The 2004 Symposium on Multilingual Student Writers
Literacy Connections: Cultivating Reading Skills and Strategies in the Writing Course
2004 Symposium on Multilingual Student Writers
University of California, Berkeley
Saturday, 13 March 2004
John Hedgcock
Monterey Institute of International Studies
SAMPLE WORKING GROUP TASKS*
Reflection and Discussion Questions
Suggestion: Preview, select, and discuss any number of the following Reflection and Discussion Questions with your Working Group partners. Record insights and ideas to share with other Working Groups in the follow-up discussion.
1. After reviewing the following operational definition of reading processes and the Content Reading Skills below, identify comprehension operations that you explicitly or implicitly target in your lessons and when composing assignments.
The ability to read for basic comprehension is the skill that underlies most other purposes for reading. Basic comprehension requires rapid and accurate word recognition; fluency in processing words, sentences, and discourse cues; a large recognition vocabulary; a reasonably strong grasp of the structure of the language; an ability in integrate meanings from the text; an ability to make necessary inferences and connections to background knowledge; an ability to vary processes and goals strategically; and an ability to monitor comprehension . . . . These abilities also represent the foundation for reading to learn, critical reading, and reading to synthesize information, and they cannot be bypassed. (Grabe, 2001, p. 18)
Content Reading Skills
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2. Review your history as a reader and writer. Which of the three hypotheses about the relationship between reading and writing (the directional, nondirectional and bidirectional models) best account(s) for your development as a writer? What evidence best supports your claim?
3. If you have experience as a second language (L2) learner, would you say that your L2 literacy skills (including writing) can be explained by the same model you cited to explain your primary language writing skills? Why or why not? Which hypothesis or hypotheses are most consistent with the experiences of your students?
4. What text genres do you read for pleasure? For information? For your professional purposes? In what ways do you think this reading has contributed to your ability to compose academic and other kinds of texts? If you do not consider yourself to be an extensive reader, what do you think prevents you from reading voluntarily, for personal enrichment, or for enjoyment? How might you promote extensive reading among your students?
5. Recalling your own experiences as a student and academic writer, describe the genres and text types you have most often produced (e.g., summaries, reports, reviews, essays, annotated bibliographies, research papers). Have you had explicit instruction in how to construct such texts? If not, how did you learn to compose them? If asked by a novice how to compose such texts, what instructions would you give?
6. A number of influential approaches to literacy education feature the inherently social nature of constructing, transmitting, and using texts. Smith (1988), for example, introduced the metaphor of the literacy club; Gee (1996, 1998) characterized literacies as communities of readers and writers for whom certain text types and genres are meaningful and reflect collective value systems. What literacy clubs or literacies do you participate in? For example, do you consider yourself to be a member of the composition community, the English or language arts discipline, or the TESL/TEFL literacy club at your institution? Are you a parent, a cook, a surfer, a bird watcher, or a community volunteer? Can you identify the practices, values, and literate skills that you and other members these communities demonstrate? From the perspective of an outsider, what practices, behaviors, and ideologies signify these entities? What skills must acquire to be regarded as a full-fledged insider in those communities of practice?
7. In your opinion, to what extent should genres be featured in the writing curriculum? For example, what are some of the pedagogical advantages of addressing the genres and text types that students are expected to read and reproduce for their academic coursework? What are some potential benefits of raising students' awareness of non-academic genres and text types that students are already familiar with?
Activity Options
Suggestion: Preview the following Activities with your Working Group partners. Select one or two Activities to work through. Record your outcomes to share with other Working Groups in the follow-up discussion.
Activity 1: Encouraging Extensive, Self-initiated Reading
Directions: Identify the educational, vocational, and professional needs of the students at your institution. Carefully consider their level of L1 and L2 literacy. After consulting Figure 2 (Presentation Handout 1), brainstorm ideas for:
- helping students to find sources of engaging English-language texts (e.g., the campus or public library, used bookstores, book sales, book exchange clubs, online communities of readers, and so on);
- motivating students to read for pleasure and personal enrichment in English (see Day and Bamford, 1998; Grabe and Stoller, 2001, 2002b; Weinstein, 2001; Verhoeven & Snow, 2001);
- monitoring your students' extensive reading practices and bringing them to bear on their growth as writers.
Activity 2: Maximizing Reading-Writing Relationships—Writing from Texts Using Reading Journals
Journal writing has become an increasingly popular instructional tool in L1 and L2 literacy instruction (see Johns, 1997; Olshtain, 2001; Peyton & Reid, 1990). Reading journals serve as vehicles for novice writers to respond to assigned and self-selected readings. Journals can thus serve as a logical component of a voluntary or mandatory reading program in a writing course, although writers may not immediately appreciate the benefits. To promote students' written fluency, critical thinking skills, engagement with texts, and latent knowledge of how written language conveys meaning, Zamel (1992) presented approaches to giving students "experiences with the dialogic and dynamic nature of reading" (p. 472). Several of these approaches are summarized in the task below.
Many teachers recommend against using reading journals as evaluative tools. Rather than assigning grades for reading journals, teachers may require students to compose a specified number of entries based on a choice of prompts. Students whose entries are complete receive a full mark. Teacher response to reading journals consists of oral, handwritten, or word-processed comments to selected student entries. Teacher comments may consist of affirmations, queries, and personal reactions.
Directions: Examine the following classroom tasks adapted from Zamel (1992). Consider how you might put one or more of these ideas into practice in a course you teach, then assess their potential effectiveness. Identify the instructional advantages as well as practical challenges.
- Ask students to maintain reading journals or logs where they record and elaborate on what they read for school or for pleasure (e.g., textbooks, literary texts, newspapers, newsmagazines, Websites, and so on).
- Give students the opportunity to write about information that they find interesting, significant, perplexing, moving, or otherwise striking to help them realize that "their written reflection makes . . . understanding possible" (p. 474).
- Ask students to keep double-entry or dialectal notebooks: Instruct them to divide pages of their notebooks or word-processing files into two vertical columns. In the left-hand column, they copy or summarize passages of interest to them; in the right-hand column, they respond to these entries by posing questions, paraphrasing, commenting, and so on. Encourage students to respond in the form of images, metaphors, and parallels.
- Ask students to write entries that they might normally include as cryptic marginal notations in the original text. According to Zamel, "this form of response allows students to consider, weigh, and interpret their reading and gives rise to reactions that they may not have been aware of" (p. 477).
- To make students aware of their associations with texts before they read them, ask students to write journal entries about an experience featured in a text that they are about to read. This procedure can help them to construct and anticipate connections that they would not otherwise identify.
- Similarly, ask students to consider and weigh their own ideas about an issue before they read a text. This simple form of schema-raising can enable students "to approach the reading from a position of authority" (p. 478).
- To show students that effective readers use prediction to construct meaning, ask them to write speculatively about what will happen in a text and to compare these predictions with those of their peers and with the original text. "Written predictions of this sort literally transform student writers into authors of the text" (p. 479).
- Sequence journal entries around readings so that students address texts from diverse perspectives. Encourage students not only to view texts but also to re-view them using their new knowledge.
* All materials adapted from Ferris, D., and Hedgcock, J. (2005). Teaching ESL composition: Purpose, process, and practice (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
