conuly

The "they don't read very well" paper is an appallingly poorly designed study on at least two levels.

1. I am in 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 work, especially 170 year old Dickens novels - you CAN'T read them sentence by sentence and expect to have any clue what's going on. They are designed to be read and understood on a larger scale than that. Reading a whole paragraph and then going back and analyzing it sentence by sentence, sure. But that's not what their moderators asked of the study participants.

2. Making generalized judgements about the reading skill of Americans who struggled with 170 year old British prose is confounding two very different things - their actual reading skill, and their ability to handle not just archaic prose style, not just foreign terminology and vocabulary, but also historical references from a distant era they're unfamiliar with (being English, not history, majors). This is the worst kind of bigoted, classist, prior knowledge based intelligence testing, and the authors of the paper should be fucking ashamed of themselves.

Not sure if this merits being a third point:
41 percent of their participants were "English education" majors, not traditional English literature majors. Which means they were interested in learning how to teach children how to read, not in reading and analyzing 19th century English novels. That they did not break those people out and report on whether or not the education majors differed from the literature majors in their ability to understand the opening of Bleak House makes me raise my eyebrows quite a bit.

That said, I am unsurprised that a lot of the students struggled with the passage. It's dense, even for Dickens, and primary schools turn out tons of students each year who have never really learned to read well. Some of those students are going to end up as English majors, despite the poor fit, because they don't actually love books or reading/learning, they are just obtaining a degree credential that they need in order to pursue their chosen career in which they will never need to know how to read and enjoy any novel, let alone a 170 year old British novel. (that there are school teachers out there teaching children to read, who don't themselves love reading and learning, is a huge problem, but that's getting way beyond the question of "can English majors read")