Strategies for Myself and for Teaching Challenged Readers

Struggling through "A Historical Perspective," I was amazed and baffled that difficult terms were only superficially clarified, and were soon supplanted by more and more difficult terms.  At length, I realized that I'd need to come back and read it a second time (which helped enormously), so I underlined phrases that seemed important and wrote questions in the margins.  For example, on pp. 34-5, when the authors speak about a reading process that tries to emulate Skinner's "analysis that explained and controlled the behavior of animals," in the margin, I wrote, FOR EXAMPLE?  Proceeding through the text, I became aware that the writers' intent was a cursory review of the competing schools of literary research, not a more typical work where the reader is treated to examples and details.  In order to try to keep track of these vaguely outlined "camps," I wrote notes in the margins, for example, on p. 37: BEHAVIORISTS VS. MENTALISTS and TOP-DOWN VS. BOTTOM-UP.  These helped me keep in mind key points when I read the piece again. Completing the graphic organizer, courtesy of Mark, made everything much clearer and much more meaningful.

The background knowledge I brought to reading "A Historical Perspective" consists of a course in Psych 101 (summer 2011), which I dimly recall as presenting an introduction to psychology, including a delineation between cognitive, neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic.  Of course, I've been a reader myself for years now, and I was somewhat able to draw from my own reading experience to consider to what extent this text made sense, or resonated with me as a reader.  (Not a lot.)

My strategies and cognitive processes, i.e, how I muddled through it all, consisted of trying hard, taking notes per the above, feeling very tired, dozing off, dozing off very deeply, waking up, feeling quite guilty that I wasn't succeeding with my cognitive processes, and resolving to wake up the next day and try again with a fresh start.  With the second read-through, I found Mark's graphic organizer was the perfect means to help me pick the most relevant bits and outline them so as to make more sense of the whole experience.