Contribution
Description: Traditionally, reading in a L2 class takes place in a whole class setting, texts being presented as a means for teachers to introducing new grammatical structures or new vocabulary (Puren, 1996). The shift towards a communicative approach and later on towards the constructivist paradigm has not led to a consideration of reading as an autonomous learning object. Therefore, explicit L2 reading instruction is seldom given and the reading act is not contextualised.
Reading in a L2 is influenced by language level and reading performance in L1 (Brisbois 1995; Carrell,1991) but depends also on the context in which reading takes place (Penningroth, 1997; Rui, 1997). Explicit strategy instruction (Nuttall, 1982; Westhoff, 1987;1997; Swaffar, Arens & Byrnes, 1991) and cooperative task solving (Cohen, 1994; Kessler, 1992) as a specific classroom context - is considered in our study as a means to analysing how co-construction of meaning occurs in students interactions and how reading attitudes are transformed through the acquisition of strategies.
In order to observe if and how students make use of formerly taught reading strategies while solving a specific reading task, we implemented a didactic sequence in four secondary school classes in Geneva/Switzerland (14-15 years old students), composed by four lessons on reading strategies instruction, followed by two reading tasks solved in different cooperative learning structure (square and jigsaw) and on different text genres (interviews and narrative text).
In our contribution, we focus on the analysis of group interactions in an jigsaw task (narrative text), in order to answer the following research question:
1. what kind of problems do students encounter while solving a reading task ?
2. what kind of strategies do they apply in order to solve comprehension problems ?
3. on what conditions/in what contexts are the chosen strategies successful ?
Methodology: We transcribed audio and video-recorded data and developed different analysis tools:
(a) summaries of dyad/group work sessions. The unit of analyses is content based, and aims at understanding the concatenation(?)/succession of activities through used materials, tasks and comprehension problems
(b) a tool for detailed data presentation which allows to visualise time reference in the transcription, text extracts on which students are working,, students' answers and gives the possibility to infer used strategies in a given context
(c) a precise description of each reading strategy, a tool used for categorizing
Conclusions: First results seem to show that students generally focus on word level problems, but that the absence of solution doesn't influence their overall comprehension of the text. Another finding concerns the important use of word level strategies but also an important amount of trials to apply text level strategies. This finding is surprising with regard to the fact that both teachers focused on word level strategies. It seems that is not so much the specific content of instruction than the mention of existing comprehension tools, as well as their modelling in class that lead students to a change of reader's attitude (strategy use instead of word by word reading). But, a high amount of strategy use still remains unsuccessful: inappropriate choice of the strategy for a given problem, use of isolated strategy more than coordinated, limit of the strategy itself in a given context ( for instance deriving word meaning from the context), linguistic level of individual students are factors that hinder text comprehension.
These findings suggest that strategy instruction should give more emphasis on a coordinated use of strategies on each level (word, sentence and text) and also teach strategy flexibility, i.e. training in the choose of the most efficient strategy in a given context.
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