Teaching Approaches/Developing language: Difference between revisions

=Developing Reading=

Both Pressley and the NRPR research overview on comprehension emphasise the crucial role of the teacher in explicitly encouraging the use of comprehension strategies. The NRPR cites evidence to show that the pupils of teachers who consciously included reading comprehension strategies within their reading programmes made better progress in their reading. It seems that comprehension improves when teachers provide explicit instruction in comprehension strategies and when teachers design and implement activities that support understanding (Tharp 1992). Explicitly planning to include such strategies within shared and guided reading would therefore seem to be an essential part of a successful reading programme.

It seems from the research quoted above that there is a growing consensus about the kinds of experiences pupils need in order to develop their reading comprehension, in the teaching model and in the range of strategies that might be helpful. The NRPR drew attention to the importance of pupils having a range of reading comprehension strategies. Work in cognitive psychology has shown that pupils need to have access to a range of strategies to enable development to take place. Siegler (2000) in a recent overview into learning and development makes the point that learners need a range of ‘production strategies’ (ways of doing things) and that having a wide range of production strategies is important for development to take place. Learners, he claims, add to their repertoire of strategies by

Robert Fisher gives a useful summary of strategies to enhance these different types of learning in his book Teaching children to learn (1995).

Siegler (2000) sees the pupil as moving from acquiring strategies to being able to reflect on their usefulness and compare them with others. This implies a level of conscious decision-making by the pupil. This ‘self-awareness’ and ability to reflect is important in learning. Gardner (1993) lists metacognitive intelligence as one of the types of learning, but it is one that, until recently, was rarely actively encouraged in many classrooms. Vygotsky (1962) suggested that there are two stages in the development of knowledge: firstly there is automatic unconscious acquisition (we learn things or do things but do not know that we know these things), and secondly there is a gradual increase in active conscious control over that knowledge (we begin to know that we know and that there is more we do not know). The second of these is a metacognitive level of understanding. Over the last decade we have become increasingly aware of the importance of metacognition in learning to read (Baker and Brown 1984). One of the characteristics distinguishing younger readers from older readers, and poorer readers from fluent readers, is that younger and poorer readers often do not recognise when they have not understood a text (Garner and Reis 1981); that is, there is evidence that they are not actively aware of their own level of understanding and are therefore not able to make an autonomous decision to use a strategy to enhance their understanding. Other readers show a greater awareness of their own level of understanding for they will stop when a text does not make sense to them. Some will then go on to select from their range of strategies that which might help overcome their problem.

In shared and guided reading sessions we can model for pupils how fluent readers monitor their understanding and use strategies to clarify their own understanding. These may range from semantic strategies to work out a troublesome word to sophisticated reflections on whether the meaning is deliberately obscure (as in a mystery) or perhaps challenging the author/text because the reader thinks they are incorrect. Such teacher modelling is an important part of the learning opportunities within reading sessions. The work of Gerry Duffy and Laura Roehler (Duffy et al. 1987; Duffy and Roehler 1989) concerning teacher demonstration and modelling is the one most often referred to.  

*  Baker, L. and Brown, A. L. (1984) ‘Metacognitive skills and reading’. In D. Pearson (ed) Handbook of reading research. Longman. ISBN: 0805841504.

*  Duffy, G. G. and Roehler, L. R. (1989) ‘Why strategy instruction is so difficult and what we need to do about it’. In C. B. McCormick, G. Miller and M. Pressley (eds) Cognitive strategy research: from basic research to educational applications, pp. 133–154. Springer-Verlag. ISBN: 0837968695.

Effective teaching of writing will depend on the degree to which teachers understand the complexity of the task (Schulman 1987).

Tightly structured lessons, which establish a clear sense of purpose and direction through clearly defined achievable targets, benefit all pupils but especially boys (Frater 1998).

Writing needs to be purposeful and offer pupils a stake in the negotiation of meaningful opportunities for expressing their interests (Britton et al. 1975). This is crucial for maintaining the interest of boys. Teachers have been slow to use boys’ particular knowledge of media and information technology and to link preferred writing to their preferred reading of factual ‘real world’ texts (Daly 1999). There is clear agreement in research on the need to integrate activities in writing around purposeful, authentic learning tasks.

   

Teachers need to provide good examples of texts so that pupils are able jointly to investigate and analyse the features as readers or as writers. Callaghan and Rothery (1998) suggest that there are three stages in this approach

Writing at Key Stage 3 involves learning to read from multiple sources and writing critically in response. Writers need to be able to organise more complex information and to orchestrate, control and reflect upon their writing of a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts (Hillocks 1995).

Anticipating the needs of their audience and understanding the reader/writer relationship require clarity of objectives, purpose and task. Teachers need to be clear with pupils how the audience and purpose for their piece of writing will determine the structural and linguistic choices they make as writers (Cope and Kalantzis 1993).

Evidence shows that teachers can support pupils in managing complexity by modelling the power of sentence-combining  activities (Shaughnessy 1979). Modelling is more than ‘demonstrating’ writing because it involves talking pupils through the thinking and decision-making processes used when writers write. The teacher takes the role as ‘expert’ (Vygotsky 1980). The use of metacognition and meta-language are important factors. Pupils need a supportive writing environment but benefit from seeing and experiencing the ‘struggles’ that are part of developing the writing skills (Bereiter and Scardamalia 1982, 1987).

   

Guided writing offers small-group teaching opportunities to support writers in making valuable connections between the text-, sentence- and word-level decisions required to shape texts with particular criteria in mind. Teachers can clarify the cognitive processes used when pupils are planning and revising, before, during or after writing parts of a text. The aim is to develop better-focused and more fluent writing with the support and feedback of teacher and peers (Scardamalia et al. 1981).

Scaffolding is an effective process by which the teacher organises learning that is challenging to pupils in such a way as to assist them to carry out the new task successfully (Wood et al. 1976). It is a complex process and involves

*  activating and maintaining the learner’s interest;

Scaffolding has a role in moving pupils to independent use of new strategies by supporting them as co-constructors of knowledge and co-users of more expert strategies than those they can control independently (Palincsar 1986). Writing frames are just one example of scaffolds, but their misuse has underlined the complexities in the process of pupils becoming sufficiently independent to manage without the ‘expert facilitator’ (Lewis and Wray 2000).

<section begin=Assessment />Since writing involves the integration of several processes, re-reading to revise is important (Norwood, Hayes and Flower 1980). Chanquoy (2001) shows the positive effect of returning to writing after the event. The time delay seems to help, but the techniques for revising need to be explicitly taught, that is modelled by the teacher. Glynn et al. (1989), behavioural psychologists researching in New Zealand classrooms, found considerable evidence that positive oral feedback has an impact on both motivation and the amount written. This was found to be more significant when errors were selectively targeted and when pupils were involved in error correction and praised for this. The research suggests that teachers’ comments should be organisational, encouraging, constructive, challenging and push pupils’ thinking. The work of Black and Wiliam (1998) and Black et al. (2002) looks at formative assessment and its relationship to raising standards in pupils’ learning. They comment that effective feedback needs to make explicit to pupils what is involved in producing high-quality writing and what steps are needed for improvement. They suggest that pupils should be actively engaged in the thinking and discussion involved. <section end=Assessment />

   

*  Bereiter, C. and Scardamalia, M. (1982) ‘From conversation to composition: the role of instruction in the developmental process’. In R. Glaser (ed) Advances in instructional psychology. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN: 0898594227.

*  Bereiter, C. and Scardamalia, M. (1987) The psychology of written composition.