Using Nonfiction to Engage Reluctant Readers
As English teachers, we often face a
huge obstacle between our goal (encouraging lifelong readers!) and our
accountability to standardized testing. This obstacle? Student reading levels.
With our high-performing students, we can almost imagine leaving them to face
the test alone and we know they’d be fine. With the rest? Well, it’s
unimaginable. Therefore, we’re tempted to sacrifice student interest in the
name of test preparation. This is the way to get our reluctant readers on
track, we tell ourselves.
How can we balance rigorous learning
with engaging nonfiction? We’d want that, right?
Yes.
It’s Danielle from Nouvelle ELA, and
today, I want to tackle nonfiction. Some of you love it; some of you dread it.
Here are three ways to use nonfiction to engage reluctant readers. None of
these are “drill and kill,” but each meets the reader where they are and
supports them as they work toward grade-level skills.
1. Use nonfiction to develop background knowledge.
We know that our students can have varying
background knowledge when we begin a new novel. This could be a matter of
culture and exposure, vocabulary level, or understanding of genre. One way we
can scaffold the reading experience for reluctant readers is to strengthen
their background knowledge.
Consider, for example, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. What did Fitzgerald’s contemporary audience know and understand that our students might not? His audience exemplified the American zeitgeist and Post-War sentiments of the era, and both inform the novel. Our students don’t have easy access to this knowledge. Our reluctant readers will just write it off as “too difficult.”
Consider, for example, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. What did Fitzgerald’s contemporary audience know and understand that our students might not? His audience exemplified the American zeitgeist and Post-War sentiments of the era, and both inform the novel. Our students don’t have easy access to this knowledge. Our reluctant readers will just write it off as “too difficult.”
Once you generate a list of topics
(as I’ve done here for The Great Gatsby), you can find nonfiction and primary sources
to support students. For example, I use this Close Reading to introduce
students to the quality of life in the Post-War United States. This is also a
good opportunity to provide key content vocabulary that students will later see
in the novel.
2. Strengthen connections through literature.
In the last section, I discussed
providing access to literature through nonfiction. You can also approach it
from the other direction. Often, age-appropriate and engaging literature is a
key to understanding denser nonfiction. Literature can also go a long way to
make content in nonfiction texts more relatable for students.
Let’s look at Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay. In this novel, the main character travels to the
Philippines and learns about the impact of Duterte’s war on drugs first-hand.
This book is accessible to many reluctant readers and easy to pair with a
closer look at current events.
You can also use shorter stories to
connect to informational text targets. I created a series of reading
intervention escape games with just this in mind. In Burnbridge Breakouts, each
game follows a different protagonist. Students collaborate to solve puzzles and
riddles to reveal clues to the bigger mystery of the series. Even though the
reading level of the stories is below grade level, each game comes with
related informational tasks at grade level. They explore topics broached in the
games, conduct research, and write procedural texts. However, their
perseverance is sustained by the interest in the topic sparked by the game. Literature
becomes the bridge to more difficult nonfiction.
Interested in Burnbridge Breakouts? Try the first game here!
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3. Inspire creative writing.
You can also use nonfiction to
inspire creative writing. Students are less constrained with creative writing
and more easily accept that there’s “more than one right answer.” Because of
this, they’re using their understanding of nonfiction to support their
imagination. This is effective because it puts the onus on them: they’ll look
back and make sure they’ve understood for the sake of their story rather than
the sake of a test question.
An example of this is my resource,
Abandoned Places. Students read an article about ten abandoned places from
around the world. Each section is short and attainable for reluctant readers,
developing a sense of achievement along the way. Then, students choose one
place as the setting for a piece of “Flash Fiction.” This quick writing
decreases students’ ability to be self-critical, since the writing time flies
by in a “flash”. They don’t have time to make it perfect! (You could have them
revise a draft later, though.)
Moving Forward with Reluctant Readers
You want to instill a love of
reading in your students, and you will! The key is providing accessible,
age-appropriate texts and doing different activities with each one. Students
can read for enjoyment, read for test preparation, and read to inspire writing!
With some resources and inspiration, you can meet students where they are and
help them on their journey to mastery.
How does nonfiction inspire you? Let
me know in the comments!
Resources from other Coffee Shop teachers:
Nonfiction Assignments for Any Text by Presto PlansAnalyzing Informational Texts by Stacey Lloyd
Exploring Issues and Informational Texts by Room 213
Nonfiction Reading Practice by Tracee Orman
Nonfiction Test Prep Escape Room by The Daring English Teacher
Informational Text Bundle: Inspiring Women, Men, and Non-Binary Figures by The SuperHERO Teacher
