They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading

Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern

Universities

Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, Diane Miniel

CEA Critic, Volume 86, Number 1, March 2024, pp. 1-17 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cea.2024.a922346

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346

[67.220.74.226] Project MUSE (2025-05-24 23:07 GMT)

 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel
They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading
Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two
Midwestern Universities1

Abstract. This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading

study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English
majors from two regional Kansas universities. From January to April of
2015, subjects participated in a recorded, twenty-minute reading session
in which they were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Charles
Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each
sentence into plain English. Before subjects started the reading tests, they
were given access to online resources and dictionaries and advised that
they could also use their own cell phones as a resource. The facilitators
also assured the subjects that were free to go at their own pace and did
not have to finish reading all seven paragraphs by the end of the exam. As
part of the study, each subject filled out a survey collecting personal data
(class rank, G.P.A., etc.) and took a national literacy exam (the Degrees of
Reading Power Test 10A). After the 85 taped reading tests were completed,
the results were transcribed and coded.

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 hap-
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pens 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 col-
lege reading lag behind similar research on critical thinking and begin to
increase in number only after 2019 (Van 4). We sought through our study
to deepen our understanding of how college students read, based on previ-
ous studies like those by Christina Haas and Linda Flower (1988), Helen St.
Clair-Thompson, et al. (2018), and Kelly B. Cartwright, et al. (2020).

The CEA Critic 86.1 (March 2024): 1–17.

© 2024 College English Association.
2 The CEA Critic
In general terms, our study was designed to test how college students
create meaning while they read. For our reading sample, we chose the first
seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ 1853 masterpiece, Bleak House. The
first paragraph of the reading sample is stated below.
LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor
sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As
much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired
from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to
meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an
elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from
chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in
it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one
might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable
in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.
Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general
infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-cor-
ners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been
slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke),
adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at
those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at
compound interest. (49)

Students read each sentence out loud and then interpreted the meaning in
their own words—a process Ericsson and Simon (220) called the “think-
aloud” or “talk-aloud” method. In this 1980 article, the writers defend this
strategy as a valid way to gather evidence on cognitive processing. In their
2014 article for Contemporary Education Psychology, C. M. Bohn-Gettler and
P. Kendeou further note how “These verbalizations can provide a measure
of the actual cognitive processes readers engage in during comprehen-
sion” (208). Because we wanted to observe how much complex information
English majors could obtain from the passage, we decided against other
reading comprehension testing methods such as the “span task” (where
subjects recall “end-of-sentence words” on a series of sentences) (Friedman
136). We wanted as well to record how subjects understood each sentence
in the passage, so we did not choose a broader think-aloud test. which,
Bohn-Gettler and Kendeou explain, “allows participants to choose when to
think-aloud during reading” to measure a reader’s “global” understanding
of a text (209).
A principal concern for us was to test whether the subjects had
reached a level of “proficient-prose literacy,” which is defined by the
U. S. Department of Education as the capability of “reading lengthy, com-
plex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making
complex inferences” (National Center 3). According to ACT, Inc., this
level of literacy translates to a 33–36 score on the Reading Comprehension
section of the ACT (Reading). Literary prose can be even more difficult to
comprehend because it requires the ability to interpret unfamiliar diction
 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel 3
and figures of speech. Dickens’ novel worked we as an example of liter-
ary prose because his writing contains frequent complex sentences and
language that often moves from the literal to the figurative. In Bleak House,
Dickens also mixes specific, contemporary references (from the book’s first
publication in 1852–3) to his 1820s setting. In addition, Bleak House is a stan-
dard in college literature classes and, so, is important for English Education
students, who often are called on to teach Great Expectations and A Tale of
Two Cities in high schools. Our assumption was that English majors, who
study similar types of literature and are trained in poetic language, should
be able to look up unfamiliar references and understand most of the literal
meaning from this novel’s first paragraphs.
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.

A Profile of Participants and Preliminary Data-Gathering

Of the 85 undergraduate English majors in our study, 58 came from one
Kansas regional university (KRU1) and 27 from another (and neighboring)
one (KRU2). Both universities are similar in size and student population,
and in 2015, incoming freshmen from both universities had an average
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ACT Reading score of 22.4 out of a possible 36 points, above the national
ACT Reading score of 21.4 for that same year (ACT Profile 2015 9). All our
subjects signed a consent form, which stated that their identities would
remain anonymous and that their names would not be used in any presen-
tation or publication. At KRU1, we gathered volunteers for our study from
seven English classes; at KRU2, we set up our study outside the English
Department and asked individual students to participate.
Prior to our test, each subject filled out a survey that asked for per-
sonal data and took the Degrees of Reading Power Test 10A, a national
exam to establish a base tenth-grade literacy level. Almost all the student
participants were Caucasian, two-thirds were female, and almost all had
graduated from Kansas public high schools. All except three self-reported
“A’s” and “B’s” in their English courses. The number of African-American
and Latino subjects was too small a group to be statistically representative.
4 The CEA Critic
35 percent of our study’s subjects were seniors, 34 percent were juniors,
19 percent were sophomores, and four percent were freshman, with the
remaining eight percent of subjects unknown for this category. 41 percent
of our subjects were English Education majors, and the rest were English
majors with a traditional emphasis like Literature or Creative Writing
As for the results of the Degrees of Reading test, most of our subjects
scored in the 85-to-100 percent range on the test, with a few scoring from
41 to 69 percent. The following is a breakdown of the reading test scores
of all 85 subjects:

Reading Score Range Percentage of Subjects Number of Subjects

90–100 64% 54 of 85
80–89 17% 14 of 85
70–79 4% 3 of 85
41–69 4% 3 of 85

*N/A (did not complete test) 11% 11 of 85

After the tests from Bleak House were analyzed, the test results were divided
into three reading categories of reading abilities: problematic, competent,
and proficient. We then compared the 10th-grade reading scores against
the reading test results. All our subjects who scored 79 percent or less on
the 10th-grade literacy test were also evaluated as problematic readers of
Bleak House. However, 59 percent of the problematic readers scored a 90
or above on the literacy test, suggesting that the ability to read on a 10th-
grade level does not ensure that students have the proficient-prose literacy
skills to read complex texts.
Each taped reading test began with a brief questionnaire in which sub-
jects were asked to give authors and titles of specific nineteenth-century
American and British literary works and to explain briefly what they knew
about nineteenth-century American and British history and culture. The
purpose of these questions was to see how much literary and/or cultural
knowledge the subjects possessed. According to Wolfgang Iser in The Act
of Reading, one’s ability to read complex literature is partly dependent on
one’s knowledge of what he calls the “repertoire” of the text, “the form
of references to earlier works, or to social and historical norms, or to the
whole culture from which the text has emerged” (69). With Bleak House, this
knowledge is crucial.
The results from the questionnaire revealed that most of these subjects
could not rely on previous knowledge to help them with Bleak House; in
fact, they could not remember much of what they had studied in previous
or current English classes. When we asked our subjects to name British
and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent
of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at
most only one author or title on their own. The majority also could not
 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel 5
access any detail on the information they recalled; they could mention
the Industrial Revolution, for example, but could not define what it was.
These results suggest that the majority of the subjects in our study were
not transferring the literary texts or information from previous classes into
their long-term memories.

Individual Think-Aloud Study

Our next step was the individual think-aloud study. Each subject was test-
ed in a private, one-on-one taped 20-minute session with a facilitator. We
made sure that the facilitators were not familiar with the specific subjects
whom they were testing. For the KRU1 study, the facilitators were English
graduate students; for the KRU2 study, the facilitators were English under-
graduate students from KRU1. During the sessions, subjects were asked to
read out loud and then translate each sentence of the passage from Bleak
House. Subjects were encouraged to go at their own pace and were not
required to finish the entire passage. Those who were uncomfortable read-
ing out loud had the option to read silently.
Because we wanted to see how well students could read a complex
text on their own, we told the facilitators not to help the subjects interpret
the text. Instead, facilitators were there to record how subjects were under-
standing the material and to stop them every few sentences to request an
interpretation. The taped recordings show that facilitators followed this
training and politely refused any request for help from subjects. Facilitators
also provided subjects with access to online resources and dictionaries and
told them that they could also use their own cell phones as a resource.
If subjects did go to Google or an outside website for help, the facilitator
recorded that fact. At the end of each reading study, the facilitator asked
each subject a brief series of questions on what the subject thought would
happen next and their comfort level in reading the rest of the novel. These
questions were designed to see how well our subjects understood the pas-
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sage and how they perceived their own success with reading the text. All
responded that they believed that they could read the rest of Bleak House
with no problem.
After all the reading tests were completed, the taped read-aloud ses-
sions were transcribed, coded, and organized into two categories: (1)
narration (with 18 codes for activities like mispronunciation, skipping
words, etc.) and (2) reading comprehension (with 62 codes of actions,
including misunderstanding a metaphor or defining a figure of speech cor-
rectly). The data were then transferred to Excel sheets, where Dr. Ananda
Jayawardhana, a mathematics professor at our university verified the final
results.
6 The CEA Critic
Major Findings and Reading Categories
Given the results, we placed the 85 subjects from both universities into
three categories of readers: problematic, competent, and proficient. A
summary of our major conclusions gives some basic data for our ensuing
discussion:
* 58 percent (49 of 85 subjects) understood so little of the intro-
duction to Bleak House that they would not be able to read the
novel on their own. However, these same subjects (defined in
the study as problematic readers) also believed they would
have no problem reading the rest of the 900-page novel.
* Problematic readers often described their reading process as
skimming and/or relying on SparkNotes.
* The majority of the 85 subjects used vague generalizations to
summarize compound-complex sentences.
* 38 percent (or 32 of the 85 subjects) could understand more
vocabulary and figures of speech than the problematic readers.
These competent readers, however, could interpret only about
half of the literal prose in the passage.
* Only 5 percent (4 of the 85 subjects) had a detailed, literal
understanding of the first paragraphs of Bleak House.

The following is the breakdown by class year:

Seniors Juniors Sophomores Freshmen N/A (did not

complete
questionnaire)
Problematic 31% (15/49) 37% (18/49) 16% (8/49) 8% (4/49) 8% (4/49)
Readers
Competent 44% (14/32) 31% (10/32) 16% (5/32) 0% (0/32) 9% (3/32)
Readers
Proficient 25% (1/4) 50% (2/4) 25% (1/4) 0% (0/4) 0% (0/4)
Readers

Overall, we found that problematic readers had no successful reading

tactics to help them understand Bleak House, so they became quickly lost
and floundered throughout the reading test. Competent readers were not
so lost because they came to the reading test with a larger vocabulary and
could thereby understand more of Dickens’ language. They were, how-
ever, as likely as the problematic readers to avoid translating more difficult
language or extended figures of speech. The only active readers were in the
proficient group (five percent of the test subjects). These readers immedi-
ately recognized when they were lost and were able to turn back and use
successful tactics to understand the meaning of each clause and phrase in
an extended sentence. Because they were able to understand much more of
the concrete detail in each sentence, they could follow Dickens’ narrative
 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel 7
in Bleak House. They could translate some of the figurative language as well
and understood some of the major symbolic meanings of the passage.

Problematic Readers
Because problematic readers constituted 58 percent (or 49 of the 85) of
our subjects in our study, we’ll focus our discussion on this category. The
majority of these subjects could understand very little of Bleak House and
did not have effective reading tactics. All had so much trouble compre-
hending concrete detail in consecutive clauses and phrases that they could
not link the meaning of one sentence to the next. Although it was clear that
these subjects did try to use various tactics while they read the passage,
they were not able to use those tactics successfully. For example, 43 percent
of the problematic readers tried to look up words they did not understand,
but only five percent were able to look up the meaning of a word and place
it back correctly into a sentence. The subjects frequently looked up a word
they did not know, realized that they did not understand the sentence the
word had come from, and skipped translating the sentence altogether.
Dickens’ rhetorical style is, to say the least, unfamiliar, so entering
his world entails making imaginative leaps and consistently thinking
on a higher level. None of the subjects in the problematic category had
the reading skills to meet this challenge. Although many could vaguely
understand the focus of each of Dickens’ descriptions (they saw the mud
and fog, for example), they could not interpret the literal, concrete details
that composed each description. A special challenge for problematic read-
ers was legal language and information. Often, these readers were also too
confused to recognize that Bleak House begins by focusing on a law court: 71
percent of the problematic readers (or 35 of the 49) had no idea that Dickens
was focusing on a court of law, a judge, and lawyers. Their misunderstand-
ing happened even though “Chancery” (a specific type of English court
where the head Judge [the “Lord Chancellor”] and other judges would
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make decisions on legal trusts, divisions of property, the property of “luna-

tics,” and the guardians for infants and orphans [“Chancery Division”])
and “Lincoln’s Inn Hall” (the building that held the Court of Chancery
[“Illustration”]) are mentioned in the first sentence as well as in the pas-
sage’s ending with its talk of solicitors and a long list of law documents:
On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause, some
two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who
made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a
line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth
at the bottom of it), between the registrar’s red table and the silk
gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions,
affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, moun-
tains of costly nonsense, piled before them. (50)
8 The CEA Critic
It is understandable that problematic readers skipped over “In Chancery”
and “Lincoln’s Inn Hall” in the first two sentences because they could
assume they would understand this language later in the reading.
However, based on the reading tests, none of the subjects subsequently
looked up any of the legal language, and the 39 percent who guessed cor-
rectly that the setting was “a court” or the Lord Chancellor was “a judge”
never went further to understand the Court of Chancery in any more
depth. The subjects’ understanding of the setting thus remained vague,
and they were not able to interpret most of the concrete legal details in the
text. A typical case will stand for the rest:
Original Text: LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the
Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
Subject: And I don’t know exactly what “Lord Chancellor”
is—some a person of authority, so that’s probably what I would
go with. “Sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall,” which would be like
a maybe like a hotel or something so [Ten-second pause. The
student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily.] O.K.,
so “Michaelmas Term is the first academic term of the year,” so,
Lincoln’s Inn Hall is probably not a hotel [Laughs].
[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers,
I’m just gonna skip that.]

The subject was far from alone in her reading process, a situation we
explored from a wider perspective.
The three main reading tactics that problematic readers used were
oversimplifying, guessing, and commenting. The most common was over-
simplifying—that is, reducing the details of a complex sentence to a generic
statement. In the first paragraphs of Bleak House, Dickens follows the fog on
the river Thames as it moves from the center of London and winds down
to the Essex marshes, 51 miles away from the city. He then centers on the
shipyard in the Holborn District of London, the same district that included
Lincoln’s Inn, the home of the Court of Chancery. Again, one subject’s
response will stand for the others:
Original Text: Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits
and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among
the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and
dirty) city.
Facilitator: O.K.
Subject: There’s just fog everywhere.
(A few minutes later in the taped session.)
Original Text: Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier brigs; fog
lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships;
fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.
Facilitator: O.K. So, what do you see in this sentence besides fog?
Subject: I know there’s train, and there’s like, like the industrial
part of the city?
Facilitator: O.K.
 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel 9
By reducing all these details in the passage to vague, generic language, the
subject does not read closely enough to follow the fog as it moves through-
out the shipyards. And, as she continues to skip over almost all the con-
crete details in the following sentences, she never recognizes that this literal
fog, as it expands throughout London, becomes a symbol for the confusion,
disarray, and blindness of the Court of Chancery.
96 percent of the problematic readers used oversimplified phrases at
least once to summarize a sentence in the test passage while 61 percent
used this method for five or more sentences. Often, subjects used this tactic
as a shortcut when they became overwhelmed by a sentence with multiple
clauses. One subject disclosed that oversimplifying was her normal tactic,
explaining, “I normally don’t try to analyze individual sentences as I’m
reading something. I try to look at the overall bigger picture of what’s
going on.” Another subject said that she separated reading from thinking:
“I’m just reading it [the text]; I’m not thinking about it yet.” Those subjects,
however, who relied on oversimplification became more and more lost as
they continued to read the test passage. In fact, 82 percent of the problem-
atic readers told the facilitators that they were confused at least once dur-
ing the test, and 26 percent said they were lost five or more times.
The second most commonly used tactic by problematic readers was
guessing. Instead of looking up the definition of a word or phrase, these
subjects often just guessed at the meaning. 75 percent of the readers did
so incorrectly and then misread that section of the sentence. This prob-
lem, however, did not occur all the time: 41 percent of these same readers
guessed the right meaning of a word, and 20 percent who defined a word
incorrectly did not continue to misinterpret the language that followed.
Many problematic readers seemed to rely on guessing as a last resort
because most did not, or perhaps could not, connect the meaning of one
sentence to the next. The subjects’ inability to understand the literal mean-
ing of Bleak House might be one reason they continued to rely on guessing,
however arbitrary or irrational the results. In a typical example, the result
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is that a subject ventures far from the text’s meaning:

Original Text: On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High
Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy
glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and
curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a
little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing
his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see
nothing but fog.
Subject: Describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great
whiskers?
Facilitator: [Laughs.]
Subject: A cat?

Note that the subject, who is not accessing any of the concrete details in the
passage, finds a subject (the Lord Chancellor) and one recognizable word,
10 The CEA Critic
“whiskers,” and concludes that the character is in a room with a cat. At
this point, she does not seem to understand what she is reading, and so she
links a few words together to form some kind of response.
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:
Facilitator: O.K. I’ll stop you there. Uh, what do you take from
that passage?
Subject: I think, uh, he’s trying to basically give the atmosphere
of where things are at the time, trying to build the scene.

This subject’s comments would be fine were they to have moved from
remarking on the scene to translating the specific language in the passage.
The subject, however, along with other problematic readers, consistently
turned to commentary to avoid translating Dickens’ language altogether.
92 percent of the problematic readers chose this tactic instead of translating
at least one sentence in the passage, and 45 percent replaced interpretation
with commentary in five or more sentences. Some subjects gave general
comments on five or six sentences in succession and then struggled when
they were asked to explain the literal meaning of that same text. Two of the
49 subjects in the problematic category used commentary to explain fifteen
or more sentences on the reading test.
Beyond their reading tactics, problematic readers were continually
challenged by the figures of speech that are woven into the novel’s descrip-
tions. 57 percent of the subjects would ignore a figure of speech altogether
and try to translate the literal meanings around it while 41 percent would
interpret at least one figure of speech literally, even if it made no sense in
the context of the sentence. One subject even imagined dinosaurs lumber-
ing around London:
Original Text: As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had
but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be
wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, wad-
dling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
Subject: [Pause.] [Laughs.] So it’s like, um, [Pause.] the mud was
all in the streets, and we were, no . . . [Pause.] so everything’s been
like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus
bones but he’s says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill.

The subject cannot make the leap to figurative language. She first guesses
that the dinosaur is just “bones” and then is stuck stating that the bones
are “waddling, um, all up the hill” because she can see that Dickens has the
dinosaur moving. Because she cannot logically tie the ideas together, she
just leaves her interpretation as is and goes on to the next sentence. Like
 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel 11
this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their lit-
eral translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors
never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category
ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter
how irrational the results. Worse, their inability to understand figurative
language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least
two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech. Some could
correctly identify a figure of speech, and even explain its use in a sentence,
but correct responses were inconsistent and haphazard. None of the prob-
lematic readers showed any evidence that they could read recursively or
fix previous errors in comprehension. They would stick to their reading
tactics even if they were unhappy with the results.
Why would all the problematic readers be so sure they could read the
rest of Bleak House on their own when they had such trouble understand-
ing the first seven paragraphs of the novel? According to their responses at
the end of the reading tests, many subjects in the category defined reading
Bleak House as skimming the text and relying on SparkNotes (which give
plot summaries, characterizations, and analyses) to understand what they
had just read. 35 percent (17 of the 49) would rely heavily on SparkNotes to
understand the basic meaning of the text. 12 percent (six of the 49) relied
on other outside sources like Google or Wikipedia. These subjects seemed to
use outside sources as the main way to understand what they could not
comprehend on their own. As one subject said, “If I was to read this [Bleak
House] by itself and didn’t use anything like that [SparkNotes], I don’t think
I would actually understand what’s going on 100% of the time.” Even those
subjects who did not mention relying on outside sources usually equated
active reading with some type of skimming. For example, one subject said
she would read Bleak House by “skim[ming] through most of the novel and
read[ing] only certain passages in detail.” Several of the problematic read-
ers in this category admitted that they had successfully used skimming and
SparkNotes to read Jane Austen’s novels and Shakespeare’s plays in other
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English classes.

Competent Readers
The competent readers in our study, who constituted 38 percent (or 32
of the 85) of our subjects, were better readers than the problematic group
because they knew more vocabulary and could interpret some figurative
language. 88 percent could accurately guess the meanings of some words.
Some looked up definitions, and 35 percent were able to look up a defini-
tion and then use that word correctly in a translation of the sentence. As a
result, most of the competent readers understood about half of the literal
prose in the passage. They also could recognize more figures of speech:
some were able, for example, to interpret the meaning of Dickens’ similes,
12 The CEA Critic
and some could just guess that certain words, like “fog,” might be sym-
bolic. Because these readers had a grasp of the generic meaning of most
sentences, they could keep moving through the first few paragraphs of
Bleak House without feeling completely lost.
The results were not all good. The competent readers, like the problem-
atic group, were not active in their practice: 96 percent would define words
incorrectly and 46 percent would skip words they did not understand.
Essentially, they were comfortable with their confusion. If they became lost
translating a sentence or a figure of speech, they would often just make an
arbitrary guess or skip that section and move on. In the following example,
the subject seems to want to breeze through the translation quickly and has
to be reminded to translate by the facilitator:
Original Text: LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and
the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable
November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters
had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would
not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so,
waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke
lowering down . . .
Facilitator: Before you go on, I’m going to ask you to kind of
explain.
Subject: Oh, O.K.
Facilitator: what you read so far, so.
Subject: O.K. Two characters it’s pointed out this Michaelmas
and Lord Chancellor described as sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
Facilitator: O.K.
Subject: Um, talk about the November weather. Uh, mud in the
streets. And, uh, I do probably need to look up “Megolasaurus”—
“meet a Megolasaurus, forty feet long or so,” so it’s probably
some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talk-
ing about encountering in the streets. And “wandering like
an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” So, yup, I think we’ve
encountered some kind of an animal these, these characters have,
have met in the street. yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind
of an animal these, these characters have, have met in the street.

The subject does not really understand what is happening in the passage
and makes guesses that do not help her comprehension. For example,
she decides that “Michaelmas Term” is a person instead of a set term
(September or late October to December for law courts and universities
[“Michaelmas term”]). She also does not look up “Megalosaurus” (though
she says she will) and assumes the word means “some kind of an animal,”
which ensures that she will not notice the figurative image of a dinosaur
walking down a London street.
Because the majority of subjects in the competent category were pas-
sive readers, they would probably give up their attempts to read Bleak
 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel 13
House after a few chapters. In the reading tests, most of the competent read-
ers began to move to vague summaries of the sentences halfway through
the passage and did not look up definitions of words, even after they were
confused by the language. None of the subjects in this group was actively
trying to link the ideas of one section to the next or build a “big picture”
meaning of the narrative. Like the problematic readers, most would
interpret specific details in each sentence without linking ideas together.
Without recursive tactics for comprehension, it is probable that their reli-
ance on generic or partial translation would run out of steam, and they
would eventually become too lost to understand what they were reading.
For example, 59 percent of competent readers did not look up legal words
like “Chancery” or “advocate,” and by the end of their reading tests, 55
percent had no idea that the passage was focused on lawyers and a court-
room. However, six of the 32 competent readers were much better readers
who understood more of the literal prose in Bleak House. They actively
looked up some terms and were more skilled than other competent readers
in interpreting figures of speech. Though they did not understand as much
of the text as the proficient readers, and read very slowly, they could prob-
ably comprehend more of Bleak House than the other competent readers.

Proficient Readers
Only five percent (or four of the 85) of the subjects in our study were pro-
ficient readers who could translate most of the literal prose in the passage
and had the reading tactics to understand most of Bleak House on their own.
They stood out because they continually looked up words they did not
know. They clearly had a better basic vocabulary than the other student
readers: they could correctly guess, for example, the meanings of words
like “implacable” and “pensioners.” They could also recognize figurative
language and avoided the trap of translating metaphors and similes liter-
ally. With these abilities, proficient readers comprehended many of the
[67.220.74.226] Project MUSE (2025-05-24 23:07 GMT)

details in each sentence and could interpret successive phrases and clauses
of a sentence to grasp its full meaning. One subject in this category demon-
strated this higher level of comprehension:
Original Text: Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas,
in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at
street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers
have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day
ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud,
sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accu-
mulating at compound interest.
Subject: And he’s talking about foot traffic within the city. I
said London first, I didn’t say that out loud, but it’s taking place
in London and he’s talking about the foot traffic and how the
weather is creating an ill temper between people and every-
14 The CEA Critic
body’s jostling and fighting with each other for a position on
streets that are paved, it’s not a pavement, it’s a mess so it’s not
perfectly smooth and level. And so people are “slipping and slid-
ing” on cobblestone or whatever it happens to be and he’s con-
necting that with the past and saying how they’re just the latest
generation of people to be walking and jostling in bad weather
through these, through these stones that other people have
gone before them and done these exact same things, uh, and it
accumulates at “compound interest,” um, [Pause.] “adding new
deposits to the crust upon crust of mud sticking at those points
tenaciously to the pavement,” and “accumulating,” I’m assuming,
“compound interest” means it’s interest on top of interest, so,
it’s, the mud is growing exponentially if you will. And that’s one
whole paragraph right there.

The difference in this reading test is immediately clear: instead of mak-

ing a generalized statement to summarize the entire sentence, the subject
carefully attempts to interpret each successive clause. He is interested in
the details of the setting, stating that the setting is in London and then try-
ing to find a reason why so many people would be “slipping and sliding”
on the road. (Perhaps, he thinks, it is because the street is constructed of
cobblestones instead of pavement.) He then finds a good way to explain
Dickens’ clause, “where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have
been slipping and sliding since the day broke,” by stating that the people
in this sentence are just the “latest generation” to be walking in the mud
that day. This subject is also able to define what “compound interest” is
and shows how this financial term is being used by Dickens to describe the
layers of mud in the street. The subject’s ability to comprehend details and
create meaning makes him a proficient reader.
In terms of the passage’s meaning to the novel’s plot, all the proficient
readers knew that Dickens was discussing a judge, lawyers, and a court
of law. They could link major ideas together and find patterns in Dickens’
imagery that helped them build a better understanding of the content. For
example, one subject was able to recognize a recurring pattern by linking
the “mud” reference in the fourth paragraph (“the muddy streets are mud-
diest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction . . . Temple Bar”) to Dickens’
first reference of mud in the fourth sentence of Bleak House. Finally, the pro-
ficient readers’ knowledge of historical details, whether nineteenth-century
pollution from coal, child labor, or the British custom of judges wearing
wigs, allowed these readers to fill in some context and understand Dickens’
specific references to life in the 1820s.

Dropping Literacy Skills in High-School Students and College

Graduates
Recent studies indicate the students in this study who have trouble read-
ing are not alone. Nationally, many American college graduates are not
 Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, and Diane Miniel 15
reaching proficient levels of prose literacy. According to the findings of a
report by the Educational Testing Service Center for Research on Human
Capital and Education in 2019, “One of every five bachelor’s degree hold-
ers among employed college graduates ages 21 to 65 lacks some important
skills in literacy” (Fogg 1). The last ACT report in 2022, two years after the
COVID-19 pandemic, reported the lowest national ACT scores in thirty
years (“Average”), with the average Reading Comprehension score at 20.4
(ACT Profile 2022 9). The newest test scores of middle- and high-school stu-
dents also show a drop in skills. Sarah Mervosh observes in an article from
the New York Times, “Nationwide, two in three eighth graders are not read-
ing with proficiency, according to the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, a rigorous exam overseen by the U.S. Education Department.
Nearly one in three falls ‘below basic,’ meaning they have not demonstrat-
ed even partial mastery of the comprehension and analysis skills expected
for their age” (1A). University faculty will probably see even more students
who have trouble reading because today’s eighth-graders will soon enough
be college students.
At this point, we must ask two obvious questions: Why is proficient
prose literacy so important? Why does the ability to read complex texts
matter if college students can still graduate with good grades, find employ-
ment, and earn entry into graduate schools?
Although there are many graduates who probably succeed without
advanced reading skills, the evidence from long-term studies reveal
that lower literacy skills affect college graduates throughout their pro-
fessional careers. The PIACC (Programme for the Assessment of Adult
Competencies) has been continually testing since 2012 what it formulates
as “the literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving” skills of the working-
age population (ages 16–65) in over 40 countries, including the U.S.,
(“Program” 1). The research has shown that high literacy rates in reading
and math are a main indicator of professional and financial success. From
the PIACC results in 2014, only 12.9 percent of the U.S. population had a
[67.220.74.226] Project MUSE (2025-05-24 23:07 GMT)

4 or 5 literacy level, which is the level of reading proficiency needed to

understand Dickens’ novels and most other texts in the literary canon (U.S.
Department of Education). According to an ETS Center report, which ana-
lyzed the PIACC data, those with the highest literacy skills will make 38
percent more a month than other college graduates (Fogg 30). The report
observed that “College graduates with higher levels of literacy and numer-
acy proficiency also had a higher likelihood of working in a CLM (college
labor market) occupation” (Fogg 21). It does not stop there. A student who
graduates college with below-level literacy (a “3” on a 5-point scale) risks
becoming what the ETS calls the “mal-employed”—that is, “an employed
college graduate who works in a job that does not require the proficiencies
associated with a college degree to obtain employment in the occupation”
(Fogg 13). The “mal-employed” were earning wages that were only 14
percent higher than their colleagues with high school degrees while those
16 The CEA Critic
employed in the CLM were making 125 percent more a month than high
school graduates (Fogg 32–33).
Our study has proven valuable to us, but more work needs to be done.
There has been a great deal of research on the reading comprehension of
K-12 students, but less attention has been paid to the literacy skills of those
college students who are not defined as developmental readers. This lit-
eracy issue may also prove more challenging as students from the COVID-
19 Generation enter college. In the end, the lesson is clear: if we teachers in
the university ignore our students’ actual reading levels, we run the risk of
passing out diplomas to students who have not mastered reading complex
texts and who, as a result, might find that their literacy skills prevent them
from achieving their professional goals and personal dreams.

Pittsburg State University

Notes
1This project was completed with research assistance from Randee Baty, Jonathan
Boydston, Sarah Chenoweth, Anna Drenick, Michelle Gorges, Lori Hartness Heidi
Hartong, Anna Hinton, Jennifer Katzer, Lindsey Lockhart, Sherry Moentmann,
Michael Morton, Matthew Rohner, Tyherah Sayles, Courtney Schlund, Carmen
Seeley, Glenn Storey, Jadie Veatch and Hannah Walker

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