Writing for the Public: Alphabet Soup in the High School Classroom

Posted by Randall Hall

As a graduate student in the UAB School of Education and an English Language Arts student teacher, I am always interested in learning new strategies to improve students’ reading and writing skills. Back when I was in high school (at the end of the last millennium - which is not as long ago as it sounds), we were taught to simply read and annotate our (usually large and leather-bound) text and then organize our analysis into a five paragraph essay. Now that I am back in high school as a teacher, I can report that things have changed. In fact, in the modern ELA classroom, there are far more acronyms for “reading strategies” than there are actual books (which have been routinely replaced by handheld devices in many school districts).

Image Courtesy of Pixabay

Over the last year, I have personally guided students through the performance of an AIR, ANX, CTQ, DRA, DRTA, GIST, GRASP, IRI, ITI, KWL, LRD, RAFT, REAP, and an SQ3R. What do all these letters mean? Well, they are all acronyms for different reading, summarizing, and writing techniques that students are now taught in modern high schools. Educators have realized that each type of student (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) learns differently and that each type of text (informational, literary, audio-visual, etc.) should be read differently to be best understood by various learners. Thus, each of the acronyms I set out above is a different strategy aimed at helping a student comprehend a certain kind of text in a unique and specific way.

For example, a KWL transforms learners into active readers by asking students to analyze a text (usually an informational article) before, during, and after reading it. They do this by first writing what they “Know” about the subject based only on the title of the article. Next, they write “What” they want to know about the subject of the article based on its topic sentence. Finally, they write what they “Learned” about the subject after reading the entire article. Thus, the KWL activates their prior knowledge, draws on their past experiences, forces them to make inferences and connections, and eventually guides them to concrete conclusions about the information they have read while stimulating their curiosity about what they wanted to know but did not learn.

This Alphabet Soup approach to reading instruction may seem odd to the students’ parents who are not familiar with the manifold strategies or the principles underlying them. However, I have found them to be indispensable in helping students “make” meaning on the literal, inferential, and evaluative levels of learning. If you have any reading or writing strategies to share (including any with fun acronyms), please post them in the “Write Like an Educator” section of WritingInTheZone (a new wiki seeking to “tap into the real-world knowledge and experience of graduate students, post-docs, and scholars to help writers achieve daily productivity goals). I know these acronyms may seem strange, but students seem to find their use as easy as ABC.