He said:
'
In this project, do not spend too much time on trying to improve students' reading. They have trouble with writing and that is what they want to improve. So spend more time on giving them help with writing'.
I thought:
But this is to assume that reading and writing are quite distinct self-contained skills, that there is no generative relationship between them.
What if having to write is what propels you to really read - thereby noticing how authorities in the discipline phrase and frame points, how they nuance and modulate their claims, how they move from one point to the next, what mix of lexis they use to increase the definiteness and/or technicality of ideas as their texts progress?
And what if it is only the reading that can provide us with these fine points of framing, phrasing, lexis, grammar, and so on. (And for the purposes of this point I will take 'listening to a lecture' as simply a different kind of reading, a reading with much more meaning in it, but which cannot be re-read and studied)?
To teach writing we are not confined to just teaching writing through teaching writing as such. We can teach writing
through teaching reading. If it is in reading that we experience and absorb the wherewithal, the discourse of the field, what I am summing as 'fine points of framing, phrasing, lexis, grammar, and so on', then in order to 'have something to say', in order to 'be able to take up the subject-position of being the subject of that discipline', a student will only be able to write if they have read.
Instead of this understanding of the relationship between reading and writing, there is clearly developing among students and curriculum writers, the notion that reading is only a matter of 'gathering information' - as if 'information' were a-lingual, as if it was something you could point at or grunt at (like Bertrand Russell's knowledge by acquaintance). However, academic knowledge is better framed as knowledge by description: the abstract objects of a body of knowledge come to us and can only be displayed in language, in phrases such as 'the perpetrators in this case'. To write you need more than simply ostensive definitions and grunts or pointing. You have to be able to put objects into the language of the discipline. You have to be able to say 'the perpetrators' (along with all its variations), not just 'him'.
My suspicion is this:
1. Over recent years (say 20 years) reading has been effaced by a focus on writing. This is because writing is more of a product and more assessable, thus more atuned to an assessment regimes.
2. Over more recent years (say 8 years) Google has been transforming reading into a contemporary version of the Renaissance Commonplace Book, thereby replacing the concept of 'a
book' as a finalised self-enclosing domain of meaning with the concept of 'an
archive' of texts that can be mined for topoi and figures, for boilerplate and wordings. (This is clearly a topic needing a more considered post some time in the future.)
