CONTENTS

MATERIALS NEEDED

LEARNING OBJECTIVES / OUTCOMES

INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

ASSESSING FOR UNDERSTANDING

RESOURCES, REFERENCES, & PERMISSIONS

AUTHOR INFORMATION

MATERIALS NEEDED

MATERIALS NEEDED Lesson 1: Reading out of Context Lesson plan overview with administrator scripts (below) “Training #1: Reading Out of Context” PowerPoint, including directions for two activities Example excerpt text (activity 1) in above PowerPoint Suggestions for selection of excerpt 2 (activity 2)

LEARNING OUTCOMES/OBJECTIVES

Tutors will understand reading as a rhetorical act, shaped by context and purpose. Tutors will:

• be able to critically reflect on their identity as a reader 

• be able to name or identifying their own reading practices 

• have a basic understanding of concepts in scholarship about reading, specifically: 

• • Reading with purpose

  • Genre awareness 

  • Meta elements of reading

INSTRUCTIONAL PLAN

Introduction

Note to Administrators Before Getting Started

  

We believe it would be helpful to review some of the scholarship related to how reading works. The reference list at the end of this lesson includes texts that inform this training. As the impetus for this training series is to encourage attention to reading—and to push back against framing issues with source use through a citational-only lens—we encourage you to also continue using this training after a training session using Forcier and Denny’s excellent lesson plan in Center Moves (2024). 

Throughout, this lesson plan encourages equal attention to tutors’ own processes and identities as readers. To that end, we encourage you to consider your center’s demographics and tutoring population and to adjust or slow down this training series as fits your needs. 

Lastly, we recommend that you personalize the PowerPoint to fit your presentation needs. We’ve chosen to provide a PowerPoint that presents what we see as the “bare-bones” essentials of the lesson to encourage flexibility and appropriateness to individual writing center populations and goals.

A Note about Timing

In the script below, we’ve included some suggestions for how you might plan the session based on our guideposts for how we originally organized this experience. Of course, your own feelings about where you want to provide greater or less time during the session should take precedence. 

• Warm up (10 minutes)

• Pumpkin text activity & discussion (10 minutes)

• “Meta” mini-lecture (15 minutes)

• Activity (excerpt) & debrief (15 minutes)

• Exit ticket (5 minutes)

A Note about Creating & Giving Handouts

You may create a handout for use during the lesson by removing much of the Administrator’s Script moments, and with some additional judicial editing for clarity and for your purposes. For instance, you might include just the free writes, some general discussion questions, pertinent definitions, and some of the material guiding the mini-lecture on “meta” features of reading (Slides 8-10). In general, we would suggest that such a handout emphasize the overall agenda and then provide the most salient features of the information. Make sure any directions/activities are on a separate handout, as the “Pumpkin” directions are timed.

Warm-Up

Administrator’s Script:  We’re starting a series of trainings focused around reading, and building your comfort with addressing reading with your tutees during sessions. To start this work, we wanted to first have you reflect a bit on your own experiences with reading and how you use reading in your life as a student. Also, consider how or when you’ve experienced issues related to reading in your consultations. Remember, reading and writing are connected activities—when we’re working with texts that use sources, we must also be cognizant that the way we write with these sources can reflect how we’ve engaged with them during our reading experiences. At all times, context and purpose will shape our approaches. When we read, we use context and purpose to help us decide what information is important to remember, either in our heads or by annotating or taking notes. When we write, we use context and purpose to help us decide what to include, what examples to spend time unpacking with our reader, and how to organize our texts. 

Okay, let’s warm up our brains a bit, thinking about ourselves and our work in sessions so far. You’re going to spend about 3-5 minutes jotting down some answers to the questions, and then you’ll discuss in small groups before doing a big share out.

• Free write instructions: 

• • Personal: 

  • What You’ve Seen in Tutorials

Questions to consider about yourself and your reading approaches: How do you normally approach reading, especially when you’re reading a text you intend to write with  (e.g. a source-text)? What things do you normally do? What kinds of source-texts do you find most challenging, and why? Can you think of a source you’ve used, that you particularly enjoyed working with? Why? What about it made it enjoyable?

Reflecting on your experiences tutoring thus far: How would you describe how you’ve engaged your tutees about their sources? What has been the focus of conversation? Have students in your consultations expressed confusion over how to engage–to read–their sources or materials? Or have they expressed uncertainty about the appropriateness of their comprehension or work with sources?

• Share out: partners or small groups → summarized group share. 

• Tutors share their experience addressing reading and source use during tutoring sessions.

Body of Lesson

Overview

Learning to recognize “how” reading is “meta” (meta -textual, -contextual, -linguistic).

Administrator's Script: Next, we’re going to focus upon learning about the cognitive “meta” features that occur in the backgrounds of our minds as we read. We’re going to do one quick activity, and then a more in-depth version, so we can practice paying attention to how we can use our knowledge about texts and how reading works in order to comprehend and make sense of texts. Basically, the more aware we are of these processes at work, the better we are able to create comprehension and engagement with texts.

Pumpkin Text Activity

Instructions & Example Text in PowerPoint

Directions: 

• Raise your hand when you understand the text on the next slide. 

• Then we’ll discuss the process of understanding it.

Text:

Mostly, people prefer to use big ones, but smaller sizes can be fun too! Once you’ve selected it, wash and dry the surface. Survey all the sides, so you can pick the best one. You want it to be fairly uniform as this will make your job easier. Next, decide upon what visage you want. There are so many options. You might choose fun or grumpy, or scary or angry. Once you have made your choice, carefully trace it out. Start your incision at the top. Carefully circle the top. Then, remove the insides. Some people like this part but others find it gross or slimy or disgusting. Next, slowly cut out your design. Be careful! Once you’ve finished, survey your work. You did it! Then, put your source of illumination inside and turn off your lights. Appreciate what you’ve created!

Discussion 

Guiding Questions (offer option of letting people freewrite answers before discussing):

• What genres did you consider as ‘the text's kind of like…” as you tried to create a sense of meta-contextual knowledge about the excerpt?

• What kind of prior knowledge or information that you ‘kind of know’ (or know) did you discuss/share as you made sense of the text with your partners?

• What words did you understand, and what added to your confusion because of lack of definition of terms (meta-linguistic)?

Administrator’s script to sum-up discussion: Okay, as we’ve discussed, you were able to figure out that the text was describing a particular activity— in this case, pumpkin carving—and that it was offering an overview of the directions you’d follow to carve your own pumpkin. By focusing upon recognizing your process of figuring out “how” and “when” you realized what the text was about, we were actually tracing out the process by which we comprehend and understand text.

Basically, what this exercise shows (in a miniature, fun way) is how reading involves meta-textual, meta-contextual, and meta-linguistic features. Let’s learn a little more about this.

Mini Lecture (Meta-Knowledge of How Reading Works is Key to Building Rhetorical Readers) 

Administrator’s Script: Okay, so now that you’ve got a bit of practice with figuring out a text by paying attention to the meta-textual, -contextual, and -linguistic features, let’s practice a bit more with the kinds of texts that we read to write with. We want to also recognize the connections between thinking of these three ways that “meta” knowledge about how texts works, and how this can help us to read rhetorically. Rhetorical reading is attending to the context and purpose. And, you’ve learned previously to pay attention to issues of audience, intention, genre constraints, and organization to help recognize how the writer made choices to appeal to their audience and achieve their purpose. 

[Slide 8: Meta Textual Features]

Administrator’s Script: You should adjust the comments below/in slide notes that are intended for developing student knowledge; a general ‘script’ of what you should focus upon explaining is: 

Remember, “meta” is a conglomeration of “overall” understandings and knowledge of how texts function. Thus, Meta-textual focuses upon the textual features that are an implicit part of the meaning-making process. The graphic sequencing (or visual cues) of a text conveys cues as to “where” the reader is in the text (see Bernhardt, 1986). For instance, subheadings generally correspond to the visual that is shown on this slide, illustrating the most common stages of knowledge construction in an article. As experts gain expertise, understanding and application of how these meta-textual features guide reading engagement moves into the “background” of the experience, freeing up the brain/mind to focus upon more efficiently comprehending the text. 

How this “gaining” of familiarity and use of meta-textual features when reading can look:

1. Moving from proactively calling up knowledge (about genre or expectations of text structure); we do versions of this with students when we support gaining critical and rhetorical reading awareness by performing genre analysis or rhetorical analysis.

2. Pausing, at things like headings, and casting back and casting forward to practice testing out ‘assumptions’ of what the text will include. 

3. Considering whether expectations of what the text would examine/analyze as the evidence to forward its claims were fulfilled. 

4. Reflecting on where you spent the most time as a reader, and why.

5. Surveying the text, before reading it, to get a sense of the “overall structure” ; then, reflecting on how well this reading strategy worked and any challenges faced (or surprises text offered).

6. Reflecting on issues with coherence and clarity in the text, and what caused these bumps in the reading experience.

[Slide 9: Meta Contextual Features]

Administrator’s Script: Remember, “meta” is a conglomeration of “overall” understandings and knowledge of how texts function. Meta-contextual knowledge focuses upon how the reader uses prior knowledge (of topic, of disciplinary values and interests) to create connections between themself and the text, the text and the discipline, or even, the text and the world.  Meta-contextual knowledge helps readers “place” the text into a broader context; this helps the text not to feel like a “recall test” where there is greater uncertainty about what parts are most important to understand and recall. Experts are able to broadly describe and define what knowledge is “settled” in their field, and what is still being argued. This “sense of place” as part of the reading experience is a mark of expertise. 

How this “gaining” of familiarity and use of meta-contextual features can look:

1. “Mapping” conversations or using AI tools to help recognize connections among texts in terms of ideas and sources.

2. Reflecting on how the text offers similar or different rationales for a topic to other texts the reader has read. 

3. Recognizing authors and works cited in-text, as particular important figures/concepts to the ideas being taken up and discussed.

[Slide 10: Meta Linguistic Features]

Administrator’s Script: Remember, “meta” is a conglomeration of “overall” understandings and knowledge of how texts function. Meta-linguistic knowledge lessens the cognitive burden of readers because they are able to fully access and apply discourse features, which include things like a familiarity in tone, in style, in commonplace phrasing, and terms. 

Communities-of-practice, and/or discourse communities, use specialized “insider” language that can identify members, but also can speed up communication among members. Part of taking on membership includes a comfort and familiarity with such aspects of texts. Consider, when you are first reading in a disciplinary area, you probably need a dictionary or term list next to you, to help you “remember” what things mean or refer to. Merely reading the term or name means little (or can even lead to greater confusion over terminology).

How this “gaining” of familiarity and use of meta-linguistic features can look:

1. Engaging things like vocabulary quizzes, which can help students master memorizing terminology.

2. Recognizing common ways of phrasing or presenting information: for example, in Forcier and Denny's (2024) training, many of the aspects of disciplinary discourse relate to meta-linguistic textual features.

3. Recognizing (and, for readers/students/learners, charting) understanding of the “key terms” or “keywords” in a discourse. Much has been written about key terms, but these are more meaningful than simply a term’s definition–rather, these help to represent and chart a discipline’s values as well.

[Slide 11: Visual]

Administrator’s Script: “Meta” knowledge about how, cognitively, we parse text as we read them in order to comprehend them. While most often, we focus upon building skills related to particular attention to texts—e,g, critical reading or rhetorical reading—all such textual attention involves “meta” features for comprehension, too. Thus, the practice in this PD session, of using or recognizing how meaning is using these aspects of meta-knowledge of how texts work, can help us to also become better deployers of critical strategies for deepening our skills as readers—strategies like rhetorical reading. 

Rhetorical reading is not just a “top down” analysis: where after reading a text, you sit back and ask questions like:

1. What is the purpose of the text?

2. Who is the author? What is their credibility? How do they structure their text, in order to connect to their audience?

3. Who is the audience? What particular common knowledges or beliefs do they hold, and how does this knowledge impact the way the author structures the paper and/or chooses facts and evidence?

4. What is the context in which the text is written? What kind of exigency is shaping the author’s purpose, and how is this a “timely text”? 

5. Are there any kinds of rhetorical constraints (e.g. things like length, medium, genre-requirements) that shape the text and its message? How does the author use or respond to these constraints? How does the author use them to guide their understanding of the message?

Rather, rhetorical reading occurs throughout the reading of the text, too, and particularly, many of those questions that rhetorical reading strategies emphasize pull from an awareness of “meta” features and how they work to create comprehension for the reader. Sometimes, when students are learning to read rhetorically—and working on assignments like writing “rhetorical analysis papers”—they might feel that rhetorical reading is just about getting the right/correct answer. However, it’s about strengthening uptake of these “meta-features” and practicing how to become more aware of their shaping of a textual engagement during reading. Thus, rhetorical reading and the “meta” features we’ve discussed complement each other. 

For your work as a tutor/consultant, especially when you’re working across disciplinary genres with a writer who might be reading or creating texts you’re less familiar with, you can use knowledge of these meta-features—and of rhetorical reading—to be more effective in your work. 

You can use this as you read a tutee’s project (what do you expect and why? What kinds of “meta” knowledge are you applying and how?) For example, knowing about meta-linguistic knowledge can help you not become bogged down in your own position with not knowing discourse language from another field. You might be able to recognize it as such “meta language” and hold at bay your personal confusion as a reader. And/or, you might be able to help a tutee more deeply reflect on why and how they’re deploying this language and if they’re doing so successfully. 

Activity: Excerpt of a Reading (or Textbook) Sample

Note to Administrators: We suggest that you consider the tutor population of your center when deciding upon the sample excerpt. The idea of this activity reflects Haas and Flower’s (1988) study, or even, Berkenkotter’s (1981) attention to audience awareness. Essentially, when we’re dropped into a reading situation with absolutely no context or clues, we can better recognize how we “create” these needed features to guide our reading. This can help us become more metacognitively aware of our reading processes. Essentially, we’re suggesting you provide a “longer and more difficult version” of the Pumpkin Activity. 

Selecting your Text: To create a text excerpt, we would suggest that you consider a few factors that could make this specifically beneficial to your center’s context. For example, you might select a text for practice that corresponds to a particular class or program of study popular with many students. There may even be an option of reaching out to the instructor from such a class to ask for a copy of the textbook or other reading materials that you can use. Alternatively, you might use your institution’s library resources to find textbook editions, or even, connect with a research librarian to identify a common journal from a field (choose a recent article and select a few pages or a section). Or, you can find an appropriate open-access textbook in a variety of disciplines. We suggest that you spend anywhere between 15 minutes and an hour on text selection, depending on your goals and center’s context.   

Instructions on Selecting a Text to Excerpt:

Instructions to administrators: When you’re creating your own excerpt sample, we suggest you think about the motivations that made you decide to focus upon building reading skills and confidence in your tutors. 

For example, our graduate consultants were particularly uncomfortable with STEM-based writing and with assisting students in STEM fields, so we chose an excerpt from a STEM-discipline article. Our goal was to help our tutors gain recognition of the broad, transferable reading knowledge they do have, even when working across disciplines. We want to show them how much they do know and how they can use that “meta-knowledge” of textual features to be an attentive reader and participate fully in a conversation outside their areas of expertise. 

Instructions to Tutors

You’ve received a document/handout with an excerpt of a text. Your goal is to read and make sense of it, paying attention to the textual cues that are most meaningful to you. Try to answer the following question, noting what information you’re drawing upon in your answer. What informational cues are in the text, and what prior knowledge are you using?

1. What is the text (what is its genre)?

2. What is the purpose of the text?

3. Who is the audience? Why might they be interacting with the text?

4. How are sources used or included? What role do they seem to be playing?

Debrief 

Guiding Questions:

• What was challenging about this experience? What did you find to be easy about it?

• What kind of “meta” knowledge did you draw upon the most? Why? 

• 1. What genres did you consider as ‘the text's kind of like…” as you tried to create a sense of meta-contextual knowledge about the excerpt?

  2. What kind of prior knowledge or information that you ‘kind of know’ (or know) did you discuss/share as you made sense of the text with your partners

  3. What words did you understand, and what added to your confusion because of lack of definition of terms (meta-linguistic)

• How does this activity and “figuring it out” relate to what we do in consultation? 

• 1. How can you use “meta” knowledge to be more aware in your tutoring?

Wrap-up & Reflection

Note to Administrators: As you develop your plan to end the training, consider how you can help prime tutors for conversations in the next training. 

Summarize Discussion Points & Major Concepts 

Administrator’s Script: As you saw today, we’ve got a lot of knowledge about “what reading is and how it works” that we can use to make-meaning– even with texts we’re totally unfamiliar with. As the Pumpkin activity taught us, even simple texts feel more difficult when we have no “context” in which to understand or make sense of them. Something as simple as adding a title can help us use our meta-textual knowledge more effectively to guide comprehension. 

When we’re working in consultations, we can use our knowledge of reading in a few ways. First, you need to activate your own strategies for making sense of text to recognize when what you’re reading “sounds right” for the context because it's following the conventions you understand about using, for example, discourse linguistic features. One of the most important rules of tutoring is that we can always help a peer better their process by asking smart questions of them. Hopefully what we practiced today shows you some of the ways we can smartly use our cognitive “meta” decoding skills about how texts work to make us better able to address and figure out meaning. Learning to voice why and how we’re trying to make meaning when we read, allows us to ask better questions of the author and their intentions. 

Tutor Reflection 

Administrator’s Script: The goal of the tutor reflection is simply to allow for greater thinking and comprehension about what has been learned, and its connection to the tutorial. This reflection can be oral, written, or merely given to students as a directive to “think about the training before the next week’s session.” We suggest that you follow the normal procedures around trainings in your center as you create the material context for this reflection.

Instructions 

What contexts shape your reading? What contexts are behind your students' reading?

Preview Next Training 

• Brief sharing of reflections

• Bring a piece of their own writing where sources were used to the next workshop/training. 

• Ticket Out

• • One thing you learned 

  • One thing you still have a question about or are still struggling to understand

ASSESSING FOR UNDERSTANDING

• Ticket Out 

• Freewrites can be in a shared doc so administrators can go back to see responses. 

• Participation in the activities

EXTENSIONS AND ADAPTATIONS

• Additional or fewer slide options 

• Choose accessible texts (texts can be used by a screen reader for example or through speech to text)

• Access to longer texts in advance 

• You may choose to not do the second activity, or to use this activity to practice reading at a separate time that better suits your tutor’s needs. 

• Warm up & Reflection activities can be done prior/after meeting 

• Print and digital copies of texts

• Physical and digital activity participation options (also think about if training is happening online).

REFERENCES AND ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

REFERENCES

Berkenkotter, C. (1981). Understanding a writer’s awareness of audience. College Composition and Communication, 32(4), 388–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/356601   

Bernhardt, S. A. (1986). Seeing the text. College Composition and Communication, 37(1), 66–78. https://doi.org/10.2307/357383

Forcier, E., & Denny, M. (2024, Summer). Understanding citation through disciplinary values. Center Moves: A Peer-Reviewed Archive of Tutor Training Materials,2(1). https://rmwca.wildapricot.org/page-18239 

Haas, C., & Flower, L. (1988).  Rhetorical reading strategies and the construction of meaning. College Composition and Communication, 39(2), 167–83. https://doi.org/10.2307/358026 

Horning, A. (2018). Neuroscience of reading: Developing expertises in reading and writing. In P. Portanova, M. Rigenburg, & D.H. Roen (Eds.), Contemporary perspectives on cognition and writing, (pp. 79–94). WAC Clearinghouse. https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/cognition/

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Bain, K. (2012). What the best college students do. Belknap Press.

Carillo, E. C. (2016). Creating mindful readers in first-year composition courses: A strategy to facilitate transfer. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Culture, and Composition, 16(1), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3158573 

Haas, C. (1994). Learning to read biology: One student’s rhetorical development in college. Written Communication, 11(1), 43–84. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088394011001004 

Haswell, R. H., Briggs, T. L., Fay, J. A., Gillen, N. K, Harrill, R., Shupula, A. M., & Trevino, S.S. (1999). Context and rhetorical reading strategies: Haas and Flower (1988) revisited. Written Communication, 16(1), 3‒27. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088399016001001 

Horning, A. S. (2007). Reading across the curriculum as the key to student success. Across the Disciplines, 4(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2007.4.1.08 

Kantz, M. (1990). Helping students use textual sources persuasively. College English, 52(1), 74–91. https://doi.org/10.2307/377413 

Mandarin, K. (2022). Reading across the disciplines. Indiana University Press.

Rhodes, L. A. (2013). When is writing also reading? Across the Disciplines, 10(4), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2013.10.4.17 

Roberts, J. C., & Roberts, K. A. (2008). Deep reading, cost/benefit, and the construction of meaning: Enhancing reading comprehension and deep learning in sociology courses. Teaching Sociology,36(2), 125–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/0092055X0803600203 

Young, J. A., & Potter, C. R. (2013). The problem of academic discourse: Assessing the role of academic literacies in reading across the K-16 curriculum. Across the Disciplines, 10(4), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2013.10.4.19

AUTHOR INFORMATION

Carolyne M. King & Megan Boeshart Burelle

Old Dominion University

Carolyne M. King is an assistant professor (English-Writing Studies) and also the director of WAC/WID and STEM Initiatives for the Writing Center. Her research focuses upon the reading-writing connection, specifically, seeking to understand how students read and work with sources as they write source-based papers. She particularly encourages attention to making reading perceivable—using methods like screen-casts of reading behaviors in action—to explore texts' materiality as part of reading. 

Megan Boeshart Burelle is a senior lecturer and Writing Center director at Old Dominion University. She teaches general education writing courses. Her research interests include writing centers, online tutoring, and multimodal feedback. She is currently working on her PhD in English and her dissertation is about online writing tutoring and asynchronous screencasting feedback.

King & Boeshart Burelle, Center Moves, no. 4, 2025.