In 2021, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)  issued a position statement on “the Role of Reading in the College Writing Classroom”. In this statement, 4Cs “affirm[ed] the need to develop accessible and effective reading pedagogies in college writing classrooms” because it would help student performance across the university and in students’ roles as citizens in a democracy. The statement correctly notes that reading pedagogy is an issue writing studies has not taken up in a robust way for about 30 years and that it is now receiving attention at four-year institutions, though reading pedagogy has long been addressed at two-year schools.

Such a position statement was timely. As of 2024, the most recent year that data was available, 65% of 12th graders were reading at a basic or below basic level according to NCES (https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g12/national-trends/#achievement-level-trends). The NAEP defines a “basic” reading ability for a 12th grader as the ability to “Recognize explicitly stated example related to main theme of a persuasive essay”; “recognize the main purpose of a persuasive essay”; “use understanding of a persuasive essay to explain a potential audience reaction”; and/or “recognize meaning of a word used in a persuasive essay”. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g12/national-trends/#achievement-level-trends. As of 2022, 39% of the nations’ 18-24 year olds were in college, suggesting that there is some overlap between basic and below basic reading ability and college attendance. Further,  two other recent trends suggest that college students likely need quite a bit of help with academic reading, as the 4C statement suggests. The first of these trends is that for several years now, colleges and universities have been moving away from discrete remedial reading classes and toward co-requisite models of first year writing that put less skilled readers into classes with stronger skilled students and give them extra support (tutorial or otherwise) to succeed in class. Then, the other trend is the demographic cliff that was looming before the pandemic and has arrived much sooner because of it. First widely discussed in Nathan Grawe’s 2018 book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, the demographic cliff refers to a massive drop in the 18-24 year old population starting in 2026, an event that was expected to cause the traditional college age demand for higher education to collapse almost everywhere east of the Mississippi river and north of the Mason Dixon Line. Almost inevitably, many of these institutions will lower their admission standards to net classes of the requisite size among the shrinking pool of traditional college age students. All of this is to say three things: the 4Cs position statement on reading is timely; our students are going to need a lot of help with reading; and effective pedagogies for teaching reading in college writing classes are of the utmost importance right now.

In spite of these facts, there is very little attention paid to how to teach reading in college writing classes. This edited collection seeks to collect “accessible and effective reading pedagogies” that the CCCC position statement calls for. Because this is a vastly overlooked and under-discussed topic, essays from any perspective on practical strategies for teaching reading in the writing classroom are welcome. However, preference will be given to approaches that:

• draw on pedagogical strategies from the rhetorical tradition
• operationalize insights from the science of reading
• operationalize insights from cognitive science

Please send essays of between 1500-3000 words, exclusive of bibliography and notes, to readingsforwriters@gmail.com by 3-13-26.