Establishing a Purpose for Reading

Student interest and affective dimensions impact the level of "text coherence and background knowledge" (Wade, Schraw, Buxton, & Hayes, 1993, p. 108) acquired by the reader. Just what is considered interesting information? According to Anderson, Shirley, Wilson, and Fielding (1984) and Schank (1979), interesting material is usually emotionally involving for the reader, suspenseful, and/or personalized. Certainly providing culturally relevant materials allows teachers to expand the interest levels of our students.

Wade and Adams (1990) have shown that textual material that was considered interesting and important was recalled best and that details supporting main ideas were also remembered better when the material was considered interesting. In fact, Wade et al. (1993) present evidence for improved long-term and short-term memory recall of information that is highly interesting to the reader. These authors also add that "...background knowledge clearly affects whether readers find a text segment interesting, easy to read, and memorable..." (Wade et al., 1993, p. 110). Additionally, the text material must allow for interaction between the reader and author.

Activities that set up real purposes for reading and model explicit strategies for managing the text can be expected to enhance the reading-learning process. For example, if complete understanding of material is needed, students might "...preview it, take notes, and question themselves about it..." (Moore, Moore, Cunningham, & Cunningham, 1994, p. 89).

Preview guides with dialogue or information from stories can be used to establish a reading purpose. The teacher provides dialogue from a story to preview some of the content. Students make predictions and look for story clues as they read. This helps to create a reading purpose by establishing background for the reading and actively engaging the reader to interact with the text.