Teaching Literature

An engaged reader is internally motivated “choosing to read for a variety of purposes, such as gaining new knowledge, escaping into the literary world of the text, and learning how to perform a task.” (Gambrell, 1996)

An engaged reader is knowledgeable, in that he or she connects existing knowledge gained from prior textual, personal, as well as social contexts with new information in order to generate richer and more coherent meanings and to extend further understandings from text.

The engaged reader is also strategic, in terms of employing self-regulatory and sophisticated learning strategies, and actively exerting mental effort to comprehend text and guide one's reading. In other words, learners are cognitively engaged when they are able to regulate their own learning processes, plan, monitor, and evaluate their comprehension, or else use meaningful high-level strategies that include, for example, questioning, predicting, interpreting, and summarizing to foster interpretation of text's challenging ideas and concepts (Almasi et al., 1996).

Likewise, a highly engaged reader is socially interactive, embedding knowledge gained from text and personal experience in meaningful social environments in order to interact, share and communicate with other readers in constructing and stimulating interpersonal and social understanding.