They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the ReadingComprehension Skills of English Majors at Two MidwesternUniversitiesSusan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, Diane MinielCEA Critic, Volume 86, Number 1, March 2024, pp. 1-17 (Article)Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI:For additional information about this articlehttps://doi.org/10.1353/cea.2024.a922346https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346[149.40.62.25] Project MUSE (2025-08-03 17:52 GMT)

In the end, the lesson is clear: if we teachers inthe university ignore our students’ actual reading levels, we run the risk ofpassing out diplomas to students who have not mastered reading complextexts and who, as a result, might find that their literacy skills prevent themfrom achieving their professional goals and personal dreams.

instead of mak-ing a generalized statement to summarize the entire sentence, the subjectcarefully attempts to interpret each successive clause. He is interested inthe details of the setting, stating that the setting is in London and then try-ing to find a reason why so many people would be “slipping and sliding”on the road.

everal of the problematic read-ers in this category admitted that they had successfully used skimming andSparkNotes to read Jane Austen’s novels and Shakespeare’s plays in otherEnglish classes.

Problematic readers often described their reading process asskimming and/or relying on SparkNotes

58 percent (49 of 85 subjects) understood so little of the intro-duction to Bleak House that they would not be able to read thenovel on their own. However, these same subjects (defined inthe study as problematic readers) also believed they wouldhave no problem reading the rest of the 900-page novel

According to Wolfgang Iser in The Actof Reading, one’s ability to read complex literature is partly dependent onone’s knowledge of what he calls the “repertoire” of the text, “the formof references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or to thewhole culture from which the text has emerged” (69). With Bleak House, thisknowledge is crucial.

As faculty, we often assumethat the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they takeclasses that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts.

abstract prose texts

In their2014 article for Contemporary Education Psychology, C. M. Bohn-Gettler andP. Kendeou further note how “These verbalizations can provide a measureof the actual cognitive processes readers engage in during comprehen-sion” (208)

English professors often assume that students can read the novels andpoetry assigned for their courses.

Girls, even when their abilities in science equaled or excelled that of boys, often were likely to be better overall in reading comprehension