Bentonville And Springdale High Schools Adopt Critical Reading Class

Candis Harrell, teacher at Har-Ber High School, hands out an assignment Wednesday to juniors, from left, Viviana Contreras, 15, Milvia Linares, 17, and Theodor Peren, 17, in her critical reading class at the school in Springdale.
Candis Harrell, teacher at Har-Ber High School, hands out an assignment Wednesday to juniors, from left, Viviana Contreras, 15, Milvia Linares, 17, and Theodor Peren, 17, in her critical reading class at the school in Springdale.

SPRINGDALE — Rallalyn Kelwan and Steven Arevalo said they avoided reading before taking the new critical reading class at Springdale High School.

Springdale, Har-Ber and Bentonville high schools implemented new critical reading classes this year to help students increase their reading levels and comprehension skills, according to school officials.

Critical reading is the ability for an individual to understand what they are reading by finding details and evidence in a text, said Jane Hugo, senior project manager for ProLiteracy, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting literacy skills among adults in the United States.

Critical reading skills can help people attain better jobs, Hugo said. Jobs required a lower standard of critical reading skills 20 or 30 years ago. Now, people need to be able to read technical manuals to perform many specific tasks.

What It Means

Critical Reading

Critical reading is the ability for someone to understand what they are reading through finding details and evidence in a text. These skills also include understanding foreshadowing, predicting what comes next in a story and figuring out what a word means by finding clues in the sentence the word is in.

If more students in the area have critical reading skills, there will be a more educated work force in the future, said Pete Joenks, principal of Springdale High School. This could mean a better economy in Northwest Arkansas.

Arevalo, 17, said he didn’t read much before taking the critical reading class because he had trouble understanding what he was reading. He had trouble finding the main idea of a text.

“Sometimes it’s hard to understand what the author is trying to communicate,” he said.

Arevalo said he will need these skills for the career he wants to pursue. He wants to be a sound engineer for musicians, and said he will need to be able to read critically so he can understand the instructions for the different devices he will use.

Kelwan, 17, also said she didn’t read much before taking the class. When she read, she would ignore words she didn’t understand and that would sometimes make a sentence or paragraph confusing. The class is helping her to not only learn new vocabulary, but also figure out what a word means through other parts of a sentence.

“Being in this class makes me want to read more,” she said.

Thirty million adults in the United States were reading at or below third-grade level in 2003, Hugo said. In Arkansas, 14 percent of adults read at or below third-grade level.

“This is a national issue,” she said. “People need a higher level of education or training.”

A lot of students get to high school without critical reading skills because most English classes focus on the content of a text and not the skills that help students understand what they’re reading, said Rachel Meyer, critical reading teacher at Har-Ber High. Language barriers also can cause students to read at lower levels.

“It’s really about empowering students to have the skills to apply to other classes across the board,” she said.

Students in critical reading classes at Heritage, Bentonville, Springdale and Har-Ber are placed in the class based on test scores and teacher recommendations, according to school officials.

Heritage High School and Rogers High School started critical reading classes at the beginning of the 2012-13 school year, according to school officials. Heritage has five classes with 100 students total and Rogers High has four classes.

Chad Scott, principal at Bentonville High School, said he didn’t know how many critical reading classes the school has or how many students are in the classes.

Fayetteville High School officials consider offering the class every year, but have not implemented it because they don’t have enough students who need the help, Steve Jacoby, principal, said.

The critical reading class was implemented differently at Har-Ber because of the school’s Language Academy, said Candis Harrell, critical reading teacher at the school. Students at Har-Ber are in the academy if they have been in the Uniteds States for three years or less. The critical reading class is designed to help English as second language students acquire vocabulary and understand what they are reading in English.

“I realize it’s a long stretch, what I’m trying to do with these kids,” she said. “If you don’t have a command of the language, it slows you down. It takes you twice as long.”

Springdale has four critical reading classes with 75 to 80 students, Meyer said. Har-Ber also has four classes with 50 to 60 students, Harrell said.

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