For those who have read this stuff before, now is the time to DELETE!
mike
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Creating the Activity
The instructional/developmental task is now better specified: We must
somehow create a system of interpersonal interaction such that the combined
child-adult system at the right of Figure 9.5 can coordinate the child's act of reading
before the she can accomplish this activity for herself. Our strategy for accomplishing
this goal was a modification of the reciprocal teaching procedure of Palinscar and
Brown (1984), in which teacher and student silently read a passage of text and then
engage in a dialogue about it. Together they summarize the text, clarify
comprehension problems that arise, ask a question about the main idea, and predict
the next part of the text. In part because the children we were dealing with still had
difficulty decoding text, and in part because we wanted to make the activity as
interesting as possible, we expanded the number of roles and chose texts that we
thought would be of interest to the children (see LCHC, 1982 for additional details).
In so doing, we both manipulated the division of labor and provided as attractive a
goal as possible.
The core of the procedure is a set of roles/division of labor. Each role
corresponds to a different hypothetical part of the whole act of reading. The roles
were printed on 3"x 5" index cards. Every participant is responsible for fulfilling at
least one role in the full activity of Question-Asking- Reading. These cards specify the
following roles:
*The person who asks about words that are hard to say.
*The person who asks about words that are hard to understand.
*The person who asks a question about the main idea of the passage
*The person who picks the person to answer questions asked by others.
*The person who asks about what is going to happen next.
All participants including the instructor had a copy of the text to read, paper
and pencil to jot down words, phrases or notes (in order to answer questions implicit
in the roles)and their card to remind them of their role. The steps in the scripted
procedure were written on the blackboard where answers were recorded. All these
artifacts represent tools to be used by the adults to create a structured medium for
the development of reading and by the children to support their participation, even
before they know how to read.
In order to move from the script and other artifacts to an appropriate activity,
the procedural script was embedded in a complex activity designed to make salient
both the short term and long term goals of reading and to provide a means of
coordinating around the script. It is in this embedding process that we make the
transition from a focus on the structural model of reading depicted in Figures 9.2- 9.5
to a focus on reading acquisition as a joint activity.
Recognizing the need to create a medium rich in goals that could be resources
for organizing the transition from reading as a guided activity to independent,
voluntary reading, we saturated the environment with talk and activities about
growing-up and the role of reading in a grown-up's life. This entire activity was
conducted after school in a global activity structure we called "Field Growing Up
College" (it took place in the auditorium of the Field Elementary School). As part of
their application to participate in Field College, of which Question-Asking- Reading
was a major activity, the children filled out applications that emphasized the
relationship between reading and growing up. They got involved with us in
discussions about the difference between growing older and growing up as well as
how our activities related to their goal of growing up.
As shown in Figure 9.6, Question-Asking-Reading began
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Insert Figure 9.6
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each session with such "goal talk," discussion about the various reasons that children
might have for wanting to learn to read. These included such poorly understood
reasons (from the children's point of view) as the need to read in order to obtain an
attractive job such as becoming an astronaught, intermediate-level goals such as
graduating from Question- Asking-Reading to assist adults with computer-based
instruction, to quite proximate goals--the desirability of getting correct answer on the
quiz that came at the end of each reading session.
We began with a group discussion of the title or headline of the story to be
read that day. following the script outline written in Figure 9.6, which was written on
the blackboard, the role-bearing cards and the first paragraph of the text were passed
around. A good deal of discussion usually ensued about who had gotten what roles;
"pick the answerer" was an obvious favorite, while the card implicating the main idea
was avoided like the plague. Once the role cards were distributed, the text for the day
(usually taken from local newspapers with content that related to matters of potential
interest to the children) was distributed, one paragraph at a time. The participants
(including the instructor and one competent reader, usually a UCSD undergraduate,
and the children) then bent over their passages to engage in silent reading.
QAL could be considered a design experiment creating reading with meaning
(Brown, 1992). It was designed to be a zone of proximal development working at the
level of small groups and it has the property Courtney Cazden (198?) attributes to
zones of proximal development, providing for "performance before competence.".
Children were not required to do the "whole act of reading" in order to participate in
QAL. They were asked to fulfill partial roles which, as an ensemble, constituted many
overlapping moments of reading for meaning. The children are allowed to participate
in the whole act of reading-as-comprehending where initially the adults and the
artifacts bear a large part of the load, but where children come to be fuller
participants (e.g. competent readers) over time.
Initially QAL was strange to everyone, even the adult inventors who were
inventing it as they went along. But after a few sessions, a microculture had grown up
around QAL. Rituals emerged, such as having a snack to begin the session and a
period to run around outside while the adults quickly made up the day's quiz.
Everyone got to play all of the roles. The adults had no less role playing to do than
the kids, dividing their attention between being a member of the group and being the
group leader. These and other procedural arrangements constituted our attempt to
organize a medium which would repeatedly create moments when the three
mediational triangles depicted in Figure 9.3 would be coordinated to create the
conditions for "re"-mediating the children's entering systems of mediation.
The Data
Our evidence for the way in which this procedure worked is derived from
several sources: videotaped recordings of the instructional sessions, the children's
written work on the quizzes that completed each session, and various test results.
Although we gathered data from the beginning of the first session, the crucial data for
our analysis come after several sessions when the children have mastered the overall
script so that the group is working as a coordinated structure of interaction.
Our strategy was greatly influence by Luria's monograph, The Nature of Human
Conflicts (1932), devoted largely to an experimental procedure designed to reveal
"hidden psychological processes," e.g. thoughts and feelings. The basic idea of Luria's
procedure, which he called "the combined motor method" was to create a scripted
situation where a subject had simultaneously to carry out a motor response (squeeze
a bulb) and a verbal response (give the first word that comes to mind) when
presented a stimulus word. In the most dramatic form of this procedure, which has
subsequently been incorporated in lie-detector systems, Luria interrogated suspected
criminals. He began by presenting either simple tones or neutral words until the
subject could respond rapidly and smoothly. Then, among the neutral words he was
present a word that had special significance in the crime (handkerchief, for example,
if a handkerchief was used to gag a victim). He argued that selective disruption of the
smoothly coordinated baseline system of behavior revealed the subject's special state
of knowledge.
In place of a bulb to squeeze and deliberate deception, our concern was with
texts, role cards, and the selective disruption of the smoothly running script of
Question-asking-reading. Hence, it was of paramount importance that we create the
conditions for a smoothly coordinated joint activity mediated by the roles, special
artifacts, and text.
The first few sessions, while the children are learning to perform the scripted
activity were anything but smooth. We were assisted by the presence of
undergraduates who participated in Field College as "older siblings." The presence of
at least two adults, the researcher and the undergraduate, meant that at a minimum
two participants were coordinated through the script and engaged in the full act of
reading. Eventually the children got the hang of how to participate in Question-Asking-Reading even if they had severe difficulties reading, thereby creating the conditions
for diagnosing the "hidden psychological processes" that interfered with their reading.
Here I will concentrate on the in situ process of coordination and
discoordination around the scripted activity as a key source of evidence about
individual children's ability to internalize the scripted roles and the points where
internalization fails, resulting in selective discoordinations of the ongoing activity
structure. In this example, two children, both of whom are failing in their reading
classes, differentially discoordinate with the publicly available scripted activity,
permitting differential diagnosis of their specific difficulties.
In the transcripts that follow, the two boys, Billy and Armandito are starting
to read the second paragraph of the day. Katie is their teacher and Larry is an
additional competent reader.
Evidence for internalization of the scripted activity is provided by instances in
which the children's talk and actions presuppose a next step in the procedure with no
overt provocation from the adults. For example:
(1) Katie: OK, lets go on to the second paragraph then.
(2) Billy: How did they find them?
(3) Armandito: The Eskimos.
(4) Katie: I think it was an accident (as she says this, she begins to pass out
the role cards, face down).
(5) Billy: (Taking a card from the stack). How come, what kind of accident?
(6) Billy: (Looking at his card). That's the same card again.
In (2) Billy's question is an internalized version of the "what's going to happen next"
role in the script that no one specifically stimulated. He takes the card handed to
him, asks a relevant question about the text, and comments on the relationship
between his role in the previous segment of interaction and its relationship to what
he is about to do. Armandito's participation is of a different order. His comment
("The Eskimos" is relevant to the topic at hand, but opaque. He does not take one of
the role cards and has to be stimulated by Katie while Billy continues to show
evidence of coordination:
(6) Katie: Armandito! (He looks up and takes a card)
(7) Billy: We each get another one (referring to the cards; there are only four
participants and Katie has not taken one, so someone will get an extra).
In a number of places in the transcript we see Armandito discoordinating
within the activity which the other three participants maintain, permitting him to
re-coordinate from time to time. These discoordinations are of several types. The
most obvious are such actions as drawing a picture instead of reading, or feigning
abandonment of the activity altogether. But repeatedly, Armandito presupposes the
scripted activity sufficiently to motivate quite specific analyses of his difficulties. The
next example illustrates his aversion to the question about the main idea and
provides information (corroborated in many examples) of his core difficulty.
(8) Larry: (He has the card which says to pick the answerer). Armandito.
What's the main idea?
(9) Armandito: I want to ask mine. I want to ask what happens next.
(10) Larry: No. I know what you want, but I am asking. I pick the answerer.
(11) Armandito: The main idea is...how these guys live.
Armandito is both accepting the joint task of Question- Asking-Reading ("I
want to ask mine" ) and attempting to avoid the role that is at the heart of his
problem (figuring out the main idea) by skipping that part of the scripted sequence.
When Armandito accepts his role (11) and attempts to state the main idea, his
answer (" The main idea is ...how these guys live") is not only vague, it is about the
previous paragraph.
Through an accumulation of many such examples over several sessions, we
were able to obtain a consistent pattern. This pattern showed that Billy experienced
great difficulty in coming "unglued" from the letter-sound correspondences when he
attempted to arrive at the main idea. When asked about the main idea, he repeatedly
returned to the text and sought a "copy match" in which some word from the
question appeared in the text. He then read the relevant sentence aloud, and puzzled
over meaning. Armandito's problem was of a quite different order: he continually lost
track of the relevant context, importing information from his classroom activities that
day or previous reading passages which had no relevance.
The first conclusion that we want to draw from this exercise is that we were
in fact successful in creating a structured medium of activity which allowed
diagnostically useful information about which part of the structure depicted in Figure
9.5 was deficient in the children with whom we worked. However, we also wanted to
establish that the Question-Asking-Reading procedure is an effective procedure for
the acquisition of reading. Both Billy and Armandito did in fact improve their
reading abilities and Armandito's general behavior in the classroom changed so
markedly that he won an award from the school recognizing his unusual progress.
However, such individual change could not be attributed to question asking reading,
both because it was part of the larger activity system of Field College and because we
had no proper control group.
To remedy these shortcomings, King (1988) replicated the small group
reading procedures in a followup experiment that included appropriate control
conditions, more stringently quantified pre- and post-test measures, and was
conducted as the sole activity in a school prior to the start of regular classes.
In addition to testing the effectiveness of Question- Asking-Reading against a
no-treatment control group, King included a group of children who were provided the
kind of structured intervention that Scardamalia and Bereiter (1985) call "procedural
facilitation" to assess whether the dynamic, dialogic characteristics of
Question-Asking-Reading were any more effective than workbook exercises in which
children completed each of the tasks corresponding to the role cards individually in
written form. The children in this experiment, like those in the original work
illustrated in the transcript fragment, were selected from the upper elementary grades
owing to their difficulties in learning to read.
King found that both Question-Asking-Reading and her version of the
procedural facilitation technique boosted children's reading performance. However,
children in the Question-Asking-Reading group retained significantly more material
from the training passages than did the students in the Procedural Facilitation group.
The students in the Question-Asking-Reading group also spent more total time
actively engaged with the task and demonstrated a greater interest in the content of
the readings, indicating an intimate link between the motivational, social-
interactional, and cognitive aspects of activity-in-context.
These results, although sketchily presented here owing to space limitations
provide support for the approach to reading I have summarized in this chapter.
Reading, we can conclude, is an emergent process of meaning making that occurs
when information topicalized by the text is synthesized with prior knowledge as part
of a general process of mediated interaction with the world. The acquisition of
reading also provides an excellent example of the social nature of development.