College-level reading poses myriad challenges to Long Beach City College students, from increased complexity and sophistication in vocabulary, syntax, and organization to increased levels of abstraction in the text written by academics. A college education is meant to expand and challenge, but the heightened tasks of textual comprehension can be daunting to many of our students.

Yes, there is a problem. Is there a solution? LBCC reading courses are the essence of student support at our college, hastening the achievement of students’ goals and dreams. We, therefore, earnestly exhort incoming students to take LBCC reading courses early in their program. 

The reading process is not linear, and neither is its instruction. However, guiding students to improve comprehension of text is both systematic and full of variety and creativity. Such balance includes the following research-based strategies that are always linked to meaning because mere decoding is not reading; “reading” is always a meaning-based thinking process.

Decoding

Decoding or the sounding out of words is not reading, but it needs to be in place. We help students fill in their decoding gaps by re-teaching phonics, word parts, sight words, and structural analysis principles.

Vocabulary

Comprehension is thwarted when the student is overwhelmed by too many unfamiliar words. Therefore, both explicitly and implicitly, we work to expand students’ college-level vocabulary and strategies for continued improvement.

Cognitive Comprehension Strategies

The research of the cognitive scientists replaced the passive “blank-slate” reading model with one that recognizes and encourages the active participation of readers, who bring schema—the sum of their life experiences—to text. We purpose to build students’ background knowledge and to teach them to activate it and make connections to it during reading. We demonstrate the invisible thinking process and help them to be aware of and to describe if and how they are learning—metacognition. Here is where the “variety and creativity” of each instructor energizes the chosen strategies to give students many styles and experiences of learning.

Real Reading

Not surprisingly, reading improves with…reading! Reading builds fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, background knowledge. LBCC instructors provide exposure to many genres of both fictional and informational text. If we can capture a student’s interest in reading, s/he will acquire the crucial practice and motivation needed to read more and allow the text to teach.