Reading Process Journals

Introduction

With complicated novels, it is often useful for students to use a journal to record their impressions, questions, and other insights as they read. A journal can also be a useful instrument during class discussions; if students have recorded their thoughts in their journals, they can refer to them during discussions. The reading process journal is more structured than either the dialectical journal or the reader's response journal.

With a more complicated novel, such as Frankenstein, students should be encouraged to use analytical tools to help them make meaning of what they read. Often, students believe there is one meaning or a hidden meaning to literature. It is, thus, important to encourage them in their own critical inquiry. By writing about and talking about literature, students learn that the text's "meaning" is dependent on the person's own experiences and point of view. As readers, we all bring to our reading different background information; we notice different details; and we focus our attention in different ways. When students become comfortable with this idea, they will be better able to discover and share their own literary insights.

Objectives

Students will:

• gain a better understanding of the novel through a writing process based on reading;
• develop a basis to ask questions during class discussions;
• advance from a highly personal reaction toward the work to a more critical assessment;
• reflect on how the novel relates to them in their society;
• speculate how the novel relates to the biotechnology issues being taught in their other classes.

Procedure

• Ask students what experiences they have had with writing journals or logs for their reading. Discuss the reasons that journals are used.
• Work through the directions for the reading process journal with students.
• Choose a short part - perhaps the first chapters - of the novel to have students read in class and work through the process journal.
• The teacher can assign reading process journals for specific reading assignments or as an on-going activity throughout the novel.

Reading Process Journal Directions

1. Read through the assigned reading without making any notation. Read slowly to gain an overall understanding.
2. After glancing through the assigned reading a second time, write a journal about your reading, in which you describe your process of reading, using the following questions as a guideline. The questions are meant as a guide and do not ALL have to be answered each time. They are meant to give the students a focus for their reading so that they begin to see the patterns and narrative tools the author uses.
1. What were your first impressions of what you read? Write freely.
2. What questions did you have about the text? What words or phrases were difficult for you to understand?
3. What connections could you make to your own experience or to other literature you have read or movies that you've seen?
4. What are the connections to biotechnology issues?
5. How might Victor have viewed biotechnology?
6. What ideas, images, or details strike you?
7. Are there words that are repeated?
8. How would you describe the tone or mood of the reading assignment?
9. How does this reading assignment relate to the whole work? Do you see any patterns emerging?
10. What meanings are expressed in the reading?
3. In your journals begin with first reactions and move to more complicated reactions. The journals can be very conversational in nature.

Reading Process Journals should not be the end assignment; instead, the journals should be used as a way to get someplace new. The following lists some of the uses for these journals:

• discussion starter - students read parts of the responses they have written, and the teacher begins the discussion from that point; the students feel validated hearing their thoughts discussed by the class.
• authentic audience - gives students a wider audience than simply the teacher; a partner, a small group, or the entire class may be their audience.
• variety of ideas - each student's response presents the group with new view of the text, thereby giving students multiple interpretations towards which to respond.
• discussion topics - the items for discussion can be generated by reading process journals; students list questions/topics they want to discuss on an overhead or on flip-chart for later discussion.