The Case of a Reading Apprentice
Noosha Mehdian, Malaysia
Noosha Mehdian has 12+ years experience in the field of TESL. She started her career as an English teacher and has taught English to diverse groups of language learners in different settings. For the past few years she has been involved in teacher training and curriculum development at Just English Sdn. Bhd. She is also pursuing her PhD in TESL at University of Malaya, Malaysia. E-mail: noushamehdian@yahoo.com
Menu
Background
The study
Procedure
The Instruction/Apprenticeship
An apprentice becoming the novice
Discussion
References
Random views and alarming statistics about the literacy crisis from secondary school teachers indicate that there seems to be a mismatch between the language proficiency level of the students and the syllabus that is to be covered. Often teachers declare that the reading abilities of the learners are inadequate for the materials to be taught and they wonder if adolescents are literate enough, language-wise, to leave school and enter colleges or universities.
In a world driven by information technology, the complexity of reading literacy is increasing as the format of texts becomes more diverse and increasing numbers of citizens are expected to use information from these materials in new and more complex ways. Varied texts such as CD-ROMs, Web pages, newspa
pers, and magazines place different demands on the reader. As information technology grows, we will encounter even more varied texts and will be called on to use information in new ways.
Alluded to within this brief statement are a number of potential sources of trouble for the adolescent reader: decoding, fluency, vocabulary, background knowledge, and critical thinking. Yet, this list does not exhaust the factors contributing to adolescents’ experience of success (or failure) at literacy tasks. According to Edelson and Joseph (2004), in addition to these requisites, readers must also develop and maintain a motivation to read and learn, the strategies to monitor and correct their own comprehension during the act of reading, and the flexibility to read for a wide variety of purposes in a wide variety of media, all while developing their identities not only as readers but as members of particular social and cultural groups.
Helping students to attain the abilities fundamental to literacy is definitely challenging and a variety of instructional approaches have been developed to this end. Each of these approaches is based on the assumption that a particular key link in literacy development- motivation, purpose, knowledge of strategies and flexible utilization of them, word-reading skills, or schemata - has been weakened. To Delgado-Gaitan (1990) literacy is a socio-cultural process, and it follows that literate ability has to do with the socio-cultural knowledge and cognitive skills that are not the L2 readers’ greatest points.
In the EFL context at the lower levels of most language curricula, literacy is more text-centric, rather than reader-centric. Literacy instruction at this level calls for using “functional” exercises, as well as reading stories and journalistic texts. At the higher levels, textual analysis skills and critical thought come into play (Barnett 1991; Jurasek, 1996). This is where most students underperform as they have not been prepared for such readings. According to Paul (2001) the common mode of teaching allows students a passive role in class which leads to the crisis of schools today, being disengaged from literacy. Thus, a classroom that is set out to teach for a new literacy would be one that honors all forms of representation. In such a classroom, students would be free to read in a variety of the “languages of the mind” (Tishman & Perkins, 1997). This freedom to read in various forms must be explicitly declared and modeled by the teacher. This more contemporary teacher role is represented in Kern’s (2000) words as the guide by the side, not the sage on the stage. The goal is pedagogy of interpretive practice in which students and teachers use the unique literate environment of the classroom to reflect consciously and explicitly on interaction processes in various social contexts (Kramsch, 1993). Therefore, there is room for socio cognitive principles to be introduced in classrooms and that is why Kern (2000) discusses that the macro-principle of communication should be translated to the realities of classroom teaching and curriculum. As a result, the goal of a literacy-based curriculum should be to engage learners in activities that involve communication. Teachers in new literacy classrooms should become more aware of the literacies they bring to their expertise in order to open up resources for students’ learning (Guthrie, 2001; John-Steiner & Mahn, 1996; and Byrnes, 1998). Acquisition of literacy is the need for socialization and interacting with texts that characterize particular discourse communities (Kern, 2000). According to Gergen (1995), learning is a social and collaborative activity, where the teacher acts as facilitator and the student is responsible for constructing her own understanding in his own mind. Thus, given opportunities involving critical dialogue, learners may develop skills which can be transferred to subsequent modes of thinking and communicating and as the interaction level is high, learners will become more engaged in the literacy tasks.
An instructional framework that best fits the criteria of a new literacy classroom could be Reading Apprenticeship. Reading apprenticeship is an approach to reading instruction that helps young people develop the knowledge, strategies, and dispositions they need to become more powerful readers (Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, and Mueller, 2001). The notion of apprenticeship has long characterized student and teacher roles in foreign language classroom. In literacy-based language teaching in Kern (2000) words, students are apprentice discourse analysts and intercultural explorers.
“In any apprenticeship, an expert practitioner or mentor models, directs, supports and shapes an apprentice’s growing repertoire of practice. The apprentice actively engages in the task, learning by doing with appropriate support and gradually moving toward skillful independence in the desired practice” (Scohenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf & Litman, 2003, p.133).
Many students in today’s diverse classrooms have trouble handling the conceptual demands in reading material when left to their own devices to learn from text. Through engagement in different dimensions of reading Apprenticeship framework students get to understand the acts of reading as evaluative pursuits. The Reading Apprenticeship Framework (RAF) involves teachers in integrating four interacting dimensions of classroom life that support reading development (Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, Litman, 2003. p. 135):
- The social dimension involves developing a sense of safety in the classroom and making good use of adolescents’ interest in peer interactions.
- The personal dimension involves addressing adolescents’ interest in exploring new aspects of their identities.
- The cognitive dimension involves developing student’s repertoires of specific comprehension and problem-solving strategies, with an emphasis on group discussion of when and why particular cognitive strategies are useful.
- The knowledge-building dimension involves identifying and expanding the knowledge students bring to a text.
As such in a classroom community of readers, the metacognitive conversation is the central dynamic that animates and links the four dimensions of the Reading Apprenticeship framework. The concept of metacognition refers to one’s knowledge about one’s cognitive processes or anything related to those processes (Flavell, 1976, Brown, Bransford, Ferrara & Campione, 1983; Paris, 1988, Hudson 2007). In metacognitive conversation, teacher and students discuss their personal relationships to reading in the discipline, the cognitive strategies they use to solve comprehension problems, the structure and language of particular types of texts, and the kinds of knowledge required to make sense of reading materials (Schoenbach, Braunger, Greenleaf, & Litman, 2003). Through metacognition, apprentice readers begin to become aware of their reading processes (Paris & Jacobs 1984).
Thus Reading Apprenticeship is an approach to reading instruction that is believed to have the potential to help young readers develop the knowledge, strategies, and dispositions they need to become more powerful readers. In brief, the aim of Reading Apprenticeship is to help students become better readers of a variety of texts by:
- engaging them in more reading;
- making the teacher's discipline-based reading processes and knowledge visible to them;
- making the their reading processes and the social contexts, strategies, knowledge, and understandings they bring to the task of making sense of subject-matter texts visible to the teacher and to one another;
- helping them gain insight into their own reading processes; and
- helping them acquire a repertoire of problem-solving strategies with the varied texts of the academic discipline (Schoenbach, 2000, p.23).
Persistence, sustained attention, and cooperation are demanding for learners. Therefore, building the right context is crucial. Although research has taught us much about what is needed to read, it has provided much less knowledge about effective means of helping students learn to read. Thus, hoping to respond to this need, this study looked at the roles the teacher should adopt in a RAF to develop pre-college EFL learners’ reading literacy drawing on what the teacher knows and does as a reader and on learners’ often underestimated strengths. In the Reading Apprenticeship Framework of this study reading strategies were taught in a context of inquiry. Such a context affords teachers the opportunity to support motivation with the principles of: a) having knowledge goals in reading instruction, b) providing hands-on activities related to reading, c) giving students realistic choices, d) using interesting texts for instruction, and e) weaving collaboration into students’ classroom lives (Guthrie, Schafer, & Huang, 2001).
Intending to provide insights into what teaching strategies are useful in facilitating the delivery of the Reading Apprenticeship Framework, the study was carried out in an English language school over a duration of two months and in 36 sessions.
The type of Purposeful Sampling adopted in this study is Typical Sampling which, according to Creswell (2002), is a sampling in which the researcher studies a person or site that is “typical” to those unfamiliar with the situation. Finn and Achilles (1999) found that students in classes of fewer than 17 had statistically significant literacy achievement gains in all subject areas and at every level. In this study for better achievement results, it was tried to keep the number of learners fewer than seventeen.
The subjects who participated in the actual study were language learners attending an intensive course of English at intermediate level of proficiency. The subjects came from a variety of native language backgrounds: Malay, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Arabic etc. Most of the learners were secondary school leavers who wished to pursue their education at a college or university in or outside Malaysia but lacked the required English proficiency. All the students at this language school sit for a written and oral placement test upon registration. Therefore, those sitting in one class might be assumed homogenous; but the fact that the pre-test of the study showed otherwise was cherished, as the heterogeneity factor helped me to see how the framework worked for learners at different levels of proficiency. On the very first session, all seventeen learners sat for a pre test, adopted from PISA 2000. The mean and standard deviation were calculated. As the overall ability of the researcher to provide an in-depth picture diminishes with the addition of each new individual (Creswell, 2002), six learners from different nationalities, two who scored the highest, two who scored the lowest and two whose scores were closest to the mean were selected to represent better, weaker and average students to maximize what could be learned from the context.
Learning cognitive strategies is a challenging enterprise. To learners, the strategies are abstract. For teachers, the process of modeling and scaffolding strategies requires time and care. Nevertheless this study found that even low-achieving readers’ reading can develop with effective instruction. Observation field notes, learners’ reflections, insights from the final interview and feedback from the peer observation sessions all complemented the findings on the efficacy of the apprenticeship.
In light of the requirements for increased reading literacy, Reading Apprenticeship puts the teacher/researcher in the role of expert and students are “apprenticed” into the ways reading is used and the strategies and thinking that are particularly useful. Rather than offering a sequence of strategies, the RAF in this study focused on creating a classroom where students became active and effective readers and learners. It should be noted that, although reading strategies have been placed under the categories of pre-reading, while-reading and after-reading (e.g. Auerbach and Paxton, 1997; Maria and Hathaway, 1993) the focus in this RAF was on ‘while-reading’ strategies.
From the beginning, reading apprentices were engaged in the whole process of problem solving to make sense of written texts, even if they were initially unable to carry out on their own all the individual strategies and subtasks that go into successful reading. The hidden, cognitive dimensions in particular were drawn out and made visible to the students. The teaching and learning environment required the interaction of students and teacher in multiple dimensions of classroom life to develop students’ confidence and competence as readers of various kinds of challenging texts. Making it safe for students to discuss reading difficulties mitigated their potential embarrassment. Strategies that address individual needs involved:
- Offering personalized scaffolding.
- Using flexible means to reach defined ends
- Creating a caring classroom in which differences were seen as assets.
The overarching practice in this RAF was building ample one-on-one time into the class structure.
Adapting Hunter’s (1991) lesson design mode, everyday the lesson was started by eliciting from the learners themselves how that very strategy could help them in real life and why it was important to know how to use it (Purpose). Then the strategy was introduced with examples for its actual usage (Input). Using think-aloud, an example or two would be modeled for them to see what a more proficient reader would actually do in the face of a reading problem (Modeling).
As Smith (1988) stresses the importance of learner’s personal sense of group membership, the learners were then assigned to groups to do the tasks together. Learners acted upon cues from what they read, experimented with multiple literacies and received feedback from peers and the “novice tutors”. They were given reading tasks to do in small groups, so that through interaction they could help their peers to manage the task and not just sit idol, waiting for the class to read out the correct responses as groups needing more scaffolding were monitored (Guided Practice). Working in small groups allowed for participation of everyone as they felt more comfortable and able to reach consensus. Research recommends no fewer than three and no more than five for small group discussions to insure the involvement of all (Miller, 1997); thus, learners were asked to sit in groups of 3-5 for the desired peer support.
A particular risk with any kind of scaffold is when its use becomes habituated. When the provided support is fixed and constantly expected, students are not given the opportunity to ever become independent (Silver & Kogut, 2006).Thus, after relative assurance was gained of their ability to handle the tasks, they were given more reading tasks and asked to try their best to handle them independently (Independent Practice).
In the first half of the framework, the strategies were introduced one at a time. To some of the more complex strategies more than one session were dedicated. Single strategy instruction enabled lower-achieving learners to understand, to gain command, and to transfer the strategies to a variety of texts (Guthrie, Wigfield, Barbosa, Von Secker & Richardson, 2001). In the second half of this 8-week framework, the strategies were combined. Learners need to be shown what teachers mean before they can effectively do what they are asked to do.
One consistent feature in the reading lessons was the encouragement of students to read and think aloud to increase students’ conscious awareness of the various problems faced and strategies used during reading. Although it was not expected from all the students to be equally competent, they were expected to follow the modeling of the strategies albeit their proficiency differences. There was an even mix of different proficiencies in different groups. Groupings that are required to discuss topics require a range of perspectives that are likely to be enhanced in mixed-ability groupings (Web, 1989). With respect to the dialogue that occurs when students are working together, Wells (2002) notes:
“It is not necessary for there to be a clear difference in expertise for participants to assist each other…whenever the dialogue that occurs in joint activity leads to an increase in individual as well as collective understanding, there is an opportunity for each participant to appropriate new ways of doing, speaking, and thinking, and thus to augment the…resources they can draw on, both in the present and in their future activities” (p. 61)
However, it was observed that having a more competent learner in each group who subtly took on the role of the “expert” and shared his think-alouds with his other peers can prove more beneficial. This allows apprenticeship to happen at two levels: At one level, the teacher as the expert and all learners as apprentices and at the second level, the more proficient readers in the groups as the mentors allowing the less proficient readers constant access to a model.
Besides the use of think-aloud, metacognitive discussion was another prominent feature of the reading sessions. Most of the discussion whether instructor-led at the first level of apprenticeship, or peer-led at the second level of the apprenticeship, revolved around the detection of what was hindering comprehension, awareness and use of learned strategies and finding contextual clues for resolving reading problems.
DH was 16 and from Korea. He had started studying English at elementary school and after that “occasionally at school” but had never attended any extra curricular English classes. He was son to a scientist and he himself had the ambition of becoming a “great scientist discovering facts”. This problem-solving attitude was evident in his handling of the reading tasks as well. Almost every day in my observation notes I was praising DH’s level of enthusiasm and dedication:
“I noticed that lack of background knowledge did not affect DH’s performance and maybe even boosted his motivation as he always welcomes challenges.” (Fieldnotes.1)
Comparing his score of 22/30 in the pre-test with his score of 28/30 in the post-test, he showed 21% improvement which supports his stating that overall he had found the RAF useful.
“In other reading classes, at first the teacher just comes in to the class and asks somebody to read it aloud and if somebody does not know the word or the meaning he would just talk and teach that word and always say read again, so it’s not that useful or productive, ummm, so I think the way you have taught is more better.” (Final Interview.1)
Comparing the results of his pre-test with his post test revealed that he has become more competent in retrieving information from both continuous and non-continuous texts as well as interpretation but he was still struggling with evaluating the text, most probably because that was the only strategy that he had doubts about its usefulness in his life outside the school.
As observed, he really connected with the module and liked the material and way of instruction. He would consistently write in his reflections that the teaching material is “interesting” or “different in a good way”. In the final interview he also mentioned:
“Some of them (reading material) was hard, some easy for me, some parts the materials were challengeable, but overall was good.” (Final interview.2)
As far as the modeling of the strategies was concerned, I was not sure how useful DH was finding it. As he was always very keen and attentive and as he had proved his good ability in reading, I wondered whether or not he could perform just as well without the modeling and scaffolding. Yet, after covering each strategy in his reflections he would comment on the instruction and the teacher support as “very effective”, “helpful”, or “enjoyable and clear”. In the final talk that we had together he again confirmed his earlier comments by saying:
“The modeling was very useful, because for the first time, I heard the instruction, it was not very clear for me, like a vague idea, but the modeling, it helped me a lot.” (Written reflections.1)
In group works, he would subtly take on the role of the mentor, sharing his think-alouds with his other peers and highlighting the clues from text to them. Quite often I would monitor how, using a very comprehendible language for his peers, he would justify his choice of answer in a reading task. At the same time he would not dominate the group nor would he impose his answer on them. He would humbly invite others to comment on his choice of answer. In my reflexive journal I once wrote:
“DH very patiently helped his team mates out and highlighted the
clues to Dieter and HM, while I listened from a distance and not
interfered as he was doing a good job.” (Fieldnotes.2)
In his daily reflections, he was quite pleased with the idea of working in groups and would state that such interaction would “make the tasks easier” or “when you hear yourself explain something to your friend, you understand it better also”. Therefore, I could confidently conclude that not only the weaker students, but also the better readers benefited from the 2-level apprenticeship.
In small groups, students were able to pool their resources and through metacognitive talk resolve the reading problems. A second level of apprenticeship occurred in small groups as the better readers mentored the less proficient students and constructed “a scaffold for each other’s performance” (Donato, 1994). Working collaboratively allows students to compensate for each others’ lack of resources in the face of reading problems (Goh, 2004).
The idea of group work was to support the social dimension of the RAF and to help learners’ build confidence. Regardless of the proficiency level, all students unanimously agreed that working with peers and sharing think-aloud proved fruitful and they all thought a maximum of 3 is ideal for such interaction.
Von Glasersfeld (1996) asserts that given opportunities involving critical dialogue and interaction, learners will become more engaged in the literacy tasks. Such interaction and collaboration calls for the engagement of all group members and even though the less proficient ones might contribute less to the pooling of think-aloud, analyzing individual students’ profiles showed that the RAF can to some extent prevent passiveness during the comprehension process. The study found that there exists a reciprocal relation between reading engagement and strategy use. In the case of DH, for example, the most engaged student, greater improvement was observed and he was better able to utilize the strategies. Reading engagement influences the use of reading strategies and the use of reading strategies influences reading motivation (Van Kraayenoord & Schneider, 1999).
Being in the security of a small group was seen as advantageous as a more proficient learner was always at hand to offer scaffolding. There is no doubt that personality traits affect the interaction among peers. Certain individuals might not get along, or better readers might not be comfortable if there is too much reliance on them. Less proficient readers might lack the confidence to contribute (Cohen, 1998) or even choose not to ask for support from their peers.
Having a better reader in each group was relieving, as less proficient learners did not have to lose time waiting for the teacher to reach them to provide support. With the 2-level apprenticeship, as support was being offered to one group, similar expert-novice relationship would be going on in other groups.
Comments from students with different proficiencies added confidence that the modeling was just as helpful. DH mentioned that he “couldn’t do the tasks without it”. Or that “it happened in his brain as well.” The feedback from the peer observers revealed the modeling had been “very clear”, “step by step” and “useful”.
The demonstration and modeling of strategies is a key feature of instructional scaffolding that students need to be successful with texts. Learning is mediated through language by differences in perspectives among co-participants (Bakhtin, 1984; Habermas, 1984).
As he was normally the better reader in his groups, he felt at times there was too much reliance on him, but he still felt that in groups of 2-3, they could handle tasks better due to the interaction.
Overall it could be concluded that at the end of the session he had become more confident in his reading as he was aware of how to use the strategies and he had learned to live with ambiguity:
“The training changed me a lot. Before I was afraid of reading. Because I was not confident whether my understating was right or wrong but now I feel more confident than before. Now I can figure out words that I don’t know, by reading the passage and I can read between the lines and I am more competent than before.”
“I try to use all the strategies. When I read the magazine, I try to figure out the words without finding them in dictionary. I am mostly correct. But not always. When I get confused during my first time reading, I just skip it and when it’s my second time I try to read again and figure out.” (Final Interview.3)
Referring to Social Constructivism, instruction must provide the context for individuals to engage in activities in which written language is constructed and used. This theoretical framework also implies that learners acquire literacy practices in collaborative settings in which the collective knowledge of participants develop through sharing and dialogue; thus, transforming the traditional transmission-oriented mode of teaching to one that is facilitative of learning and literacy acquisition (Auerbach, 1993). With 33 hours of apprenticeship, it is believed that a good amount of intensive reading took place. Through the modeling of each strategy and sharing of think-aloud, teacher’s discipline-based reading processes were successfully made visible to the learners. What is more, working in small groups, benefiting from a second level of apprenticeship, thinking together and having constant access to a model (either the teacher or the better reader of the group), made learners’ reading processes visible to themselves and to each other; and finally with direct strategy instruction, gradual removal of scaffolding and learners’ growing of confidence, learners at different proficiency levels became more capable of handling authentic texts and more enabled to “break the code” (Shoenbach, et al., 2003) of academic language.
The positive impact of the RAF implies that teachers potentially have a useful instructional technique to help learners improve their reading literacy and deal with various text types and to reach this aim they can heavily rely on the more competent readers to gradually take up the role of the novice reader and act as scaffolds for the less competent peers.
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