Storytelling into Understanding
Middle School Teachers Work with Text Analysis and Second Language Reading Pedagogy
BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
In the winter and spring of 2002, I gathered data for a study designed to examine the possible uses of linguistic approaches to text analysis in reading strategy instruction for second language (L2) learners. I was interested in whether practicing teachers could come to understand certain basic principles that illuminate text structure, whether the information would be helpful to their teaching, and whether my approach to presentation of the subject was successful. Four practicing teachers participated in the study. We report on a portion of the larger study by examining the responses of the two teachers who exhibited the greatest contrast.
The core of my data comes from 12 hours of study-and-discussion sessions and approximately 10 hours of interviews held with the participants, who were content area middle school teachers working in an urban school in the American southwest—here called Tierra Encantada Middle School—attended by large numbers of language minority (LM) students from Hispanic, Native American, and Vietnamese backgrounds. The teachers also kept journals during the four months of the study and, as I observed them, piloted their emerging understandings of Study Group subject matter in their classrooms. Their lived responses to the information I presented and to their own classroom-based experiences with that information are the material I have used to catch glimpses of their learning processes and of the potential for using what I have come to call Field Model Construction (FMC) to help intermediate English language learners of middle school age become better readers.
FMC (represented schematically in Appendix 1) is a metastrategy designed for use during reading to aid comprehension of expository text. It involves three virtually simultaneous steps that are first modeled and scaffolded by the teacher, later performed independently by the student:
1. The reader identifies Known information (propositions previously mentioned in the text) and New information
(propositions mentioned for the first time in the text);
2. The reader draws a diagram (Field Model) of the relationships between Known and New information;
3. The reader solves any comprehension breakdowns that arise during the act of reading.
Through their own spoken and written texts produced during Study Group sessions, interviews, classroom activity, and journal-writing, a picture emerges of how a group of practicing teachers situated information about linguistics and second language readers and reconstructed it in light of what they already knew about teaching as well as what they wanted to achieve with their students. A shadow picture is created, alongside the first, of the researcher-instructor’s struggle to achieve two sometimes contradictory purposes: helping the teachers understand the Study Group subject matter but leaving them free to work as independently as possible toward the achievement of understanding.
The study participants went through very different learning processes with very different results. Two teachers, “Eve” and “Lizabeth,” presented a clear contrast in terms of comfort with the material and speed of learning, in addition to context-related differences such as teaching style and educational background. The researcher’s role with the teachers was conditioned by their needs and responses and was therefore very different in these two cases. All three of us, Eve, Lizabeth, and I, changed positioning over the course of the study. In the terms in which I came to see the changes, we began with sets of assumptions, learned principles, collections of facts, understandings, misunderstandings, ways of being, and ways of talking (among other things), then moved through a learning space in which new ideas were examined and recast, resulting in either major or minor adjustments to our points of view. We learned, in other words, but how we did so and what happened to the information presented and discussed during our many conversations was complex and sometimes unanticipated.
The central impetus for my research was direct experience with the phenomenon of LM school failure. Red flags to the problem are disproportionate school dropout rates (Olsen, 1988; Waggoner, 1999), an ever-widening gap between the SAT composite scores of whites and other ethnic groups (Graves & Cooper, 1999), and huge performance differentials across significant populations of whites and ethnic minorities or LMs with respect to standardized measures of reading comprehension (McLaughlin, 1994; National Assessment of Educational Progress, 1999; National Center for Educational Statistics, 2000; Peregoy & Boyle, 2000).
In the view of many educators and language specialists, the critical missing element is the ability to read effectively (Shih, 1992; Kamhi-Stein, 1995). A peculiarity of ESL instruction in the United States is that reading instruction is often delayed or excluded entirely in favor of oral language development. In the main, ESL teachers are not trained to teach reading (Fitzgerald, 1995), and what their students are given to read is characteristically limited to brief, inauthentic narrative texts (Wales, 1990; Block, 1992; Shih, 1992). Experiences with extensive reading, expository genres, and reading strategy training are the exception rather than the norm.
What is lost, crucially, is the opportunity to link classroom practice with the extensive research literature on L2 reading processes (Bernhardt, 1991). This research suggests overwhelmingly that while the search for meaning that characterizes what L1 readers engage in (Goodman, 1975) also figures prominently in the work L2 readers do, language proficiency issues create greater cognitive burdens for L2 learners (Devine, 1988) and greater variability in their strategies and difficulties. Researchers have identified LM reading problems in the areas of lexical and syntactic knowledge as well as discontinuities in background knowledge related to cultural difference (Cohen et al., 1988; Parry, 1988). The overriding and largely unexamined difficulty, however, is the inability to comprehend written language at the discourse level—from phrase, clause, and sentence to paragraph and full text, in other words. LM readers tend to focus on decoding small chunks of written language and often cannot make semantic connections across extended text (Coady, 1979; Grabe, 1991; Gibbons, 1991; Cazden, 1992).
The result of the failure to bridge the gap between research and classroom shows up, where reading is taught at all, in an emphasis on pre-reading and post-reading activities at the expense of guiding students step-by-step during the reading process (Casanave, 1988). Despite the fact that strategy training for the L2 reader is widely reported to be effective (Carrell, 1987; Chamot & O’Malley, 1994), reading instruction typically focuses on vocabulary lessons and the activation of background knowledge before students read or on comprehension questions posed by the teacher after reading has finished. Comprehension questions, as Pauline Gibbons points out, even when asked paragraph-by-paragraph, are “after the event” (1991, p. 71). They address what has been comprehended, not how the comprehension process is being conducted by the reader. Moreover, these traditional classroom activities avoid the important issue of providing opportunities for the development of higher-order learning strategies which enable independent and critical reading (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987).
As I searched for a number of years for solutions to the reading problems of the LM student, I became convinced that teaching the student to monitor and repair micro-level comprehension difficulties while simultaneously tracking his or her unfolding understanding of the meaning of a full piece of text was the only viable approach to encouraging the development of intellectual control over written text. The approach had to be based, I felt, on better teacher understanding of the characteristics of expository text, but it also had to be relatively streamlined. I wanted to avoid the tiresome error of offering menus of strategies to teachers and students, and I wanted to keep linguistic jargon to a minimum. Without these constraints, the individual student’s unique comprehension problems could be lost in the shuffle, and, more pragmatically, the approach would be unattractive to busy teachers.
In the process I found what I believe to be a principled way to think about and carry out this three-pronged procedure by using frameworks from recent reading research by cognitive psychologists and from the “systemic functional” approach to text analysis developed by the linguist Michael Halliday. As indicated above, I call the procedure Information Model Construction. It takes each written text to be a language phenomenon reflecting three facets of its situational occurrence: field, tenor, and mode. In somewhat simplified terms, field is the entire subject matter covered, including participants, human or non-human, animate or inanimate, their activities or what is done to them or what they are, and their relationships. Tenor is the relationship of author to subject matter—attitude, perspective, point of view. Mode is the presentation format: the order in which information is given, the patterns of organization used, the genre (Halliday, 1973; 1994).
FMC is based on the idea that successful reading depends on the ability to identify the propositions that are provided by a text and establish the stated or implied relationships between those propositions (van Dijk, 1972). The result, which is unique to each text, is called by cognitive psychologists its “mental” or “deep” model (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Britton, 1994). It is achieved primarily by “backwards inferencing,” which is simply the process of linking what is new information to what has already been understood and recorded in the developing mental model (Zwaan & Brown, 1996; Gernsbacher, 1997).
The teacher must learn to do FMC before training students to carry it out. In the classroom, FMC involves the creation of some sort of visual representation of the mental model. Each New element must be orally negotiated by teacher and students working together. New information is determined by the simple procedure of deciding what contrasts with, or adds to, what is Known. If a student is missing a piece of language or background knowledge necessary for comprehension, the identification of New and Known will be impossible. If the connections between ideas are not being tracked, the identification of New and Known will be impossible. Backtracking, rereading, discussing points of grammar, searching for word definitions in dictionaries or memory banks—all such substrategies, and more—become entailed in the process as understanding is sought and, very importantly, students are continually challenged by the teacher to “prove” their assertions regarding New information. Ultimately, after a time of repeated training in the procedure, first with extremely simple, short paragraphs, later with texts of greater and greater complexity and length, the assumption is that students will develop an approach to reading that involves “expert” control (Bereiter & Scardamalia, p. 18). Improved competence should appear in at least three specific areas: greater awareness of comprehension breakdown, the emergence of a repertoire of repair strategies and “rules” for their selection and application, and expanded proficiency in the L2.
