reading vulnerable/open to public discussion and a subject

of playful inquisitiveness. Further, for the reading cycle sandwich’s modeling and reflective

activities to offer much benefit to students, they need to actively buy into the framework’s goals,

and being up front about those goals is the first step in seeking this buy-in. These goals might

include the following:

1. To become more aware of the ways we think when we read academic texts.

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2. To identify (give name to) and probe moments when understanding academic texts is

difficult so that we can gain agency over these difficulties and learn something new

about how we read.

3. To enlarge our (already considerable) repertoires of strategies and knowledge about

reading academic texts so that our reading is more purposeful, productive,

meaningful, and versatile.

Communicating the reading cycle sandwich’s goals doesn’t have to be a time-consuming

process. In fact, it’s probably better that they be explained only briefly and immediately followed

with an activity putting these goals into action—perhaps an initial modeling activity of a reading

strategy or introducing the reading journal assignment. Performing this one-two combo helps

show students that the course goals are in earnest and are aligned with instructional activities.

Acclimating students to the routines of the reading cycle sandwich is simply familiarizing

them with the kind of activities in which they will habitually participate throughout the semester.

Such acclimation can be fostered by calling explicit attention—through brief oral

metacommentary—to what the class is doing and why. As an example of this metacommentary,

here is what an instructor might say to introduce the first read-aloud protocol activity of the

semester:

I want to demonstrate an activity that is called a “read-aloud” session today. Basically,

I’m going to read from a text out loud while stopping periodically to talk about what and

how I’m thinking about the text. We’ll be doing several of these activities throughout the

semester. Sometimes I’ll lead one while you all observe me, sometimes we’ll do the

activity side-by-side, and sometimes you all will lead while I step back. Sometimes these

sessions will try to model a specific reading strategy or way of thinking, and sometimes

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they won’t. The point of these activities is to become more aware of the types of thinking

we engage in when we read academic texts and to expand our repertoire of reading

practices. I think this kind of work can be done more meaningfully when we experience

these strategies and ways of thinking for ourselves—either through using them or

watching each other use them—rather than only reading or talking about them. Expect

these activities to be messy—for me as much as for you. It’s not easy to talk about what’s

happening in our brains when we read. That’s okay. We’ll muddle through together and

see what we discover.

Oral metacommentary is a useful tool to guide students through course sessions—to overview its

activities and goals at the start of class, to transition between activities, and to summarize its

work at its conclusion. The length of such metacommentary, however, tends to shorten as

students become more familiar with regularized activities and the functions they serve.

Introducing threshold concepts as a reflective framework involves several activities that

have already been described in detail above. In summary, though, they include the following:

1. Assigning the suggested readings from this project, Naming What We Know, and/or

Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding (see “Reflective Reading Journals”

above) as background for working with threshold concepts.

2. Holding a post-reading conversation aimed at consolidating students’ developing

understanding of threshold concepts, learning their perspectives and thoughts about them,

and explaining how they will be used reflectively in the reading journal assignment.

3. The instructor’s modeling of the reflective reading journal assignment through a read-

aloud protocol.

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Threshold concepts and the reading journal assignment constitute important recursive

mechanisms for reflection, so steps two and three in this sequence of activities could likely take

the better part of a typical three-hour seminar session to work through with the care and attention

they entail—perhaps an hour and a half or so. Additionally, because this introductory session

requires students to have read some background on threshold concepts prior to it, instructors can

introduce their course’s content and thematic goals in the first session while assigning the

suggested readings about threshold concepts in preparation for the second.

Pre-Reading: Frontloading to Scaffold Meaningful Interactions with Texts

Pre-reading activities take place in class prior to students’ reading assigned course texts.

Their purpose is to orient students to unfamiliar aspects of reading academic texts and to

introduce new strategies that will scaffold deeper, more directed, and more meaningful

interactions when students read outside of class. Activities that orient students to a text by

providing necessary background information or strategic guidance are often called front-loading

activities by K-12 teachers. Frontloading activities conducted in the pre-reading phase of the

reading cycle sandwich might include any or all of the following:

1. Providing students with summary of the text to be read.

2. Supplying contextual background information about the text’s author, its historical or

cultural situatedness, or the subject matter being discussed.

3. Communicating specific purposes for reading the night’s assignment.

4. Sharing rationale for why the text was selected to be read or how the text is significant to

the field.

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5. Demonstrating/modeling a new reading strategy (see list of “Model-able Reading

Strategies and Types of Thinking,” above) for students to practice when reading the text

on their own.

Summaries and contextual background information help to provide students some direction for

their reading by narrowing down what the piece’s main ideas, arguments, or questions might be.

Especially for readers very new to the discipline, establishing the main thrust of what a piece is

trying to communicate can be quite challenging and time consuming. Summaries and

background information provide indication of what to look for in the text that can facilitate

students engaging more deeply and strategically with its ideas.

Communicating specific purposes for the night’s reading assignments and sharing

rationale for a text’s selection likewise help students to orient to texts. Whether instructors state

their reasons for assigning a text or not, they usually have in mind at least a broad conception

that the text contains something important enough to the field of study to warrant its inclusion on

a reading list. Stating specific purposes for reading and rationale for text selection helps to

communicate to students what the instructor thinks is worth carrying away from the text,

reassures students that text selection for the course has been thoughtful and purposeful, and

provides students with a goal for their reading if they may otherwise have trouble inventing one

for themselves.

There is a growing chorus of scholars—within writing studies and without—calling for

instructors to explicitly communicate specific purposes when assigning course texts to their

students, and these calls often link the need for such communication to improving students’

motivation to read. Mary Lou Odom writes that “faculty must be able not only to articulate their

goals for student reading but also to make those goals clear to students” (268). Sociologist Linda

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B. Nilson, whose work has focused on the research and direction of higher education faculty

development programs, has made a similar call: “We must give our students a purpose for the

readings, things to look for, or a strategy for devising their own purpose. […] In our own

questions, we can direct our students’ attention to what we deem important in the readings, what

we want them to gain from them.” (215). Michael Bunn has pointed out the need to more

explicitly connect students’ purposes for reading texts to the writings that they ultimately

produce as a result of those readings, asserting that “explicitly teaching such [reading and

writing] connections can influence the extent to which students find course reading valuable and

can affect their motivation to complete assigned reading” (500). Finally, Nancy Morrow asserts:

As teachers we must decide why we want students to read a particular text, and we must

communicate that purpose explicitly. That our motives may be various—and that

different texts offer to students a different piece of the puzzle that is reading and

writing—is without doubt, and we should make those differences clear in the way we

present texts to students. (11)

While all of these scholars imagine undergraduate classrooms as the primary context for the

teaching of reading, the issues of motivation and direction for reading that undergraduates

experience and that these calls for explicitness seek to address do not mysteriously disappear

when students matriculate to graduate programs. All students benefit from knowing the reasons

why they have been asked to read and why those reasons matter.

While instructors may understandably wish for graduate students to develop their own

reasons for why an assigned text is important enough to be read (and, indeed, graduate students

do need to be able to establish their own purposes for reading to become self-sustaining members

of an academic discipline), this may not always be a reasonable or realistic expectation when

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asking students to read in course contexts. Though most graduate students are highly dedicated

to and interested in their fields of study, they don’t—by and large—get to pick the texts assigned

in their courses. Not all students will find all courses and assigned texts interesting or useful to

their research, teaching, or learning goals. Alternatively, many graduate students are still

developing their primary areas of interest and purposes for reading, even often well into Ph.D.

programs, and they could use a bit of direction in their reading to being to imagine possible

future interests. In situations like these where students’ motivation for reading a text may thus be

largely extrinsic—that is, they read it primarily because their instructor assigned it—learning

what the instructor values about a text can help students to gain appreciation for how it has

impacted members of the field, even if they don’t ultimately come to value the text for

themselves. Furthermore, the articulation of instructors’ purposes for having students read don’t

have to supplant or push out students’ purposes if they already have them or are developing

them: student purposes for reading can and should be explicitly encouraged alongside those of

the instructor. It is even possible to help model for students the thought processes behind

inventing purposes for reading—a strategy for helping students to invent their own purposes for

reading, as Nilson suggests.

Throughout the semester, instructors may also wish to use pre-reading sessions to model

various reading strategies or types of thinking that members of a discipline engage in to make

use of texts (again, see list of “Model-able Reading Strategies and Types of Thinking,” above).

To support students’ in trying out such strategies for themselves, it is helpful for instructors to

demonstrate the strategy/way of thinking prior to a reading assignment through a read-aloud

protocol or other modeling activity, incorporate practice with that strategy/way of thinking into a

nightly reading assignment, and then have students practice/discuss/reflect upon that strategy in a

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post-reading class session. These “bookends” placed around acts of reading make the process of

engaging with course texts more sustained and recursive, increasing the chances that learning

will be meaningful for the student long-term.

Apart from the last item on this list, most of these activities could be handled in a few

short minutes towards the end of a course session. Textual summary, contextual information, and

purposes for the night’s reading could be prepared on a handout ahead of time or spoken aloud in

a few brief statements. Modeling a reading strategy could take quite a bit longer—perhaps a

dedicated time period of twenty to thirty minutes. Not all of these frontloading activities need to

be performed for every reading assignment—especially the more time-consuming modeling

activities—but dedicating time for at least some frontloading for each assignment will likely be

greatly appreciated by students and will hopefully lead to more productive conversations when

they return to class to talk about their reading in the following sessions.

Because most courses assign readings nearly every week, pre-reading and post-reading

activities, it should be noted, will often take place within the same course session. An initial

portion of a course session may be devoted to post-reading activities seeking to extend and

consolidate students’ learning from the reading assignment due that week. A later portion may be

devoted to orienting students to new reading strategies and new texts that will be discussed the

following week.

Reading: Into the Woods of Practice

The middle stage of the reading sandwich cycle is most strongly associated with what

students do with their assigned texts outside of class. In this phase, students, equipped with their

prior repertoire of reading strategies and ways of thinking, as well as those introduced through

the modeling and frontloading activities of the course, set out to apply those strategies in making

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sense of and making use of their assigned readings without the presence of an instructor. Acts of

reading take place within all three phases of the framework, of course, but it is in this phase

where the bulk of it will happen. This phase inheres for students both the greatest agency and

greatest responsibility for learning. They choose which strategies to apply to their reading, when

and how to apply them, and how to respond to any difficulties they encounter—all as a form of

independent practice. Instructors maintain some agency to shape and guide this independent

practice: the reading journal assignment asking students to reflect on their difficulties through the

mechanism of threshold concepts is one example of this shaping influence that directs student

attention along certain paths and not others. Specific additional tasks can also be addended to or

substituted for this assignment. For the most part, though, this is a space where students are most

set loose to play with their reading strategies and practices in the ways they see fit.

Importantly, while this phase of the sandwich cycle is performed without the instructor

present, it is not necessarily always performed by students in isolation: students can form reading

groups to tackle the texts collectively, and the formation of reading groups is also something that

the instructor can encourage and model.

Post-Reading: Extending, Complicating, and Consolidating What Is Learned

In the post-reading stage, the aim of activity is to have students extend, complicate,

consolidate—synthesize—what they have learned through their experiences of reading outside of

class so that these learnings can permanently, positively, and productively impact the ways

students engage with texts in the future. Put another way, the goal is to transfer something

learned through a specific encounter with a text into something that can be applied in a broader

array of contexts for reading. Two types of in-class activities are crucial to fostering this kind of

transfer and synthesis: discussion and guided practice activities.

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The kinds of discussion most conducive to transfer and synthesis are much like the post-

reading discussions of students’ reflective reading journals described above. In fact, in many

course sessions, discussion of students’ reading journals will be the starting point and the bulk of

post-reading activity. It is extremely difficult to provide specific vision of what these post-

reading conversations might look like, however, because their shape and content is likely to vary

wildly from course to course, instructor to instructor, and session to session on account of many

contextual factors. Thus, I offer instead a few considerations and guidelines that might direct

instructors’ judgment of how best to scaffold their post-reading discussions.

One such consideration is that discussion should focus firstly on students’ experiences of

reading the text and in responding to their needs in working with it rather than on the text’s

content—on having students share, compare, and reflect on the reading strategies they tried and

the moments of difficulty, discovery, and success they encountered. Very often, discussion may

commence with students sharing summary of what they wrote about in their reading journals.

This sharing may lead to other students expressing affirming or alternative reactions to moments

of specific difficulty, or their asking questions, or their seeking advice on a strategy for

addressing difficulty, or their offering interpretation of a confusing moment in the text.

Discussion of the text’s content can and should be woven into these discussions, but even this

interweaving of textual content should—at least initially—strategically serve students’ needs in

making sense of and making use of the text. For example, it may be necessary as part of post-

reading discussion for the class to work together to reconstruct a communal interpretation of the

text’s main points or arguments if students are still having trouble understanding them.

Alternatively, discussion may include some group rhetorical analysis of the text, breaking down

portions of the text paragraph-by-paragraph to point out textual features and their functions in

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communicating meaning to an academic audience. Put another way, the focus of these

discussions is placed less directly on the text and what it says, and more on how students make

meaning from the text.

A second consideration in facilitating post-reading conversations is instructors’ need to

balance their role as experienced disciplinary readers who offer helpful expertise with their role

in fostering students as independent and interdependent disciplinary readers. The former role

positions instructors as stepping in to offer clarification, interpretation, and strategies in helping

students make sense of and make use of texts. The latter role positions instructors as stepping

back so students can do much of this work on their own. Both roles are important and balancing

between them is a constant judgment call of the instructor. The premise of the GRR/modeling

framework on which the reading cycle sandwich is built is that learning is most effective when

students can both observe good examples of the concept or task to be learned and practice these

concepts or tasks for themselves. Achieving a good balance probably requires us instructors to

take on more of the role with which we are less comfortable. For instructors who are like me and

all too eager to step in to offer guidance, we might serve our students better by waiting longer,

letting our students wrestle with the texts in conversation with each other, and weighing in with

the authoritativeness of experience only after they’ve had a chance to do so, if we need to weigh

in at all. For instructors who are reluctant to intervene in their students’ learning, they might

consider when their insight about a text or how they made sense of it offers something beneficial

which students cannot access on their own. These might be the moments where these instructors

wade into the conversation.

The line between post-reading discussions and guided-practice activities can be a thin

one. Guided practice could entail a separate, structured activity designed to introduce or give

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students further experience applying a reading strategy or way of thinking, but it could also be a

short informal moment intertwined in a post-reading conversation itself. For example, a student

sharing their reading journal assignment during post-reading discussion might walk through how

they identified a moment of difficulty in the text and ultimately connected it to a threshold

concept. This would be essentially a demonstration or a summary of a read-aloud protocol. This

walkthrough and the resulting discussion are essentially guided practice of a difficulty analysis

strategy.

Final Note on the Reading Sandwich Cycle

Implementing the reading sandwich cycle into graduate courses in writing studies

potentially asks a lot of instructors. Depending upon how many of the activities described above

ring as familiar or foreign to their existing pedagogies, faculty may be asked not only to devote a

significant amount of time to new instructional planning, but also to take new risks in how they

implement that instruction and perhaps even to fundamentally reconsider the role disciplinary

texts play in their courses. I am not unaware of the labor that the reading sandwich cycle could

place on those whose labor is already thinly stretched. The aim of this chapter has been to invite

graduate instructors to consider the place of reading in their classes. It has also been to lessen the

potential burden of pedagogical change by providing a roadmap and tools for those willing and

able to try them. Recall that the reading sandwich cycle is but one roadmap among many yet to

be proposed for integrating sustained, explicit reading instruction into graduate curricula. This

roadmap has been made as specific and detailed as possible to give a coherent vision of what

such instruction could look like and how it might be valuable to students. But everything about it

can be adapted, nothing is final or absolute. Thus, it is possible for instructors who cannot

commit to major changes in their pedagogies to adapt and adopt useful portions of the reading

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sandwich cycle while offering benefits in supporting students’ academic reading. I look forward

to seeing the adaptations that might come from it.

Epilogue: The Road Ahead for Reading in Writing Studies

Having now outlined a framework for sustained, explicit, graduate reading instruction

through description of the reading cycle sandwich, the remainder of this chapter takes a

significant turn outward in scope, reflecting upon the lessons learned from this project, the new

questions and concerns it has raised, and the directions future efforts to integrate reading more

fully into writing studies might take. Inevitably, a project of this scope inspires thinking about a

host of disciplinary implications branching from its main topic like limbs from a tree. Three such

branches of implications are explored below.

1. Writing Studies Knows More About Reading Than It Thinks.

As chapter one recounted, many scholars who study reading in writing studies have cited

reading’s history of neglect as a subject of inquiry and as a component of writing instruction

(see, “1. It Enacts and Extends Writing Studies’ Commitment to Teaching Reading”). Such a

history would suggest that there is a scarcity of knowledge about reading available to writing

studies’ practitioners, but the reality seems to be somewhat more complicated than that. Frankly,

a project like this one for which the methods of inquiry are based upon collecting and

synthesizing theories, arguments, advice, and pedagogical frameworks about reading could not

have been produced if such a body of knowledge about the topic did not already exist.

Composition, or at least a small but dedicated and growing segment of it, has produced more

knowledge about reading than many of its practitioners are aware of. Consider, for example, the

works of scholars frequently cited in this project, like Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue,

who began their work studying reading in the subject’s productive period of the 1980s and who

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continued to write and publish on it well into the 2000s when disciplinary interest in reading

waned. Consider, also, the works of scholars like Alice Horning, Ellen Carillo, Dan Keller,

Patrick Sullivan, and many others who continue to carry forward the torch of reading in writing

studies to the present day. Add to these scholars those who, like Louise Rosenblatt and James

Gee, have influenced writing studies’ knowledge about reading from other fields. The threshold

concepts compiled in chapters two and four of this project and the pedagogical suggestions

recounted earlier in this chapter could not have been produced without the underlying

contributions of all of these people. Threshold concepts, when aggregated in “official” published

lists like those produced in this volume or Naming What We Know, are ultimately amalgamations

of what a discipline already knows or believes about a topic, not just an individual. Wardle et al.

admit as much in writing that “troublesome learning thresholds can be hard and even feel

revolutionary to those coming to them and to the field for the first time. But they are not where

the cutting edge of the field’s internal work is happening” (25, emphasis in original). Throughout

this project, I frequently consulted the sprawling annotated bibliography I created as a research

aid for this project (the “quote farm” referred to in chapter three of this volume) and was

humbled by how few of its ideas newly originated from my own thinking.

For as much as writing studies knows about reading, there is a still larger wealth of

knowledge lying at our doorstep. Reading has been a crucial, sustained topic of inquiry in our

sister fields of education and educational psychology for many decades now, and it would

behoove us in writing studies to further explore these fields’ knowledge and integrate it with our

own insights about reading. Through borrowing concepts like schema theory, gradual release of

responsibility (GRR), “frontloading,” and bookending reading with pre- and post-reading

support, this project has approached only a tiny fraction of the knowledge available in these

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disciplines regarding reading and its teaching—largely what has stuck with me from my former

life as an integrated language arts teacher. Most of us compositionists, though, don’t have this

kind of background bridging the fields together, and it can be daunting to wade through the

literature of another discipline that has a different history, different belief systems, and different

ways of thinking than our own. Within this difficulty, however, there is also opportunity to forge

interdisciplinary relationships that enrich the understandings all fields concerned about human

literacy. To methodically integrate knowledge about reading, we will need to foster

collaborations with our colleagues in these fields, to listen to them as guides curating and

contextualizing what they have discovered as well as to offer them what we have learned in

return. Reading has already been an interdisciplinary subject of inquiry—one that composition

has participated in through work in literacy studies—but we need to redouble these participatory

efforts, and to me cross departmental collaboration within institutions is one useful venue for

such an endeavor.

That there is a pre-existing, citable body of knowledge about reading in writing studies is,

to me, a heartening development: it shows that reading has had a place in writing studies for

quite a long time. It also makes me wonder what us reading scholars might stand to gain in

drawing broader field-wide attention to reading if we update the narrative we use to frame our

research so as to recognize the history of that place. Instead of framing reading as something like

writing’s neglected stepsibling, for instance, what if we were to emphasize the importance of the

contributions of pioneering reading scholars in charting new territory in writing studies? What if

we were to entice new researchers and practitioners to the study and teaching of reading in

writing classrooms by offering them a place in continuing the ennobling endeavors they began?

What if we were to tout the exciting opportunities that still exist for creating knowledge in this

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subfield to further deepen and complicate our understanding about what reading is and does and

how it might be taught? What if we were to show program directors the power and importance of

teaching reading to enrich the lives of all students—graduate and undergraduate alike—by

developing and piloting models of instruction and inviting stakeholders into our classrooms to

see their effects? The ways we go about presenting the work we do, how we invite people into

the studying and teaching of reading, and the attitudes we harbor toward these things can play an

important role in furthering or hindering the cause of reading in writing studies. If we assertively,

enthusiastically, invitingly carve out a space for reading in writing studies, then I am hopeful for

the future of that cause, even as I recognize the sacrifices of labor that have brought the topic of

reading to its current level of recognition as well as those of the many labors left to come.

2. Fully Integrating Reading into Writing Studies Will Take the Work of Many Over Time.

But even if writing studies knows more about reading than it thinks, it is still a problem

that this knowledge has not circulated the discipline’s research and teaching practices to the point

of integrally and universally shaping them. Reading is in our discipline. Reading is with our

discipline. Reading, however, is not yet fully in who we are or what we do. That the teaching of

reading in undergraduate writing courses has in some cases been incorporated into writing

programs and in others taken up by individual instructors is a good starting point, but not enough

to fully represent reading’s essential role as a co-equal, literate practice that is inextricably linked

to writing. One need only cite the existence of numerous reading textbooks published in the field

as evidence that reading gets taught at least sometimes—Carillo’s A Writer’s Guide to Mindful

Reading, the multiple editions of John Bean et al.’s Reading Rhetorically, Salvatori and

Donahue’s The Element’s and Pleasures of Reading, and Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of

Reading, to name a few. The last one on this list was even used in an intermediate undergraduate

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writing course I took at The Ohio State University about two decades ago. However, the teaching

of reading in writing courses is far from consistent, purposeful, explicit, and universal practice.

At the times I went through TA training at Wright State University and Bowling Green State

University, for example, neither of these two programs made any mention of reading or its

teaching. There may have been discussion of “readings”—texts to be assigned to students to

read—but no discussion of “reading”—how to help students make sense of and move through

these texts. I suspect that few of us teaching writing as graduate students in these programs at the

time even considered that the teaching of reading might be an option. And, if the teaching of

reading at the undergraduate level is at best inconsistent, then the teaching of reading in graduate

education—as I have argued throughout the project—is at least a few steps behind that point.

Thus, the importance of teaching reading is not yet consistently reflected in the field’s activities.

Ultimately, altering the discipline to systemically pay attention to reading and reading instruction

at all levels, including the graduate level, is a complex, multifaceted endeavor that will require

the efforts of many researchers and practitioners over time.

Perhaps one of the keys to fostering attention to reading in our scholarship and teaching

is to inspire would-be contributors with a sense of some of the kinds of work that is needed to

fully integrate reading with writing studies as well as with a sense of how and why that work

matters. What follows, then, are some thoughts about future directions of research on reading in

writing studies and the importance of those directions.

Moving forward, we will need studies that explore the depth and nature of academic

reading—at the undergraduate, graduate, and faculty levels—from a variety of angles and using

as many different methods and methodologies as we can muster—empirical, theoretical, and

mixed. The discipline needs to know more about what happens when people read in academic

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contexts and about what types of strategies for reading seem to work well, under what

circumstances, and for what reasons. The threshold concepts named in this volume are an

attempt to name practices, patterns, and presumptions about academic reading that have left

traces in disciplinary scholarship as well those I have personally used, but this isn’t nearly

enough information to give satisfactory pictures of the totality of what happens when readers

read in our discipline, nor does it fully reflect the diversity of approaches to academic reading

that exist among members of our field. To paint these pictures, we will need carefully

constructed surveys of faculty and student perceptions of their disciplinary reading, case studies

detailing individual students’ reading practices, ethnographies studying reading practices in

relationship to the ecological sites of graduate programs and communities, and studies

employing think-aloud protocols of faculty and students’ online processing of academic texts.

We will also need to continue to probe theoretical research—and that of our allied fields,

especially education—to find new connections with, adaptions to, and solutions for the issues of

academic reading we encounter. Finally, writing studies needs more scholarship devoted to

applying what we learn about reading. It needs scholars to invent new frameworks for teaching

reading, and it needs those frameworks to include specific blueprints and examples of how they

may be implemented in the classroom so that they have a chance of meaningfully impacting

practice. It needs teacher research that proposes, tests, evaluates, and reports upon the impact of

various pedagogical strategies and frameworks used to support academic reading in the

classroom.

As explained in chapter three, this project has favored theoretical methods as a starting

point for investigating graduate-level academic reading practices, difficulties, and teaching

frameworks, but such methods have significant limitations in acquiring new “raw” data about

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how members of a discipline read and risk overgeneralizing few or singular narrative data points.

Obtaining accounts of reading practices directly from the “horses’ mouths” of students and

faculty will require a significant increase in studies employing empirical methods. But these

methods carry with them their own sets of limitations and concerns. In the interest of fostering

high-quality research studies, discussion turns now to some concerns that researchers

undertaking these methods might keep in mind as they design and implement their projects.

Most importantly, researchers conducting empirical studies of reading should be on guard

against overestimating the “truth-telling” capacity of these methods. There is cultural bias

towards trusting the results of empirical studies, especially studies employing numerical

methods, but data must always be interpreted by the researcher during their analysis and through

their reporting, and the kind of data being collected in empirical studies of how readers read will

be data for which knowledge is always uncertain or incomplete.

As an example of these concerns, there are a number of factors unique to the culture of

graduate programs that might make obtaining accurate and honest accounts of students’ reading

experiences—especially their difficulties—more challenging. In spite of efforts at reform,

graduate programs remain competitive spaces. Students compete to get in. Once there, they must

compete for scarce resources—most notably for funding in the form of assistantships and

fellowships, but also for teaching, research, and service opportunities necessary to improve their

hiring prospects, which, of course, are also highly competitive. Institutional program cultures

vary greatly in the extent to which they perpetuate this competitive force, just as individual

students vary greatly in the extent to which they internalize it. Still, the presence of such a force

in this environment can be a factor discouraging honest admission of intellectual difficulty,

especially about something that many in English studies still view (erroneously) to be so basic as

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reading. Interleaved with these forces of competitiveness are students’ intellectual insecurities,

often taking the form of “imposter syndrome,” or the internalized belief that the sufferer is

literally not smart enough to perform academic work but is faking such capability. Psychologists

Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, first coining the term in 1978, noted that experiencers “fear

that eventually some significant person will discover that they are indeed intellectual imposters”

(241). This fear of discovery can manifest in a variety of behaviors, including causing the

sufferer to go to great lengths to conceal from others any difficulty they may be experiencing in

performing the academic tasks of a graduate student. As an example of this behavior, Rachel

Herrmann, writing on imposter syndrome for The Chronicle of Higher Education, reflects on her

personal experiences as a graduate student: “I remember going home after one of my first

graduate seminars to Google ‘postcolonialism’ because I felt too stupid to admit that I didn’t

know what it was, and that, even after a week’s worth of readings on the topic, I couldn’t define

it.” Though Herrmann feels comfortable admitting her difficulty reading and understanding

postcolonialism after-the-fact, it is telling that she did not feel comfortable doing so as a graduate

student. It is worth considering how comfortable she would have been disclosing such

information to a researcher at that time, even anonymously. Empirical researchers must be

mindful, then, that the competitiveness of graduate culture and the prevalence of imposter

syndrome threaten to muddy the results of any empirical study that asks students to self-report

about their experiences of reading, influencing these students to underreport the severity and

frequency of reading difficulties.

Similarly, when proceeding with empirical methods that rely upon collecting graduate

students’ perceptions of their reading practices, researchers should also be careful not to assume

respondents always possess the reflective equipment necessary to deeply assess the strength of

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their reading. Graduate students, on the whole, are an intelligent lot, but introspectiveness

requires some additional dispositions: a stance of honest metacognitive self-exploration; the

ability to take a distanced perspective on one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions; and a willingness

to be vulnerable. Lack of these dispositions as well as lack of knowledge of how an academic

discipline operates can impede students’ efforts to assess themselves. If students are unaware that

their knowledge on a subject is incomplete or they are unwilling to recognize that possibility,

then they are less likely to have perceived themselves as having experienced difficulty with

something like reading. Such a phenomenon has already been documented among undergraduate

readers. Karen Manarin, conducting a survey of undergraduates in her institution’s first-year

writing course, found that nearly eighty percent of students reported themselves as being “good

at reading,” and a slightly higher percentage reported having a high degree of confidence in their

reading ability, in spite of widespread beliefs by faculty that students don’t know how to read

academic texts in the ways their teachers want them to (281). While it is certainly possible for

the faculty to be wrong in this case, I think it more likely that the students were neither aware

that their instructors were looking for them to perform academic reading using a different set of

skills and practices than other types of reading nor that the researchers were specifically

interested in hearing students’ perceptions about their academic reading. Lack of self-awareness

on the part of student respondents, lack of understanding that there are different types of reading,

and even lack of specificity in phrasing survey questions can skew data toward indicating that

there aren’t serious issues with undergraduate reading of academic texts. This is something that

our experience as instructors evaluating the written products of students’ reading tells us is likely

false. Researchers would do well to remain mindful that similar skewing remains a possibility

when studying graduate students as well.

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Other factors should caution researchers against likewise overestimating the validity of

empirical studies centering on faculty perceptions of their students’ reading. Because faculty

don’t see the vast majority of reading performed by graduate students, and because the

traditional curricular assessments and accountability measures (response papers/posts, class

discussions) employed in seminars typically only cover a tiny portion of the weekly reading load,

it is relatively easy for students to conceal reading difficulties by focusing their responses only

on facets of texts that they understand. Thus, it can be difficult for faculty to get a wholistic sense

of students’ capabilities to comprehend, analyze, and synthesize texts in the discipline, at least

until those capabilities are implicated in the larger writing projects—course papers, preliminary

exams, theses and dissertations—that depend on them. But even in many of these cases, the

open-endedness of topics usually allowed in such projects afford the unintended consequence of

further helping students to hide difficulties. Thus, faculty may simply not have a robust enough

body of information to make accurate judgments about their students’ reading.

To be clear, none of the above concerns are reasons against performing empirical studies

of graduate reading practices. Rather, they are concerns through which to design projects

mindfully, challenges to be managed, and considerations to contextualize findings. Writing

studies needs empirical studies of reading just as much as it needs theoretical studies, but

researchers must be conscious of the limitations of their methods, whichever ones they choose to

employ.

Opportunities to contribute toward integrating reading into writing studies are not limited

to scholars and researchers, however. Teachers are needed on the frontlines to test, implement,

invent, and adapt frameworks for teaching reading at both undergraduate and graduate levels,

and their voices need to be heard to share what they have learned, not only through the venues of

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scholarship, but also through participating in and leading faculty development initiatives. In my

view, modeling to teachers how to teach reading to students should play an important role in

these initiatives. Instructors are far more likely to leave a professional development seminar

willing to try something new in their teaching if they have first seen and experienced how it

might be done, thereby attaining a better idea not only of how to teach something, but also of

how that something might be helpful to their students.

Writing program directors are crucially needed in efforts to integrate reading into writing

studies as well. They, with the help of instructors, will be needed to design curricula that

incorporate explicit attention to reading into first-year writing programs, intermediate and

advanced writing programs, and graduate programs in ways that are in keeping with their local

institutions’ values, contexts, and commitments. When such revision of curricula require,

program directors will be needed to articulate the importance of these changes convincingly to

stakeholder groups in administration and elsewhere. Program directors are also needed to train

new teachers of writing in frameworks and strategies for teaching reading. The training of new

teachers of writing to implement the teaching of reading in their practices is perhaps the most

crucial work to be done in integrating reading into writing studies long-term. The field’s current

graduate students are its next generation of scholars and practitioners, and what they value will

not only shape the following decades of teaching and scholarship they produce, but how they, in

turn, shape the generations of scholars and teachers who follow them.

Finally, the full integration of reading into writing studies will require greater

representation of reading as a topic in our professional institutions, organizations, and

documents, an endeavor that is currently making some important gains but has further work to do

as well. For one, writing studies needs more venues for publishing works on reading. There are

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some, to be fair, but not enough. The WAC Clearinghouse is the home for many of the recent

book-length works published on reading in writing studies. There is also a smattering of journals,

like Pedagogy, that take up the subject of reading frequently and are more or less located in the

field, and there are multiple venues of publication related to the interdisciplinary field of literacy

studies— Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy and Reading Research Quarterly, for example

(both published in conjunction with the International Literacy Association)—but more spaces

specifically devoted to reading research are needed within our own discipline.

As for our professional organizations, recent developments bode well for reading gaining

increased recognition as a topic of importance. In March of 2021, the Conference on College

Composition and Communication (CCCC) released the “CCCC Position Statement on the Role

of Reading in College Writing Classrooms,” which “affirms the need to develop accessible and

effective reading pedagogies in college writing classrooms so that students can engage more

deeply in all of their courses and develop the reading abilities that will be essential to their

success in college, in their careers, and for their participation in a democratic society.” The

symbolic importance of this document in raising the status of reading in writing studies cannot

be overstated, but it, too, implicitly limits its scope to imagining the teaching of reading as taking

place largely in undergraduate composition courses. Work will be needed to revise or

supplement this document to articulate the role reading might play in graduate education. Such

work could likely be bolstered by the Conference’s “The Role of Reading in Composition

Studies Special Interest Group,” which serves as a gathering space for those interested in the

study and teaching of reading in composition. Work may also be needed to advance the status of

this special interest group to a full-fledged CCCC Standing Group.

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The magnitude of the work ahead to more fully integrate reading into writing studies can

feel intimidatingly large, but it is also exciting. Significant development along the pathways

described above will, at best, probably take decades to achieve. No one, however, is responsible

for all of this work or for seeing the completion of it. One of the exciting aspects of the work

involved in more fully integrating reading into writing studies is the opportunities it affords for

contributing to a meaningful cause greater than any individual researcher or practitioner. Helping

to foster the literacy of others—through the teaching of writing and reading—is among the most

ennobling pursuits that we humans can undertake. When undertaken with the disposition of

serving students, it entails nothing less than contributing to the agency and identity formation of

fellow human beings—helping people to author themselves. Writing studies, as I see it, is at a

crossroads, just on the verge of recognizing a new aspect of the roles it plays in human literacy

development. There is much to be done, but also much good to be done in doing it.

3. Reading’s Role in Graduate Education Must Continue to Grow and Change.

In acknowledging the magnitude of the work ahead to more fully integrate reading into

writing studies, I must also acknowledge the work left incomplete by this project. I set out in the

beginning pages of this volume to advocate for sustained explicit attention to reading at the

graduate level “in classes and elsewhere throughout graduate curricula,” but as is so often the

case in scholarship, my reach for this project exceeded my grasp. Proposing even a modest

framework for teaching reading in the graduate classroom swallowed much of the space and

attention I had hoped to spare for the integration of reading into other components of graduate

curricula. For reading to truly take hold in the field as a subject equal in weight to writing, it

must be something that we practitioners of writing studies are mindful of incorporating into

every aspect of what we ask our students to do in their educational programs. As a gesture

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toward the future directions of my own research, and as acknowledgement of the importance that

reading must play everywhere in our curricula, this last of the three reflections on this project

muses about what changes graduate programs might continue to make beyond activities within

courses to support their students in learning to read academic texts.

Before delving into these suggestions, however, I want to acknowledge the history of

graduate faculty working throughout time to revise programs in writing studies to both better

reflect the discipline’s changing values and to better respond to students’ learning needs. Much

of the history of these efforts is just as invisible to the field as the discipline’s reading practices,

and I am neither familiar enough with individual institutional efforts at curricular revision or

broad movements of reform to give them here the full credit they are do. I feel confident in

asserting, however, that the graduate programs of today are generally less draconian, more

thoughtfully designed with students in mind, and less elitist than those of the past. To move

forward with more fully integrating reading into writing studies, these histories of past curricular

changes and successes will also need to be uncovered.

Even after generations of curricular change and development, I also see, though, that

graduate curricula are still influenced by multiple problematic constructs that surround academic

work. I would like to address some of the components of these curricula that read to me as most

influenced by these constructs in ways that potentially harm students and contradict current

disciplinary values. Several of these problematic constructs have been discussed elsewhere in the

project, including the myth of the solitary genius (see, “The ‘Solitary Genius’ Is Alive and

Kicking,” chapter one, this volume). The project has also discussed what I believe to be some of

the potential consequences of these constructs: students and faculty developing imposter

syndrome (see above) and generally feeling intellectually insecure about their reading (see,

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“Argument the First: Reading Is a Struggle, Even for Graduate Students and Faculty,” chapter

one, this volume). There is yet another problematic phenomenon I have perhaps only gestured to

so far but that informs many of the concerns about graduate curricula I am about to describe as

well as the suggestions I propose for addressing them. This phenomenon is frequently called

“content coverage” or a “coverage model of instruction,” and it can be defined as a deeply

internalized sense of pressure or obligation that instructors feel to “cover” or deliver instruction

on a large number of topics—to march inexorably through the headings on their syllabi or

through every course outcome. Christina Petersen et al., in “The Tyranny of Content: ‘Content

Coverage’ as a Barrier to Evidence-Based Teaching Approaches and Ways to Overcome It,”

explain further:

The coverage metaphor (that teaching primarily entails presenting information on a series

of topics) is aligned with a historical description of what it means to be a teacher. It is a

powerful, lasting idea that can be difficult to surmount and even to frame as a

problematic issue. This is the “tyranny of content,” or the perception that covering

content must take precedence in undergraduate courses. We use the term “content” to

refer to all of the material—often in the form of facts—that students are responsible for

learning and mastery of which may be assessed. When we refer to “coverage,” we mean

all the mechanisms of presenting content to students through lectures, slides, readings,

videos, and so on. […] the drive to “cover content” presents a formidable barrier to

incorporating more learner-centered practices into undergraduate courses.

Petersen et al. explicitly direct their arguments to the context of undergraduate life-sciences

classrooms, but the “historical description of what it means to be an instructor” that they invoke

applies with equal validity to how every discipline has been taught in the past and at every level:

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there is the vision of the authoritative “expert” teacher—probably passed down since the

founding of universities in the Middle Ages—imparting knowledge to students who studiously,

gratefully, passively receive it. The sense of obligation that the coverage model of instruction

inspires can come from a belief that the job of an instructor is largely to “teach”—to present

information to students—but not necessarily to ensure or support students’ learning of what is

taught, and this perception can be reinforced by a variety of external factors (Petersen et al.).

I should clarify that I don’t see current instantiations of graduate curricula as totally

beholden to a coverage model, but rather that its historical influence still leaves its mark on

graduate instruction in problematic ways. The coverage model, for example, is most frequently

linked to teacher-centered forms of delivering instruction—like lecture—which students are then

positioned to passively receive. This highly critiqued form of instruction has neither significantly

characterized the teaching in graduate programs with which I have been involved nor seems to

define graduate programs more generally in the discipline at the present time. Teaching in these

graduate programs is usually more active and interactive, probably being most characterized by

discussion as the archetypal teaching method rather than lecture. Likewise, graduate instructors

rarely, if ever, assess their students for “mastery” of content in the way that Petersen et al.

describe.

The visions of teaching that the coverage model espouses may have been discredited by

decades of educational research, but the influence of the past is hard to shake off entirely. The

coverage model is more an orientation to—more an organizing priority for—teaching than any

particular instructional strategy, and I see evidence of this priority influencing curricular design,

especially in the ways the discipline conceives of texts functioning in their classrooms. Take, for

example, how graduate curricula are divided into courses largely according to the principle of

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topic (i.e., content) areas. At Bowling Green State University, the current core courses required

of students enrolled in its Ph.D. program in rhetoric and writing studies (all of which I have

taken) include ENG 6210: Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition as a Discipline, ENG 7220:

History of Rhetoric and Written Discourse, ENG 7230: Issues in Historical Rhetoric, ENG 7240:

Rhetoric and Written Discourse, ENG 7260: Research in Rhetoric & Writing, ENG 7280:

Computer Mediated Writing: Theory & Practice, ENG 7290: Publication in Rhetoric & Writing,

and special topics seminars. Most—but, importantly, not all—of these course titles indicate a

topic area or theme of disciplinary content—i.e., a body of texts—around which the course is

designed to study. At Bowling Green, for instance, ENG7220: History of Rhetoric and Written

Discourse explores the impact of various rhetoricians on the theory, teaching, and practice of

rhetoric throughout time. Graduate courses very often further divide course topics into subtopic

(content) areas that each define instructional activity and categorize reading lists for a period of

one or more weeks. History of Rhetoric and Written Discourse usually starts with several weeks

of study on the works of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians before moving chronologically

on through those of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, etc., and the titles of weekly themes listed

in the syllabus reflect these topics. Within courses like these that are organized around a

coverage model, assigned course texts and what they have to say or contribute to a field can be a

greater locus of instruction than supporting students in learning to make sense of and make use

of them.

A content-centered organizational schema for curricula implies that to prepare graduate

students successfully for professional work in academia means, among other things, to move

students through all of the topics in all of their courses, and this begins to pose problems for both

teachers and students when there is inevitably too much content and not enough time to address

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all of it. Because each topic area is far too large for any human to read and come to intimately

know, even within a lifetime, instructors must make extremely difficult decisions about what

topics and texts to cut from their course syllabi, decisions that are all the more painful because

they are still deeply motivated to try to address, to cover, as much content as possible in order to

feel like they have done their jobs effectively. Internalized pressure to cover material clearly lies

behind Nancy Morrow’s lament that “as a teacher, I have always found the selection of texts

peculiarly painful. To choose what to include in a literature or composition course is inevitably

to make decisions about what to exclude, and exclusion is nearly always painful” (453; see also,


one, this volume). Such pressure to touch on many texts can push out of curricula sustained in-

class attention to any particular text and instructors’ attempts to assess whether students are

actually coming to understand what they are being taught. Further, anxiety about the need to

address many texts is inevitably transported to students through the vehicle of heavy course

reading loads (because there was ultimately too much that was too important, in the instructor’s

estimation, to be cut) that frequently stretch and exceed the boundaries of reasonable time and

attention students have to devote to them. Thus, the coverage model also underscores Amy

Robillard’s anxiety that good reading in academic disciplines is equated with volume (again, see,


one, this volume). Anxieties like those caused by investment in content coverage models can

have real impacts on faculty and students’ mental health as well as their physical and material

well-being, but I don’t believe that such anxieties must be inherent to academic work.

I do not know the extent to which the discipline can decouple itself fully from the

influence of content coverage in curricular design, nor whether a complete decoupling would

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ultimately be desirable or beneficial to students. Students need to have some sense of the range

of topics that exist within an academic field, not only so they can construct what the field is and

does, but also so that they can construct a place for themselves within it. Likewise, students need

exposure to a range of topics to know what the possibilities for inquiry are. At the same time,

though, it is possible to imagine alternative organizational schemata for graduate curricula—ones

that mitigate the anxieties just described. Something important is left out of a coverage model,

and naming that something may be the key to imagining other ways to organize graduate

curricula. Content coverage implies that the key to professionalizing, the path to fully entering

the complex and nuanced discourse communities that are academic disciplines is primarily

through exposure to a range of their topics and texts. Few of us in writing studies, though, I hope,

would agree that mere proximity to a discipline’s writing is enough for graduate students to

professionalize. To professionalize in a discipline is also to learn how to think and do that

discipline, and most students need practice and guidance to acquire proficiency with the skills,

habits of mind, and tasks that the “doing” of academic jobs entail.

These considerations lead me to the first of my suggestions for revising graduate

curricula to incorporate explicit attention to reading beyond the individual course: what if

graduate core curricula were organized at least as much around students learning how to

effectively perform the activities comprising academic work as their learning about the topics of

inquiry that academics study? What if we were to reduce the number of courses that explicitly

center around topics in the field and increase the number that center around helping students

learn to do academic reading, writing, researching, and thinking? Graduate instructors cannot

expose students to, cannot cover, all potentially important topics to students as they

professionalize, nor all of the texts within those topics. Why cling to curricular models (and

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assigned reading loads, for that matter) that imply that instructors can? What if, for example,

writing studies implemented core courses devoted exclusively to developing students’

professional-level academic reading and writing (in separate courses if we could manage it, but

in a combined course if we couldn’t). These could be workshops in which students’ engagement

with disciplinary texts serves primarily as a tool to support their learning to read and write

professionally. These courses’ activities could consist of instructors modeling reading and

writing strategies, and students could engage in multiple forms of guided practice of these

strategies through their assignments. There could be focus on rhetorical analysis of example texts

written in various academic genres— a picking apart of their moves, conventions, and

components to help students understand the functions they serve—and then opportunities for

students to mimic and innovate on them in applying this knowledge to their own writing. These

courses’ goals would not be to explore or cover any particular subject areas, although content

would be woven into them in pursuit of developing students’ reading and writing capabilities.

Widespread adoption of such a course or courses into core graduate curricula—not as

electives—could do much not only to help more intimately integrate reading instruction with

writing studies, but also to finally answer the calls of Laura Micciche, Alisson Carr, and the

generations of scholars that preceded them, “for an explicit commitment to graduate-level

writing instruction that goes beyond incorporating drafts, peer reviews, and workshops into

seminars and entails more than extracurricular writing workshops to supplement course work”

(478).

The scale of curricular reform that the above suggestion implies is great—no doubt about

it—but writing studies may take some solace that the coverage model of instruction has not fully

defined our graduate curricula for some time. There are undoubtedly courses—or elements of

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them—within existing curricula that can serve as models for refocusing instruction on student

learning to “do academia.” Several graduate courses at Bowling Green balance attention to

students’ learning to perform disciplinary activities with content coverage. ENG 7260: Research

in Rhetoric & Writing, for example—taught at the time I took it by Dr. Lee Nickoson—did well

at balancing discussion of disciplinary research methods and methodologies and devoting time

for students to practice using these research methods for themselves. In balancing these things,

the course prioritized helping students learn how to do the discipline as much as learning what

the discipline has said. Courses like this one at Bowling Green and those that might yet be

identified at other institutions could be studied as examples for designing future courses that

privilege student learning over content.

Other suggestions for curricular revision that more fully incorporate reading into writing

studies’ courses also arise from a desire to reduce the influence of problematic constructs. An

important suggestion is that graduate instructors carefully manage—that is, limit—their assigned

reading loads to be manageable and sustainable for students. Quantifying what is a “reasonable”

or “manageable” reading load is tricky for oh so many reasons, but I think a helpful guiding

principle is not to assign more reading than the instructor can realistically work with students

through in the course session for which it is due. In my experience, that reasonable load amounts

to no more than three to four article-length pieces per-course, per-week, or the commensurate

number of book chapters. Translating this number into pages is important when dealing with

especially long pieces, and this works out to about eighty pages of academic reading per-course,

per-week. Perhaps instructors may believe that in assigning more reading than this to students, in

addition to covering content, they may be affording students more opportunities to discover texts

that become significant to their later work. Such discovery does happen, but less often than

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instructors might think. At some point, students’ thoughts about how many more texts they have

to get through in a week crowd out motivation for engaging deeply and presently in the reading

of the text in front of them. And if students end up reading a text without deeply engaging with

it—enough to learn something, spark ideas, or take something away from it—they probably

won’t even remember it well enough to recall the text if it should prove useful for a later purpose

or project.

Something that may help graduate instructors to cull their reading lists to a manageable

size is to reverse their thinking about the text selection process. Rather than starting with a broad

topic area and “cutting” from it texts that seem less essential, instructors might consider starting

with their course goals and “drafting” texts that serve specific, articulable purposes in helping

students to reach those goals. Extending this drafting metaphor a bit further, drafting in a sports

context is a strategic process: there are only limited spots on the team, the team starts empty, and

no one’s spot on it is secured unless they offer something special in furthering the team’s

strategy. Similarly, when selecting course texts, there should be a high bar for admission. If the

instructor cannot figure out what they want specifically for students to take away from the text or

to be able to do with it, then it should never be drafted into the course plan to begin with.

Further, reasoning for including a text on the syllabus doesn’t necessarily have to revolve around

how integrally the piece has impacted the subject area in the discipline—some integral pieces

always get left out anyway. Considerations of student access and engagement should play a role

in text selection as well. A less influential text may explain a concept important to the

instructor’s goals in a way that is far more accessible to students given their current repertoires of

reading strategies. Instructors can always select that less-influential text and tell students about

where its ideas come from. Whatever the reasons instructors come up with for including any text

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on their syllabi, they should also remember to communicate these reasons to students before

asking them to read the texts.

If instructors’ desire to cover textual content in courses comes from a benevolent place—

of wanting, for instance, to give students access to as wide as possible of an array of texts that

could be important to their future work—then there are other ways of achieving these purposes

than assigning larger loads of texts to be read verbatim. Instructors could institute a “tiered”

system of reading assignments, in which they assign students to perform a whole-text, verbatim

reading of a few (the most “essential” tier of texts), perform a “skim” of a few more (a less

essential tier), and just be aware of the existence—the titles of several others. What “skimming”

entails in the context of any given course, though, is something that I think instructors should

explicitly define and communicate to students. Perhaps it is even something they might model.

What happens when someone skims a text is just as ambiguous and multifaced as what happens

when someone reads it. Skimming for one person could mean scanning titles and reading an

introduction. For another it could mean reading the first and last sentence of a paragraph.

Defining skimming for students is important to establish for them the boundaries of labor and

engagement that keep the reading load manageable. Assigning several or many texts to be

skimmed may also require reductions in the number of texts to be read verbatim for this same

reason. Finally, when assigning students to skim a text, it is still important to communicate to

them the reasons they are being asked to do it and what the instructor is hoping for them to gain

from having done so.

Other options for increasing students’ access to more disciplinary texts include providing

students with curated bibliographic lists of important texts to a subfield. These can be instructor-

prepared or bibliographic essays published in scholarship. Such bibliographies can optionally

330

have attached annotations, or the instructor can provide “book talks”—short summaries and

explanations of the significance—of especially important texts. Instructors can also model for

students how they use bibliographies in books and articles to locate potential sources for further

inquiry and communities of scholars that share their interests. Finally, they can also show

students the online bibliographic tools available to the field—like Compile (available from the

WAC Clearinghouse website), and Rebecca Moore Howard’s bibliographies (available since

2019 on Google Drive). Many of these strategies are already in common use among graduate

instructors. Their use reflects the reality that instructors cannot personally introduce students to

all significant texts and that they need to learn how to leverage the network of references

embedded in disciplinary scholarship to be able to find important texts for themselves.

As touched on in chapter four, another important place I see problematic perceptions

about academic work—including the aforementioned coverage model—impacting students and

the way the discipline relates to academic reading is in the preliminary/comprehensive exam

process taking place prior to Ph.D. students starting their dissertations (see, “1.0 There Are Many

Types of Reading: Types Vary According to the Reader’s Context for Reading,” chapter four,

this volume). These exams vary considerably from institution to institution and often ask

students to perform multiple tasks or to produce multiple documents evidencing different aspects

of their learning and professionalization. But a common component across many of these exams,

and the one about which I am most concerned, is essentially a timed writing test: typically

students are tasked with independently reading a large number of texts “covering” a wide range

of topics in the field and ultimately asked to use these texts to answer a series of questions or

write on a series of topics within a limited timeframe. At Bowling Green, this component of the

exam process is called the “General Preliminary Exam.” It requires students to answer a total of

331

three questions—one each in the topic areas of history, theory and research, and pedagogy—by

writing three extended essays as a take-home exam over the course of weekend—usually a

Friday morning to a Monday morning—while citing and incorporating research from a list of

seventy sources. Fifty-two of these sources are selected by faculty and comprise a common list

for all students. The remaining eighteen are selected by students. Neither the expected length of

these essays nor the number of sources expected to be cited in each is specified in any official

program documents, but many students have internalized the notion that each essay should be at

least ten double-spaced pages and cite at least ten sources.

I see two problematic aspects in timed reading and writing preliminary examinations like

those used at Bowling Green for its General Exam. To me, these aspects undermine student

agency and imply troubling assumptions about the functions reading serves in academic work.

The first problematic aspect is the timed component of the test itself. Though there is usually

substantial time allotted to students to read and prepare for their exams (at Bowling Green,

students may submit their plans for the General Preliminary Exam and schedule to take it up to

several months later), students are tasked with demonstrating a high degree of proficiency in

using and applying those texts in a very short and intensely stressful period of time. Depending

on students’ preparation and writing processes, some at Bowling Green have been known to skip

sleeping during the exam weekend to complete it within the deadline (I personally pulled an all-

nighter on the last evening of the exam). There is no other place I can think of in graduate

curricula or working in the field that asks for such a demonstration of knowledge in such a

potentially harmful way. The writing of academic books and articles, and the reading required to

produce these writings, is usually conducted over months or years, not in days or a week or so.

Furthermore, timed writing tests have largely been rejected as a mode of effective and ethical

332

writing assessment in composition courses. It is difficult to see how their use in graduate

education is better aligned to writing studies’ disciplinary values.

The second troubling aspect of these preliminary exams is more closely related to the

coverage model of instruction described above. Students are rarely provided with guidance on

how to approach reading their assigned list of texts nor with instruction on what aspects of those

texts to take note of. However, the prompts of the test can conceivably ask students about

anything they contain. This creates a conundrum for the student: they are encouraged to “cover”

in their reading as many of the texts as possible and take note of essentially everything. At the

same time, reading such a large body of dense academic texts (presumably verbatim) and making

note of everything they contain is probably not a reasonable expectation, even if students have

had several months to do this work. Preparing for the exam in this way is also, arguably, an

exploitative waste of students’ labor. Probably half or more of the texts they read for the

preliminary exams will not be relevant or used to write their exams at all. There is some solace to

be taken in the fact that todays’ preliminary exams have often been altered from their truly

draconian historical origins to increase opportunities for student agency and choice. At Bowling

Green, students are given a choice of questions (five to seven options or so) to write on for each

of the three domains. They are also encouraged to submit self-written questions (up to one for

each domain) and to prepare answers for these questions ahead-of-time. Most students take these

opportunities, and faculty make efforts to see that at least one of these questions, though perhaps

in a revised form, appears on the test. Alterations such as these do much to increase student

agency and to lessen the harm preliminary exams can do to students, but they do not eliminate it.

Few students at Bowling Green are given all of the questions they submit. And even with

multiple options for questions, it is possible that none of these options align with the preparations

333

the student has made. And although students can review previous versions of the exam, they

cannot know the exact questions they will be asked until the day they receive their own. These

factors create a potential “gotcha” trap in which students are held to account for knowledge that

they couldn’t know they needed to know. Preliminary exams structured in the ways thus far

described effectively coerce students into reading all of the assigned material with the threat of

trapping them in failing the exam (and thus out of their programs) if they don’t. It is hard to

judge as ethical an assessment that relies on coercion and entrapment to secure student

compliance.

I wonder what writing studies might stand to gain from reconsidering, perhaps redefining,

the purposes—if any—that timed essay tests ought to serve in the preliminary exam process and

in preparing graduate students for work in the discipline. What actually are the purposes of these

essay tests? Are those purposes clear to the faculty designing these tests? Are those purposes

clearly communicated to students? Are the purposes of these tests simply to “check” if students

have been reading in the discipline? If so, is that a worthy purpose? Are essay tests ethical or

effective ways to prompt such reading? Is the purpose of these tests to ensure that students are

familiar with a broad range of topics in the discipline? If that is the goal, why might that goal

matter, and need such familiarity be demonstrated through a timed writing test? Further, what

might be realistic and sustainable expectations for students’ generalized knowledge of the field,

especially when the depth and breadth of the discipline continue to expand while human capacity

and attention for learning remain steady? Would either of these two purposes be consistent with

our other disciplinary values about reading and writing? Do the conditions of these tests, and the

purposes that reading and writing serve within them, mirror or prepare students for the kinds of

reading and writing they are going to need to be able to do to create professional-level research

334

for their dissertations and in their careers? Whom do these tests serve, and are we comfortable

with that? At the very least, in answering these questions for ourselves and to each other, the

discipline stands to gain a clearer sense of why we ask students to undertake these sorts of tests.

I wonder also, though, what writing studies might gain from revising these tests to

eliminate the problematic elements identified. What if, instead of a timed writing test, students

demonstrated their capacity to critically read and synthesize academic texts on a variety of topics

through a longer-term process continually negotiated between the student and their committee or

chair? What if, for example, students were responsible for writing all of their own “exam”

questions, submitting drafts of these questions to their chairs for feedback, and subsequently

revising them until approved? Similarly, what if students were responsible for picking all of the

texts that they might use to answer these questions so that they could select the body of

knowledge best prepared to answer them? What if, as part of this back-and-forth process,

students were required to submit annotated bibliographies illustrating that a viable body of

knowledge exists to answer the questions they have proposed? What if they received some

guidance about where to look and how to uncover relevant sources? What if these lists were

themselves open to feedback, suggestion, and revision? What if the resulting writing produced in

answering these questions were conducted over a series of weeks or months, perhaps even a

semester? What if students were required to set timelines for completing these tasks sequentially

in consultation with their chairs? What if the answers to exam questions could themselves

receive feedback and be revised? Might changes like these to the preliminary exam process

reduce student anxiety, increase their agency, and provide scaffolded practice preparing them for

the types of reading, writing, and thinking that academics engage in independently in their work?

I think such a process would still require students to demonstrate versatility and independence in

335

reading, researching, and writing on a broad array of topics other than the subject of their

dissertations, but would subtract from the equation any surprises that threaten to torpedo their

careers before they start them. Such changes, I think, would offer students a greater degree of

control over the preliminary/comprehensive exam process while also asking of them a greater

degree of responsibility and providing to them a greater degree of support.

Chapter Summary and Conclusion

This chapter covered a wide swath of topics in helping writing studies implement

sustained, explicit reading instruction into graduate curricula. It began with discussion of why

writing studies needs to produce thorough, explicit accounts of how to teach reading. From there,

it introduced a pedagogical model for reading instruction—the reading cycle sandwich—that

advocated for modeling reading strategies to students and sandwiching acts of reading between

in-class pre- and post-reading activities that contextualize and consolidate student learning. This

model also articulated how threshold concepts might serve as heuristic devices through which

students may reflect upon their reading difficulties and practices. The concluding portion of the

chapter mused about directions future efforts might take to more fully integrate reading into

writing studies at the graduate level and elsewhere.

Here, at the conclusion of this project, I find myself at a loss for words to summarize and

encapsulate its work beyond reiterating points I have hopefully already made clear. Reading and

reading instruction matter in writing studies, and they matter for everyone in writing studies—for

the undergraduates who move through composition courses and other writing programs, for the

faculty and instructors who teach them, for the writing program administrators who guide

curricular choices, and for the graduate students who will become or are already instructors. To

more fully integrate reading with writing studies requires true recognition of reading’s

336

importance to literate communication, its contextuality, its complexity, and its multiplicity at all

educational levels and for all people. Writing studies already has at its disposal many tools for

seeing this integration through. Threshold concepts for reading and the reading cycle sandwich

are just two among them. Further, the discipline has the capacity for finding and inventing many

more such tools of integration, and many people are already engaged in the exciting work that

lays ahead to give reading in writing studies its proper due. I am hopeful to see the results of this

integration and the things we build from its tools.

337

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