APLING678 Week 4 - Reading

Reading with Web 2.0 and Beyond

Guiding Questions:

• What are the different types of reading that we do daily?
• How has the Web 2.0 change the way we read?
• Why is it important for us to recognize these changes?
• What are some of the benefits and challenges of the Web 2.0 tools for the facilitation of L2 reading skills and academic reading?

Readings: Complete the following readings:

• Text: Walker & White (2013) Chapter 4
• e-Reserves: Chun (2011) Chapter 5 in Arnold & Ducate (eds.)
• Weblink: Rance-Roney, J. (2010) Jump-starting language and schema for English-language Learners: Teacher-Composed Digital Jumpstarts for Academic Reading

Substantive Discussion Post

“Jumpstarting” or prepping students with important vocabulary and contextual material has long been a part of traditional teaching of reading in the classroom. Web 2.0 has opened up a broader spectrum of possibilities for providing this jumpstart.

Three distinct advantages of reading with Web 2.0 come to mind: digital jumpstarts can offer a more thorough and more engaging introduction to the reading, students can have more access to authentic materials, and properly prepared Web 2.0 materials can aid in a flipped classroom approach.

In her “Jump Starting Language…” article, Judith Rance-Roney points out that English Language Learners often don’t perform well on reading comprehension due to a lack of background information or to poor visual literacy. Exposure to visual schema plus integration of voice and word within meaningful contexts is necessary to help improve these lacking areas (p. 389). Rance-Roney explains how she and other educators have been experimenting with using technology to create “digital jump-starts” for students, which would prepare students for a particular reading assignment by “providing background information, developing schema, and previewing vocabulary for learners” (p. 387) A digital jumpstart can include photos, videos, music, speech, and text. This rich introduction can “establish the emotional tone” necessary for diving into a reading, as well as providing scaffolding for vocabulary, previewing a theme, predicting a topic, making cultural connections, and modeling effective pre-reading strategies (p. 393). My personal response to the sample digital jumpstart for To Kill a Mockingbird was to notice how all the elements combined to evoke emotion, give background information with words and visuals, define relevant vocabulary, and to pique my interest through quotes and images. Rance-Roney cites William Kist’s New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media in her article. In Kist’s first chapter, he recalls a time when he was moved by a Woody Allen film and struck by how a picture (or in this case a video set to music) is worth a thousand words. He describes how the sentiment portrayed was that “love is worth holding onto no matter what,” but that those words “couldn’t begin to evoke the same understandings…[Woody Allen] had communicated via the filming” (Kist 1). That was the feeling I got when watching the Mockingbird jumpstart. I’ve read the book, but the picture in my own mind was not as powerful as the picture created by the black and white photos, in combination with the southern music, in combination with the powerful quotes from the novel.

Of course some of those same effects can be seen with traditional multi-media reading jumpstarts, but those can often be more difficult for the teacher to create because of the labor involved in collecting authentic materials. Gathering culturally relevant, authentic materials is easier with the internet. And when these materials are collected into a digital jumpstart by the teacher, then the students can have access to them, hopefully for a longer period of time than if the teacher had used a traditional reading jumpstart. For example, if a traditional teacher had shown a few slides of the pictures present in the Mockingbird jumpstart, read a few quotes, and handed out a vocabulary list, the student would have been provided with some background knowledge and vocabulary would have been previewed, but depending on the student’s individual deficits in background or cultural knowledge, this might not be enough scaffolding for him. But imagine the student has access to the digital Mockingbird jumpstart the night before class. He could watch, re-watch, pause, and explore further as he sees fit. He could study the photos to try to predict the story, study relevant vocabulary, and look up information on the web to further his knowledge. The digital jumpstart might act as a springboard for the student to research the topic more on his own. One of the potential outcomes I envision for students are is that if a student has a particular deficit that would hamper his understanding of the text, he could fill in those holes (perhaps via web links that the teacher provides in the digital jumpstart) in his own understanding before beginning the reading.

Another advantage of teaching reading in the days of Web 2.0 is the potential for developing internal motivation and flipping the classroom. In Chapter 5 of the Arnold & Ducate text, Chun explores several studies on “developing intrinsic motivation”. Lück’s investigation “showed that the group that worked with web-based reading significantly increased their participations and motivation” and were particularly interested in reading authentic L2 texts on the web. This led me to seek out other and newer articles on motivation in the classroom, which led me to Abeysekera and Dawson’s article on motivation in the flipped classroom. The basic idea of a flipped classroom is to no longer see the teacher as a relator of information, but more as a facilitator of learning activities. Abeysekera & Dawson define the flipped classroom as “a set of pedagogical approaches that: (1) move most information-transmission teaching out of class, (2) use class time for learning activities that are active and social, and (3) require students to complete pre- and/or post-class activities to fully benefit from in-class work” (Abeysekera & Dawson p. 3). Walker & White provide descriptions of a couple of reading communities that are examples of flipped classrooms. In reading community 2, the readers read the text ahead of time and then gathered in a virtual Victorian drawing room for discussion. DuQuette assigned the participants specific roles for the discussion, so they had a “teacher’s” guidance, but they were not gathered in the drawing room to hear a lecture from the teacher nor to hear the story read aloud by one person. Their “in-class” time in the virtual drawing room emphasized peer learning, which is a characteristic of the flipped classroom (Abeysekera & Dawson, p. 3). Reading community 3 also flipped the traditional classroom by allowing students have access to their classmates’ homework ahead of time (p. 49). Sal Khan discusses the advantages of a flipped classroom in his TED talk. Khan points out the irony that in a flipped classroom, technology is actually being used “to humanize the classroom” (Khan 6:28). In the context of teaching reading to language learners, if a digital jumpstart has been provided in advance, and the students come to class prepped with the background and vocabulary necessary to be on the same page as their classmates, then class time can be used to read and discuss, and thus have more time to work in and on the target language.

Melissa, you mentioned that some students might have limited access to the web outside of the classroom. That’s definitely a factor we need to consider. It’s difficult to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution; it might need to be something we have to work out individually, taking our own student population and school restraints into consideration. One idea that comes to my mind (but would not work everywhere) is that many high schools now have block schedules and mobile computer labs. For my particular example, students could use the first 30 minutes of class to access the digital jumpstart and explore the topic in depth in whatever way meets their individual needs, and then gather as a class for the next hour to interact, discuss, and so on.

Additional References:

Kist, W. (2005). New literacies in action: Teaching and learning in multiple media. New York: Teachers College Press.

Transcript of "Let's use video to reinvent education" (n.d.). Retrieved February 22, 2016, from https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education/transcript?language=en