To encourage students to read novels, teachers can employ strategies such as allowing students to choose their books, encouraging them to read ones outside their comfort zone, and providing supplemental reading materials.
The reading of novels is being sacrificed for short passage reading because students are more likely to encounter these texts in standardized tests, said Alex Corbitt, assistant professor of literacy at the State University of New York at Cortland.
“What I tell my students is that novels allow you to step outside your world into a new world, and by allowing you to experience another life, that's where you truly grow and change," said Bernie Heidkamp, an English teacher at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Illinois. “If you can share that change with others, you're also changing the world.”
Accommodating reading levels and comfort zones
One of the challenges to teaching novels is that having the whole class read the same book makes it difficult to accommodate different reading levels for students, Corbitt said.
To address this, Corbitt encourages teachers to create book clubs that are thematically organized but with three or four different novel options at varying reading levels for students to choose from.
“During or after reading, you could create a heterogeneous group of students who read different books, and then they're all coming with a unique set of knowledge that they've developed, and they're excited to share that with their peers,” Corbitt said.
Heidkamp incorporates independent reading in his classroom. He realized that when students choose the text, they are willing and eager readers.
This is also why he argues that some of the notions around students being less likely to engage with novels due to shorter attention spans are something of a “false premise.”
“I'm not necessarily pessimistic that somehow, as teachers or as this generation of students, we have this antagonistic relationship with novels,” said Heidkamp. “I think over the course of the 30 years of my career, young adult literature in particular has just blossomed and diversified in ways that make it appealing to such a wide variety of students.”
The challenge he’s noticed is that students aren’t reading outside of their comfort zones — something he circumvents by ensuring that the novels they do read as a class focus on communities and identities from different parts of the world.
Introducing resources beyond the page
Corbitt suggests that the most effective strategies when teaching novels involve frontloading and scaffolding the reading with news articles, nonfiction texts or documentary videos that provide context for the text. This could take the form of starting with a unit theme or with student-generated questions.
This strategy, he said, gets students interested and motivated to learn more, but it also provides students an opportunity to make connections between the novel and other materials — such as an article or other story — when they encounter vocabulary that's specific to an event, community or topic that is featured.
Incorporating audiobooks is another way to complement novel reading. Heidkamp and Corbitt both emphasized that students should still be reading along with the physical book to encourage active listening by having them also annotate the book.
“Audio books can be helpful, because they can also model reading fluency — which is reading not just for accuracy and speed but also with expression,” Corbitt said.
Another option, Corbitt added, is pairing a novel with a graphic novel version, as this strategy can scaffold learning with visual cues. Students can also preview what's going to happen in the next chapter by reading ahead in the graphic novel version.
Overall, Corbitt encourages educators to think outside of the box and incorporate less conventional ways to interpret the texts, such as tableaus, which are freeze-frame reenactments of a scene from a story.
“Novels are an invitation to dream and to imagine. I think we need to make our classrooms academic, for sure, but also not lose sight of the joy of reading,” Corbitt said.
