Storytelling into Understanding
LIZABETH’S LATER STORIES
By the Study Group’s fifth session, on April 20, Eve had been piloting FMC with her sixth graders for approximately one week. Lizabeth, it will be recalled, said almost nothing that day and had spoken about her difficulty writing training paragraphs during session four:
Story 7
Because I don’t think I’m very good at doing it. I struggled . . . while my student teacher was teaching yesterday, I spent about four hours with students in the classroom. “Read this. What do you think? Is this too hard? Is this too easy? What do you think?” And I was asking the kids and . . . “She’s making me rewrite this,” and I was complaining. And they were [inaudible] “Your teacher’s making you do homework again? [Laughter from the Study Group] “Yeeeees!” I really feel
The author is once again a Principal-1 engaged in an amusing (but painful) activity along with her students. Her role as Teacher-as-Student is given emphasis by her inclusion of the researcher as a major participant. Indeed, the researcher is more the teacher in this story than the author is, and the Discourse suggested here is not even TEACHING READING.
I was concerned about Lizabeth, but spring vacations and conferences put me out of touch with the teachers between March 9 and early April. By the time I was able to make fact-to-face contact with her again, she hinted at the existence of unusual work stress and seemed to have no specific plans for her classroom use of FMC. She said she wanted to “just follow the recipe” and try out the process with her enriched class. I reminded her that my study focused on reading strategy training for L2 learners. Eventually, we decided she would work with a small group of L2 learners to be pulled out of her student teacher’s class and taught in a separate location.
Lizabeth began teaching FMC to a group of four LM seventh graders on May 9. She placed the lesson in the context of “how to be a better reader,” then, using the paragraph Eve had contributed on map symbols, showed the students how to identify Known and New information. Next she turned to a paragraph written by another Study Group member, and finally used two of her own paragraphs, which by that time were considerably improved. She pinpointed vocabulary problems for the students, showed them that pronouns should be considered Known because they restated information given previously, and eventually moved them from identifying individual words as New to identifying “what chunks are New.”
Although most of the issues and definitions Lizabeth worked with had already been discussed during Study Group sessions, her teaching was carefully paced and purposeful, the process of becoming acquainted with the students expertly stage-managed, and the lesson decidedly successful. The four students caught on quickly and contributed enthusiastically.
Our final Study Group session two days later was the startling occasion for five non-obligatory stories offered by Lizabeth, only one of which was similar in structure and purpose to the stories she had told during previous meetings. Story 8 is the most dramatic because it represents a clear move into the Discourse TEACHING FMC. It is a complex and lengthy text consisting of two explicitly linked parallel narratives that are aimed at the explication of an original insight into the nature of L2 reading processes. Lizabeth had told me the first narrative immediately after her first meeting with the four LM students. It describes a personal experience she had a few days prior with a videotaped television series. The second narrative generalizes the first by elevating it to the status of an analogy and embedding it in a passage using both the present tense and
Story 8
And another thing that [the researcher] wanted me to mention was an experience that I had last weekend. I was watching a set of six videotapes. It’s called Berkeley Square, and so I took out the first videotape, watched the film, rewound it, put it back in, got the second videotape, put it in, watched the film. And there were a couple of places I was thinking, well, that’s funny, how did the runaway guy become a butler all of a sudden? I didn’t see that. So I watched the third tape and the fourth tape, and by the sixth tape, there were so many things in the sixth tape I didn’t know where they came from. Because I kept assuming that the authors or the producers or directors just assumed that I was smart enough to figure out, oh, OK, well this has happened, and that’s why the man is doing this, but then by the sixth tape there were so many empty holes in my knowledge that I thought, well, something’s wrong. So I took them out. I looked at them. Well, lo and behold, there are two shows per tape, and I was only watching the first one, so I was watching basically every other one [Laughter from the group]. As Amy pointed out, often people know when you’re watching Public TV and you just switch around, you find it. They put enough information in there so if that’s the only episode you watch, you can find of figure out what’s going on. But if you’re watching it as a series, pretty soon you realize you’re missing a whole bunch of stuff.
And I think the kids go through this, too, when they’re learning English. They can pick out some of it, and they know some of it. Because I think they start with speaking, and because of their knowledge of the speaking language, they can take that to reading and use it, but the written word, as you taught us, is different from speaking, and so they’re getting some of it, but they’re not getting all of it. They have huge holes in their knowledge, just like I did,
and pretty soon they figure out. I ... well, I had the tenacity. In fact, I’m watching the whole thing over again. [Laughter from the group] Just like you can go back and read. But I think sometimes the students, especially the ones that give up easily, will just say, “I can’t read.” Especially in middle school, their main priority is socialization, and if they can speak good enough . . . and you hear them talking in Spanish all the time, too, so they can survive with what they’ve got. And if they realize there are too many holes in the reading, they’re going to give up. And we can see that all the time. They just go ... pretty soon, they go, “You know what? I don’t know what’s going on here any more,” and they stop instead of going back and figuring out what the problem is.
And I think this would be a good thing for that—to teach them how to go back and figure out what the problem is and maybe recognize, instead of waiting until the sixth video [Laughter from the group] that there is a problem, but figure out from the first one: Wait a minute, I’m missing some information here. These are my skills to go back and figure out what it is I’m missing and why I’m missing it.
In addition to discovering a metaphor for conceptualizing some of the problems of the L2 reader, Lizabeth has also figured out that FMC is a way to tackle those problems and that it is a way to teach reading strategies from a developmental perspective. No Study Group discussion had touched upon this issue. What has happened, in other words, is that Lizabeth has begun to re-examine her older Discourse—which, it will be recalled, did not include a differentiation between L1 and L2 reading processes—and to position features of both Discourses in a dynamic relationship with each other. The shifts in Principal type which have occurred over throughout her corpus are dramatic and refle features of both Discourses in a dynamic relationship with each other. The shifts in Principal type which have occurred over throughout her corpus are dramatic and reflect several significant moves in the direction of TEACHING FMC. The biggest change lies in her move from a Principal-1, the author of Anecdotes in which she functions as a kind of equal partner to her students, to a Principal-3 who tells a sophisticated narrative, evaluates from a position of expertise, and projects how she will guide L2 readers in the future.
Because of the delay in starting her classroom practice with FMC, Lizabeth held only two more sessions with her students and taught the procedure over a period of only eight days. I found myself wishing that I had done something to encourage her to use it in the classroom earlier. Although it was apparent that her LM students were receiving valuable training, especially through her skillful modeling behavior, there was no time for moving them to paragraphs of significantly greater difficulty, and I saw some evidence during my observations as well as our final interviews that Lizabeth was still married to the view that L2 readers were not different in kind from L1 readers. As we talked about what she might have done with more time, she also showed a tendency to move away in her thinking from the teaching of reading to the idea of using FMC as a way to have students write, which I felt would dilute the effectiveness of the procedure. I was puzzled by her ambivalence, but I was pleased that she said she liked FMC and would “definitely” use it during the coming school year.
