In the final months of 2009, the WPA listserv (WPA-L) saw an onslaught of detailed responses to an initial post with the deceptively simple subject line: “How well do your students read … ?” The complete question, posted in the body of the email, sent to the listerv on October 27 by Bob Schwegler (2009) from the University of Rhode Island read: “How well do your students read complex texts—other than literary texts?” With more than fifty responses in just a few days, it became clear that this was an issue that interested a range of subscribers, many of...

As noted in the introduction, the field of composition has historically neglected the role of reading in the teaching of composition. Moreover, the one moment in the field’s history—the 1980s and early 1990s wherein compositionists wrote prolifically on the subject—remains terribly underrepresented in histories of the field and its anthologies, including Susan Miller’s (2009) 1760-pageThe Norton Book of Composition Studiesand Villanueva and Arola’s (2011) 899-pageCross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, two anthologies that are often used in graduate courses in rhetoric and composition. Thus, graduate students rarely receive training in how to productively attend to...

Some of the insights gleaned from the survey of first-year writing instructors, particularly those concerning their lack of teaching preparation, may leave one wondering how exactly composition—a field so invested in literacy and pedagogy—has come to largely neglect the practice of reading, which few will dispute is inextricably linked to the practice of writing and thus the teaching of writing. Tracing some historical antecedents, this chapter posits potential reasons for this contemporary situation.

This chapter begins in the nineteenth century, a time of great change as attention to reading, writing, and speaking as integrated domains of rhetoric was...

In the 1980s and early 1990s, textbooks, collections of essays, and conferences on the subject of reading (on its own) and on connections between reading and writing were plentiful. The long, but still woefully incomplete list below is intended to indicate the sheer amount of scholarship that emerged from this moment, as well as a few textbooks. Some collections, such as Atkins and Johnson’s (1985)Writing and Reading Differently, which used deconstruction to explore the relationship between reading and writing, addressed reading-writing connections from theoretical perspectives. Other collections, such as Robert J. Tierney, Patricia L. Anders, and Judy Nichols Mitchell’s...

The study detailed in Chapter 2, which focuses primarily on how instructors attend to reading in their composition classes (and how students experience these connections), found that forty-eight percent (n = 48) of instructors teach what they call “rhetorical reading” and/or “rhetorical analysis.” They employ this approach as a means to reach two primary goals: (1) to connect the practices of reading and writing, and (2) to prepare students to read effectively in other and future courses. These instructors value rhetorical reading because it potentially combats students’ default way of “reading for information” and compels them to pay attention to...

Keeping the scholarship on transfer detailed in the previous chapter in mind, as well as first-year instructors’ investment in teaching for transfer, this chapter contends that composition instructors should be promoting the development of metacognitive practices that help students develop knowledgeaboutreading, knowledge that will prove useful as they move among contexts and classes. As it explores this particular way of making students more conscious readers, this chapter does not promote a particular reading approach such as critical reading or close reading. Neither does it seek to add mindful reading to the list of reading approaches that have been...

When I first conceived of this book in 2009 there was very little formally articulated interest in the place of reading in writing instruction other than, of course, the WPA-L discussion with which this book opens. Years had passed since articles on the subject had been published in the field’s journals and books on the subject were simply not being published. As I received rejection letters from potential publishers of this manuscript, I sought advice from colleagues in the field who had success in the 1980s and 1990s publishing on reading only to find out that some of them had...