A popular diagram for teaching plot structure to middle and high school students looks like a mountain, mapping out exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
It’s an apt representation for the act of novel reading—a task that for some students, can feel like summiting Mt. Everest.
“I don’t know if it necessarily comes naturally to anyone, adult or young person, to take on a challenging or complex text on their own,” said Caroline Rose, an 8th grade English/language arts teacher at Boston Collegiate Charter School in Boston.
For that reason, Rose and her colleagues offer their students a bevy of support, creating additional time for reading and teaching comprehension strategies, like annotating. Reading several full-length novels a year can be challenging for some students, but the effort is worth it, said Rose.
“By reading novels, they get to sit with an idea or some characters over the whole course of a story,” she said. “There is a benefit to really getting to read and understand the whole narrative arc.”
Exactly how much reading of whole books—especially novels—students should be doing is a contested topic, with no clear research-based answer. Some evidence suggests that elementary and middle school students nationwide may be reading more short texts and excerpts in class than full, longer works.
The reasons why are complex and layered. Some educators point to the perennial challenge of getting students to actually do the reading, and follow a story over several weeks—a challenge they say is compounded in today’s information landscape, where children and teenagers are used to reading snippets of text online and watching short-form video content.
Even so, teachers like Rose, along with other experts, say there are ways to capture and keep students’ focus. Read on for three tips for teaching with novels from educators and researchers.
1. Make time for students to do the reading
High school English teacher Jay Arellano entered the classroom at the beginning of his career with an assumption: If he assigned his students reading for homework, many of them wouldn’t do it.
This isn’t simply a phenomenon of the social media age, he added. “I feel like that’s kind of how it’s always been,” said Arellano, who teaches 9th and 10th graders at Legacy High School in Broomfield, Colo.
He has never asked his students—who study several novels and plays throughout the year—to read at home for class. Instead, they read together as part of the period.
This works for Arellano because most of the books he assigns are on the shorter side.
For Rose, the Boston teacher, the English/language arts class period just doesn’t offer enough time to get through the four or five full-length books that her 8th graders read each year. To keep that pace, she said, students have to do some reading outside of class.
Still, though, Rose’s school offers options that help students get it done. There’s time and space in the school building before the day starts and after it ends, she said. Teachers also “work really closely with families” to make sure that students read what’s assigned, Rose added.
2. Check for understanding before moving to literary analysis
State standards for English/language arts often ask students to pull apart what they’re reading—to identify an author’s use of figurative language, for example, or explain how a particular sentence or chapter fits into the broader theme of a book.
But before students can do this kind of close reading, they need to do something much more fundamental: grasp the gist of the story, said Julia Sutherland, a professor of education, literacy, and language at the University of Sussex in England.
A decade ago, Sutherland and her colleagues tested a reading intervention with middle grades teachers that asked them to read two novels back to back with their students over 12 weeks.
“They just had to focus on getting through a whole book, making sure students comprehended it,” Sutherland said. This differed from how these teachers usually taught full books—two over the course of a full year, with lots of pausing for detailed study of excerpts.
In classroom observations, Sutherland and her colleagues saw both teachers and students frequently pause to ask questions, clarify meaning, and ask for recaps of what had just happened. The students had a stronger understanding of the book, said one teacher in her interview with a researcher, “because I’ve allowed them to read it, rather than analyze it.”
Fully understanding the gist of the story then allowed for deeper analysis, Sutherland said. “The kind of comments they were making about the literature was extraordinary,” she said. “They were commenting on structure, they were commenting on narrative voice. … They were doing a lot of complex things with the novels that you wouldn’t expect children of that age to be doing.”
Ultimately, the study found, students made about 8.5 months of progress on a standardized assessment of reading comprehension after 12 weeks of the faster-paced novel reading.
It’s important for teachers to scout ahead for parts of a novel that might trip kids up, and pre-plan how to address them, said Tim Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies reading.
“I don’t think we pay enough attention to what it is that makes a particular text hard to understand,” he said.
3. Connect shorter texts to the novel—and use them to build students’ background knowledge
In the Elmhurst 205 school district outside of Chicago, 4th and 5th graders read three full-length books a year, a mix of novels and nonfiction, said Katie Lyons, the district’s assistant superintendent of teaching and learning.
But these books are far from the only texts students read. They’re the capstones of larger text sets, topically aligned selections of poems, speeches, informational text, and other works designed to build students’ knowledge.
When students read a historical fiction novel, for instance, they also read speeches from real historical actors at the time, and informational text about the period. This helps familiarize them with context and vocabulary they can use to understand the novel, while also offering opportunities to practice close reading skills with shorter text, said Lyons.
“This is a scaffolded approach,” she said. “All learners can benefit from that.”
Knowing more about the time period in which a novel was written, or the cultural context it explores, doesn’t just make the book more accessible—it can also make it more engaging, Lyons added.
The practice helps to address the question at the heart of the district’s English/language arts classrooms, she said: “How do you get kids engaged around a topic that is worthy of their time and attention?”
