What Difference Does It Make If Words Are Regarded To Be The Interface Between Communication And Thought, Or 'Just Words'?

Author(s):

Anna Lyngfelt(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 09 A, Lesson Studies and Co-teaching : Perspectives in didactics

Paper/Poster Session

Time:

2017-08-24

13:30-15:00

Room:

K3.02

Chair:

Anke Wegner

Contribution

The main objective of this presentation is to discuss the relation between domain knowledge, reading comprehension and vocabulary when developing scientific literacy in grade eight and nine at secondary school, by the use of texts in textbooks. What barriers do the students perceive when using texts in textbooks? Could they be explained by the students’ lack of relevant vocabulary, or the students’ lack of reading comprehension strategies? In addition to this, why is it important to discuss what difference it does make if words are regarded to be the interface between communication and thought, or ’just words’?

It is when we read that we build, refine and modify our knowledge. However, in the text the meaning of any word consists of bundles of associations that are the cumulative product of the reader’s experience with both the word in context and the conceptions to which it refers. In fact every concept – simple or complex, concrete or abstract – is learned in terms of its similarities, differences and relationships with other concepts whith which we are familiar (Adams, 2011).

It should be pointed out that every coherent text is made up of a few words that repeatedly occur, while at the same time there are words that occur just once or a few times. This is true for every natural language domain, regardless of its size, modality or sophistication. This means that if students read several texts on a single topic, they encounter a number of domain-specific, information-bearing words. In such texts the words that arise to the top are those most useful for describing the concepts and relations that are central to that topic. As follows, the more the students know about the topic of a text, the greater their understanding and learning will be as they read (O’Reilly & McNamara, 2007; Shapiro, 2007).

Also, it is well-known that even if vocabulary strength predicts the speed and security with which students learn the meanings of unfamiliar words (Biemiller & Boote, 2005), the students’ knowledge of words grows less through any process of inferring their meanings, one by one, based on the sentences in which they arise, than as a product of learning more generally about the contexts in which they arise (Kulbrandstad, 1998; Axelsson, 2002). To grow, students must read lots of complex texts – texts that offer them new language, new knowledge and new modes of thoughts. As Hirsch puts it, reading deficit is integrally tied to knowledge deficit (Hirsch, 2006).

At schoolthe challenge lies in organizing reading in every subject and every class such that each text bootstraps the language and knowledge that will be needed for the following texts. Thus, reading programmes talk about ’activating’ the reader’s background knowledge so she/he can comprehend a text. Little attempt, however, is made to enlarge students’ background knowledge which in turn means that little is accomplished in terms of expanding children’s ability to comprehend more complex and varied texts (Hirsch, 2011). Here scaffolding by the use of reading strategies might support the building of students’ vocabulary and ideas, to develop domain knowledge by the use of advanced texts in secondary school.

Method

To be able to answer the research questions mixed methods have been used. To discuss what barriers the students perceive when using texts in textbooks, focus group interviews with semi-structured questions were created, and to this text analysis was added, based on text structure and the use of multimodality in science textbooks. For question number two, classroom observations of implemented reading strategies have been made, and related to the teachers’ documentation of their teaching. The overall methodological approach, however, has been ethnographic; question number three would otherwise have been difficult to answer, since the two initial questions, about literacy practices and the interface between communication and thought, needs empirical data based on observed behaviour and meanings expressed by both students and teachers linked to the teaching of science in the two school classes. In accordance with Blommaert (2010), ethnography here allows the unravelling of details of how language varieties and discourses work for the students and teachers involved, including what they accomplish (or fail to do) in practice. The study was conducted during 2016. Initially, to get an overall view of science teaching in two school classes at secondary school, classroom observations and interviews with two science teachers were made. Further on, information on the students’ text perception was obtained by interviews in four focus groups. These included 16 students that were arranged in groups which, according to the teachers, each of them were compatible and representative when it comes to reading comprehension and science knowledge. Eight were chosen from each class, discussing four different texts on the refraction of light - one text in each group. To be able to link the students’ reflections on the specific text studied in the group, the four texts (fetched from four different textbooks in science for secondary school) were analysed. To this the teachers’ notes on their own teaching were added for the analysis, including their planning and implementation of work with reading strategies (emanating from the students’ ideas on text perception). Here, the main focus was to unravel in what ways the teachers took into account the students’ vocabulary and ideas on a specific topic when they implemented elaborated reading strategies – could they be said to contribute to the students’ development of domain knowledge? The notes from the teachers also included self-evaluation, which could be compared with the students’ (written) documenation of how the work with the reading strategies fell out.

Expected Outcomes

The focus group interviews show that the presentation of the content, in terms of text length, text structure and multimodality, mattered to the students. However, the answers were contradactive when it came to the importance of coherence. Generally, the students asked for more reasoning in the science texts, to make them easier to follow and understand. Yet the students in the group that specifically discussed the most reasoning of the four texts being discussed, did not elaborate thoughts of the text content to a higher extent than the groups discussing the three other texts. Also, the students found it difficult to interpret texts where the relation between illustrations and (written) text extracts is unclear or misleading. Furthermore, the interviews showed that the teachers’ views on texts are transmitted to the students; students in each class had similar ideas of what texts could be used for and these ideas corresponded with the teachers’ opinions on text use. As follows, eight of the students stressed the importance of reading texts as a whole, to understand the content, while the other eight thought more of reading as a desciphering of scientific terms. The efforts, twice, to elaborate reading strategies suitable for specific groups of students and actual domains of knowledge, showed great difficulties in enlarging the students’ background knowledge. In the classroom the teachers found it difficult to bridge the gap between activated background knowledge and knowledge beyond the desciphering of scientific terms or meaning of specific sentences in the texts. Partly these difficulties could be explained by conceptions within the school system, of reading with comprehension as a set of general-purpose skills and strategies that can be applied to any and all texts (En läsande klass, 2017).

References

Adams, M. J., 2011. Advancing Our Students’ Language and Literacy. The Challenge of Complex Texts. American Educator. A Quarterly Journal of Educational Research and Ideas, 34 (4), p. 3-11. Axelsson, M., Lennartson-Hokkanen, I. & Sellgren, M. (2002). Den röda tråden. Utvärdering av Stockholms stads storstadssatsning – målområde språkutveckling och skolresultat. Stockholm: Språkforskningsinstitutet i Rinkeby och Stockholms stad. Biemiller, A. & Boote, C., 2005. An Effective Method for Building. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 31: 6, p. 1281-1292. Blommaert, J. & Dong, J., 2010. Ethnographic Fieldwork. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. En läsande klass (2017). Läsförståelsestrategier. http://www.enlasandeklass.se [2017-01-09] Hirsch, E. D., 2006. The Knowledge Deficit. Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hirsch, E. D. & Pondiscio, R., 2011. There's No Such Thing as a Reading Test. American Educator, 34 (4), p. 50-51. Kulbrandstad, L. Iversen, 1998. Lesing på et andrespråk : en studie av fire innvandrerungdommers lesing av læreboktekster på norsk. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. O’Reilly, T. & McNamara, D., 2007. The Impact of Science Knowledge, Reading Skill, and Reading Strategy Knowledge on More Traditional “High-Stakes” Measures of High School Students’ Science Achievement, American Educational Research Journal. 44 (1), p. 161-196. Shapiro, A. M., 2004. How Including Prior Knowledge as a Subject Variable May Change Outcomes of Learning Research. American Educational Research Journal, 44 (1), p. 159-189.

Author Information

Anna Lyngfelt (presenting / submitting)

University of Gothenburg

Dep. of pedagogical, curricular and professional studies

Gothenburg

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