The Joy of Text?

I'm working with a couple students on SAT Critical Reading. Some are native English speakers. Some aren't. They all generally do better in science and math, though some are quite accomplished in the humanities.

But all of them -- all of them -- struggle with critical reading passages from the 19th century.

It's not just the diction -- though that, I'm sure contributes. The meanings of certain words have evolved a bit, and at least, have taken on different primary meanings in conversational English. And yet, it's a minor reason -- the SAT, by its nature, includes words that students may or may not know, and an entire class of reading passages questions requires students to determine the meaning of a phrase or word in context.

It's not just subject matter. Yes the passages are narrative and often divorced from the social, cultural, and racial reality of my students. But so are, say, the philosophical passages, or passages focused on a particular minority group. Some of the students struggle on these as well, though to a lesser extent.

I've decided that the primary challenge is due to the fact that these passages are heavy on dialogue.

I've reviwed nearly a score of official SAT tests of the current variety. And it appears that more modern narrative reading passages are characterized by omniscient narrators, detailed prose descriptions, and a boatload of adjectives.

The older passages, on the other hand, consist almost entirely of dialogue.

That got me thinking: why should that make it harder for students? Isn't this generation infamous for communicating via text messages? And although behavioral psychology suggests this leads to a loss of over 90% of the information provided by nonverbal (or at least non-linguistic) cues from direct, personal communication, haven't they adapted by becoming closer readers of dialogue?

But it's not an issue specific to millennials. I have trouble with these passages. Older SAT tutors I know -- people who don't text at all -- have similar issues.

Maybe then it has to do with a phenomenon that spans a couple generations.

Round up the usual suspects!

1. Television

Television is a favorite whipping boy. But it might be at least slightly responsible. Why? Well, it provides the viewer with abundant visual cues, which a block of text doesn't supply. So although a screenplay may need explicit directions for the actor, the gap between the naked dialogue and the viewer's brain is filled with a raft of nonverbal cues supplied by the directed actor.

We don't read dialogue. We watch it.

2. The decline of plays in classroom instruction

I read a lot of Shakespeare in the classroom. Although one of my more perceptive English teachers told us (correctly) that Shakespeare wasn't meant to be read silently, we often did. And yes, the dialogue was often witty, and monologues and chorus provide at least some narration and background. But it's hard, unless one already knows the general plot, to understand what a given piece of dialogue means.

In order to interpret the dialogue, you need to understand the plot. But in order to understand the plot, you have to know how to interpret the dialogue. It can be done, in an iterative process. But who has time for multiple re-readings, especially on a standardized test?

3. The decline of poetry.

We don't read poetry. There are lots of reasons. I loved poetry, but realized it was making me overly pretentious. Some hate its indirectness and subtlety (the very things that others, including myself, love it for).

But what it does do -- at least when done well -- is force us to appreciate the subtleties of language. It demands, upfront, vocabulary, and historical sensitivity to connotation. Narrative prose does this too, though the lower restrictions on structure often lead even great authors to be a bit lazy and less economical with words. Clarity, not brevity, is often the emphasis, which lowers the barriers to comprehension.

In other words, the very inaccessibility of poetry makes it better training for tests that seek to differentiate students based on reading comprehension ability.

I don't know if any of these are true. It's possible that culutral context matters way more --  I find it boring to read about the upper-middle class Victorian lives of Jane Austen's characters. But it's something that I'm mulling over, especially as it is currently a roadblock for some of my students -- a block I have to figure out how to move quickly.