English professors often assume that students can read the novels and poetry assigned for their courses. However, like many of our colleagues, we have come to question that assumption. To gain some insight, we conducted a reading test from January to April 2015 to record what happens when 85 college English majors read a literary text completely on their own, with no help from instructors or guidance from other students. Although there has been extensive research on the reading comprehension skills of K-12 and college developmental students, less attention has been paid to the reading skills of average four-year college students, and there are few think-aloud studies for this population. Overall, studies on college reading lag behind similar research on critical thinking and begin to increase in number only after 2019.
…The 85 subjects in our test group came to college with an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which means, according to Educational Testing Service, that they read on a “low-intermediate level,” able to answer only about 60 percent of the questions correctly and usually able only to “infer the main ideas or purpose of straightforward paragraphs in uncomplicated literary narratives,” “locate important details in uncomplicated passages” and “make simple inferences about how details are used in passages” (American College 12). In other words, the majority of this group did not enter college with the proficient-prose reading level necessary to read Bleak House or similar texts in the literary canon. As faculty, we often assume that the students learn to read at this level on their own, after they take classes that teach literary analysis of assigned literary texts. Our study was designed to test this assumption.
…Finally, our subjects with the most challenges relied on commenting— that is, giving personal reactions to the text instead of trying to interpret it. Most of the time, they commented on the mood or difficulty of the passage, and sometimes they generalized so vaguely in a comment that it would be hard to know if they really understood what they had read….
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Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Daniel Milne | “They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities” | CEA Critic 86.1 (2024).
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