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Shitty scholars publish bad paper claiming english majors can't read well.
Someone brought "They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities" by Susan Carlson, Ananda Jayawardhana, Diane Miniel (CEA Critic, Volume 86, Number 1, March 2024) to my attention today. a pdf of the paper is here
This is an appallingly badly designed study and a seriously flawed paper and the authors should be fucking ashamed of themselves. (Carlson is an English professor, Miniel was one when the research was conducted in the teens, and Jayawardhana is a statistician, all at Pittsburgh State U. Why they ventured all the way to Kansas to conduct their research is a mystery).
They interviewed 85 students majoring in English or English education (mostly juniors and seniors with some sophomores and four freshmen) at two Kansas universities. Each participant took a reading test designed to determine 10th grade literacy, filled out a survey, and then were asked to spend 20 minutes reading the opening seven paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House aloud, pausing to explain the meaning of each sentence as they went along. They were given dictionaries and allowed to look things up in those or on their phones. They were told that it didn't matter if they did not finish going through the passage before time was up. (I'll put the opening paragraphs they used in the first comment below so you don't have to google it on project Gutenberg)
The authors recorded the students reading aloud and explaining the passage to an interviewer, transcribed those recordings, and then tagged and analyzed the transcripts. Their conclusions were that only five percent of the students were able to properly understand the dickens passage ("proficient readers") another 38 percent understood about half the passage ("competent readers"), and 58 percent struggled to understand the passage ("problematic readers"). "Problematic readers often described their reading process as skimming and/or relying on SparkNotes" (page 6).
They conclude that most of the people majoring in English do not have the reading skills necessary for such a major and do not gain those reading skills from their first and second year classes.
This paper has two huge and one large problems.
1. I am probably in or near their top 5% of readers, and I would have struggled and been incredibly frustrated if someone asked me to read the beginning of a Dickens novel one sentence at a time, explaining each sentence as I go along. That's not how novels are intended to work, especially densely written 19th century novels. Reading a whole paragraph, or the whole passage, then going back and working through it bit by bit, sure. But expecting to extract meaning from each sentence in isolation without knowing what's coming in the next sentence -- no fucking way. Fictional prose is intended to *flow*, you can't ask someone to chop it up into bits based on the punctuation and expect those bits to make sense without the context of what comes next.
2. They assigned 21st century American students a passage from a mid 19th century British novel, thereby turning it from a test of whether or not they could read and understand a chunk of complex literary prose, into a test of that *plus* whether or not they had adequate working knowledge of an archaic and foreign prose style, culture, vocabulary, and setting. OF COURSE the students struggled and did poorly in figuring out the meaning of "Michaelmas term," "the Lord Chancellor," and "Lincoln’s Inn Hall" in just the first sentence. Not because they're poor readers, but because they're not 19th century Londoners.
If the researchers had been serious about trying to gauge the students' reading ability without confounding their results with the student's poor familiarity with 170 year old prose style, setting, and culture, they could have assigned them a dense passage from a 20th or 21st century American literary novel. But they didn't. This is the worst kind of bigoted, classist, prior knowledge based intelligence testing. Shame on the authors, and shame on the journal for publishing this crap.
The not so huge but still large problem:
3. Forty-one percent of the study's participants were "English education" majors, not traditional English majors. Even if both majors are taught by the English department, they are very different beasts with very different course requirements that attract very different types of student. One is a major for people who wish to become primary and secondary school teachers of English (aka grammar, literacy, writing, and maybe also age-appropriate novels), the other is for people who enjoy reading and analyzing literature. The authors do not say anything about how the two majors differed in their ability to understand the opening of Bleak House, an omission that makes me raise my eyebrows very high.
In sum: Those who can't, teach. Those who can't do research, write poorly conceived papers on how their students are bad at reading.
***
That said, I am unsurprised that significant numbers of students struggled with the passage. Even aside from the design flaws which artificially lowered the scores of the students in the study, some people who aren't actually interested in reading and thinking about novels get a degree in English as a job credential (like those education majors who were included in the study, who may only be in the English department because it's a path to getting a teaching certificate that doesn't involve math).
And it is a sad fact that secondary schools turn out tons of students each year who have never really learned to read well, some of them with high GPAs. Now that a 4 year degree is required for many jobs that used to be open to high school graduates, they end up taking classes they're not really equipped for.
Which reminds me of something my sister said about her year teaching English at a magnet school in Austin Texas. She was one of the only teachers who stocked her classroom with age appropriate books and encouraged her students to pick out and read ones that appealed to them. The administration and most of the rest of the teachers regarded this sort of thing as a bad idea, because students reading books for fun were not spending time honing the skills needed for doing well on the next standardized test.
To the extent that it's a real problem, and not one manufactured to produce a shocking academic article, it's multi generational at this point. Those who don't read books themselves, have become school teachers and are teaching children to read but not to be able to read very well. Those children grow up, go to college, and frustrate their professors with their lack of reading skills.
This is an appallingly badly designed study and a seriously flawed paper and the authors should be fucking ashamed of themselves. (Carlson is an English professor, Miniel was one when the research was conducted in the teens, and Jayawardhana is a statistician, all at Pittsburgh State U. Why they ventured all the way to Kansas to conduct their research is a mystery).
They interviewed 85 students majoring in English or English education (mostly juniors and seniors with some sophomores and four freshmen) at two Kansas universities. Each participant took a reading test designed to determine 10th grade literacy, filled out a survey, and then were asked to spend 20 minutes reading the opening seven paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House aloud, pausing to explain the meaning of each sentence as they went along. They were given dictionaries and allowed to look things up in those or on their phones. They were told that it didn't matter if they did not finish going through the passage before time was up. (I'll put the opening paragraphs they used in the first comment below so you don't have to google it on project Gutenberg)
The authors recorded the students reading aloud and explaining the passage to an interviewer, transcribed those recordings, and then tagged and analyzed the transcripts. Their conclusions were that only five percent of the students were able to properly understand the dickens passage ("proficient readers") another 38 percent understood about half the passage ("competent readers"), and 58 percent struggled to understand the passage ("problematic readers"). "Problematic readers often described their reading process as skimming and/or relying on SparkNotes" (page 6).
They conclude that most of the people majoring in English do not have the reading skills necessary for such a major and do not gain those reading skills from their first and second year classes.
This paper has two huge and one large problems.
1. I am probably in or near their top 5% of readers, and I would have struggled and been incredibly frustrated if someone asked me to read the beginning of a Dickens novel one sentence at a time, explaining each sentence as I go along. That's not how novels are intended to work, especially densely written 19th century novels. Reading a whole paragraph, or the whole passage, then going back and working through it bit by bit, sure. But expecting to extract meaning from each sentence in isolation without knowing what's coming in the next sentence -- no fucking way. Fictional prose is intended to *flow*, you can't ask someone to chop it up into bits based on the punctuation and expect those bits to make sense without the context of what comes next.
2. They assigned 21st century American students a passage from a mid 19th century British novel, thereby turning it from a test of whether or not they could read and understand a chunk of complex literary prose, into a test of that *plus* whether or not they had adequate working knowledge of an archaic and foreign prose style, culture, vocabulary, and setting. OF COURSE the students struggled and did poorly in figuring out the meaning of "Michaelmas term," "the Lord Chancellor," and "Lincoln’s Inn Hall" in just the first sentence. Not because they're poor readers, but because they're not 19th century Londoners.
If the researchers had been serious about trying to gauge the students' reading ability without confounding their results with the student's poor familiarity with 170 year old prose style, setting, and culture, they could have assigned them a dense passage from a 20th or 21st century American literary novel. But they didn't. This is the worst kind of bigoted, classist, prior knowledge based intelligence testing. Shame on the authors, and shame on the journal for publishing this crap.
The not so huge but still large problem:
3. Forty-one percent of the study's participants were "English education" majors, not traditional English majors. Even if both majors are taught by the English department, they are very different beasts with very different course requirements that attract very different types of student. One is a major for people who wish to become primary and secondary school teachers of English (aka grammar, literacy, writing, and maybe also age-appropriate novels), the other is for people who enjoy reading and analyzing literature. The authors do not say anything about how the two majors differed in their ability to understand the opening of Bleak House, an omission that makes me raise my eyebrows very high.
In sum: Those who can't, teach. Those who can't do research, write poorly conceived papers on how their students are bad at reading.
***
That said, I am unsurprised that significant numbers of students struggled with the passage. Even aside from the design flaws which artificially lowered the scores of the students in the study, some people who aren't actually interested in reading and thinking about novels get a degree in English as a job credential (like those education majors who were included in the study, who may only be in the English department because it's a path to getting a teaching certificate that doesn't involve math).
And it is a sad fact that secondary schools turn out tons of students each year who have never really learned to read well, some of them with high GPAs. Now that a 4 year degree is required for many jobs that used to be open to high school graduates, they end up taking classes they're not really equipped for.
Which reminds me of something my sister said about her year teaching English at a magnet school in Austin Texas. She was one of the only teachers who stocked her classroom with age appropriate books and encouraged her students to pick out and read ones that appealed to them. The administration and most of the rest of the teachers regarded this sort of thing as a bad idea, because students reading books for fun were not spending time honing the skills needed for doing well on the next standardized test.
To the extent that it's a real problem, and not one manufactured to produce a shocking academic article, it's multi generational at this point. Those who don't read books themselves, have become school teachers and are teaching children to read but not to be able to read very well. Those children grow up, go to college, and frustrate their professors with their lack of reading skills.
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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-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 accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. 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. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. 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. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time—as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
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. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. 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, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”
Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor’s court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits. These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever falls from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed dry years upon years ago. The short-hand writers, the reporters of the court, and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. Their places are a blank. Standing on a seat at the side of the hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible judgment to be given in her favour. Some say she really is, or was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one cares. She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls her documents, principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time to make a personal application “to purge himself of his contempt,” which, being a solitary surviving executor who has fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all likely ever to do. In the meantime his prospects in life are ended. Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at the close of the day’s business and who can by no means be made to understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out “My Lord!” in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his rising. A few lawyers’ clerks and others who know this suitor by sight linger on the chance of his furnishing some fun and enlivening the dismal weather a little.
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An Anecdote from my uncle's childhood (he was born in 1956):
One day, his teacher shocked the class by asking them who they thought had done best on the citywide reading assessment, better than the rest of the school, head and shoulders among almost all kids their age. The answer was my uncle. And why? "Because he reads all the time!"
His classmates could not believe it. He read all the time, sure - but he read comic books, how could that help?
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I had to look up:
– Michaelmas Term (modern day: ends in December; I was off thinking it would be in the new year. I forget how short three terms are, but at least I know it (used to live in Oxford)
– Lincoln's Inn Hall and the Lord Chancellor. I'm not sure whether the Old Hall was 'the hall' before the current one was opened in 1845. Contemporaries would know whether this is a marker of time as well as place. Anyway, Lincoln's Inn is in London proper.
– Megalosaurus. This was named in 1824, and I wonder how many people would be familiar with this. It marks the intended readership as somewhat educated. (The first part of Bleak House was published before the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs made it famous in 1854.)
– Holborn Hill. This is close to Lincoln's Inn. Going by the StreetView, it's a moderate rise, not a steep hill. His readers might or might not know.
– history of umbrellas as protection from rain. (First recorded usage, 1708, referring to women. Not really coming into their own in Britain until the 1780s; all the rage in Paris much sooner.) A marker of people without their own carriages; and I have a feeling that 'foot passengers' echoes that. Would have to be more familiar with the literature of the time to know what people walking in an urban environment are usually referred to.
To sum up the paragraph: Dickens sets the scene with a mixture of sentence fragments/short sentences and long, elaborate, winding ones: We're in London, in November, it rains, and things are bleak (mud, soot, people going splat.) He even leads with the Court, though that's a sleight of hand you only appreciate in the last two paragraphs of this excerpt; until then it was just a bit of flavour.
Skimming through the rest, Dickens is still setting the scene right until the end; he starts with very broad strokes (indistinguishable dogs, working horses in blinkers), and paints a bleak picture right from the start mostly using the weather/atmospherics.
The gas lights are another thing I had to look up just to see when they had their heyday. by the time this book was written, they were pretty well established, at least in London, and the point was made that this would have boosted literacy because people could spend more time reading!
He's also spending enough time on the Court; and giving specific details about people there that I'm expected much of the next chapter at least to be set there and dealing with a specific case. (I haven't read Bleak House at all.)
Overall, it feels quite wordy. Leaving aside the fact that Dickens was paid by the word, which encourages wordiness, there's not actually much to trim on sentence level; each little gem of description adds to a very rich overall picture, and while you could cut some, you'd leave the text poorer. There's a lot of poetry in the descriptions, and it feels like something that ought to be read aloud.
Many of the details might have gone over the intended readership's heads, but that's ok, because there are enough details, and what you're missing is likely to be 'some of the richness' rather than 'crucial information needed to understand the book'; and most readers will have recognised *some* of them, just different parts. One might know Holborn Hill, the next the almshouses in Greenwich.
I've come away with a greater appreciation of Dickens than before; much of this opening feels intentional rather than filler, so thank you for that.
What someone who is not familiar with London, with 19th century literature, and without a good historical grounding makes of this I don't know. 'What is this sentence doing' can be a trap because it draws attention away from the overall text: how there isn't a specific narrator, and how we gradually creep from generic Londonness to a specific moment in time.
Given what he did with the Lord Chancellor, I wonder whether some of the details in this introduction might reappear later, but overall, there's too much to keep track of.
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Wordiness: People forget just how profoundly the telegraph transformed prose style in the later 19th century. At some point between Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, authors adopted a much simpler, more direct and less wordy way of writing. I forget where I first read (30+ years ago) that this was due to the telegraph, which charged people by the word, forcing them to be brief. Brevity started in journalism, with a new, short winded style of reportage that cost less for transmitting over the wire, and spread from there to fiction, nonfiction, and basically every kind of writing. The new "telegraphic prose" style was shocking and innovative at first, then it became fashionable, and finally so universal that we only notice its absence when reading work that does not utilize it.
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Then again, I've grown up on Karl May, who'll throw obscure phrases in eight different languages he didn't speak at you, along with the cultural details, and if you're not willing to just keep reading knowing that there'll be stuff you won't understand, again, you'll be stuck on page thirty and never get to the rest of the adventure.
I love how the Lord Chancellor looks like any of the other random flavour details in paragraph 1, and then we read the end of the excerpt, and we know why he was in it in the first place, or how even the question of 'when is the end of Michaelmas term' is answered. Sentence-by-sentence reading REALLY does not work here.
Those students were set up to fail, which makes me angry.
I hadn't made the connection between telegraphs and a shortened style; but it makes sense. I wonder how much newspapers as a whole contributed. And yet my biggest surprise of this year was to actually look at Hemingway (not just his reputation): He's using very short sentences and very plain words. (If you'd given me the dogs/horses segment and asked me who wrote it, Dickens would not have been high on my list, and the only reason I would not have said 'Hemingway' is that Hemingway wrote about cars, not horses.) But it turns out that you can be poetic with plain language,, too; it's all about the rhythm.
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Hemingway: He's one of the names that would occur to me if I was asked to suggest 20th century american authors who might present a challenge to struggling students for a reading skills test. But the paper writers chose a victorian from the pre-telegraph era because they wanted to make more students do badly by tripping them up with unfamiliar terminology and archaic constructions. Evil.
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