Yesterday I experienced the classic student anxiety of public reading. We were handed an excerpt of a piece by Foucault and asked to read portions of the passage out loud to the rest of the class. I quickly counted the people who would read before me and then scanned the text to see if there were any words, names or phrase I might trip over.
Then I thought Is this what my students do?! I'd hate to be the cause of anxiety for them, or any anxiety, surrounding reading. My desire, for every student, is to encourage and foster a safe, comforting, welcoming reading environment. How do I engage students with reading in class while combating the same type of anxiety I felt?
Well...the SI resident experts prepared me for such questioning. Here's what we did. All SI-ers were handed a passage of difficult text; the assumption being that the text will be difficult for everyone in the room. We then took turns reading a line or two of the passage as the reading was passed from person to person. My anxiety melted because I wasn't the only person reading and I benefitted from others tackling words that peaked my concern. Then, together, we all picked one sentence and everyone read the same line in different dramatic representations. In doing so, my anxiety melted.
Today, I gleaned some interesting methods to help my own students avoid reading anxiety. Perhaps the extra confidence boost will even bleed over into their recreational reading. One can hope! :)
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