Securing a Place for Reading in Composition
Securing a Place for Reading in Composition
The Importance of Teaching for Transfer
Securing a Place for Reading in Composition addresses the dissonance between the need to prepare students to read, not just write, complex texts and the lack of recent scholarship on reading-writing connections. Author Ellen C. Carillo argues that including attention-to-reading practices is crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy pedagogies. Students who can read actively and reflectively will be able to work successfully with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their post-secondary academic careers and beyond.
Considering the role of reading within composition from both historical and contemporary perspectives, Carillo makes recommendations for the productive integration of reading instruction into first-year writing courses. She details a “mindful reading” framework wherein instructors help students cultivate a repertoire of approaches upon which they consistently reflect as they apply them to various texts. This metacognitive frame allows students to become knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read and gives them the opportunity to develop the skills useful for moving among reading approaches in mindful ways, thus preparing them to actively and productively read in courses and contexts outside first-year composition.
Securing a Place for Reading in Composition also explores how the field of composition might begin to effectively address reading, including conducting research on reading, revising outcome statements, and revisiting the core courses in graduate programs. It will be of great interest to writing program administrators and other compositionists and their graduate students.
'This is a lovely and important book. Looking at the history of post-secondary literacy instruction and our present practices, Ellen Carillo makes a compelling case for how and why reading can and should have a place in composition.'
—David Bartholomae, University of Pittsburgh
'Carillo makes a number of useful observations in her study, most particularly in unpacking how scholars and instructors alike address readings rather than reading practices . . . '
—College English
'A foundational overview of the situation of reading and what we can and should do to initiate changes. . . . an excellent resource, this text serves to inform curricula and pedagogy; additionally, sections of the book can easily support faculty development for writing teachers.'
—Teaching English in the Two-Year College
'Securing a Place for Reading in Composition succeeds as a work of historical recovery, as a resource for writing instructors new to reading pedagogy, and as a research-based call to teach reading more mindfully across all years of undergraduate study.'
—Rhetoric Review
Ellen C. Carillo is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing program coordinator at its Waterbury Campus. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition and literature, and her scholarship has been published in Rhetoric Review; The Writing Lab Newsletter; Reader: Essays in Reader-Oriented Theory, Criticism, and Pedagogy; Feminist Teacher; Currents in Teaching and Learning; and in several edited collections.
