L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature
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Digital Fiction in Literary Education: What do secondary-school teachers think about this multimodal artform as a pedagogical resource?
Get PDFThis paper documents L1 teachers’ viewpoints regarding the integration of digital fiction in the form of multimodal, digital literary texts as a resource to foster literary education at secondary level. This study is developed in the context of a larger collaborative, intersectoral research project focused on the co-construction of guided reading of digital fiction texts. Based on interviews with 6 secondary school teachers in Catalonia (Spain), we analyze what teachers think about the arrival of digital fiction in literary education and the pedagogical function they consider that it might perform. Also, we document their fears and doubts regarding the academic use of these texts as well as the teaching and institutional challenges posed by the multimodal and interactive artforms that they envision using. The data analysis shows that one main challenge has to do with grasping the value of works of digital fiction as key texts for literary learning and reflecting on the ways in which digital fiction contributes to building a complex literary competence. Other challenges concern establishing criteria for the selection of quality texts, their suitability for the student/reader, envisioning teaching strategies, the metalanguage on multimodality, and overcoming institutional barriers. Our study also highlights the contributions that, according to teachers, digital fiction brings to reinforcing the interpretive, literary skills of secondary school students
The value of comparative research in an era of standards-based reforms: Sustaining a critically reflexive professional praxis. An Australian case study.
Get PDFThe impact of standards-based reforms on the professional practice of English teachers in Anglophone settings has been well documented. Such reforms typically foreground the importance of a particular form of English and standardised formulations of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, which facilitate easy measurement and comparisons between educational settings. In Australia, the impact has intensified to such an extent that traditional framings of English teacher practice, which emphasize responsiveness to the cultural and linguistic diversity of students, begin to look like a discourse of a bygone era. From an historical perspective, how has this come about? And what does English teacher practice look like in the current policy environment? Can comparative inquiry into language education, such as has been conducted under the auspices of the International Mother Tongue Education Network (IMEN) over the past four decades, provide intellectual resources to resist relentless pressures towards standardisation and measurement? The collaborative inquiry into the professional practice of one author at the heart of this essay arises out of our attempts to explore the potential of IMEN protocols to render the familiar strange and to see her practice with new eyes. In this way we seek to resist the ways standards-based reforms are radically reshaping the praxis of English educators in Australia
Instructive Dialogues on Literary Texts: A Framework for Dialogic Teaching promoting High-level Comprehension in the Literature Classroom
Get PDFIn our conceptual paper, we propose the framework Instructive Dialogues on Literary Texts. We describe how teachers can identify questions about the literary text which are worthy of clarification and central in such dialogues. The worthiness of questions depends on three criteria: A question worthy of clarification has to be testable based on the literary text and either disputable—i.e., it elicits multiple answers—or urgent—i.e., there is a students’ urge to clarify—or both. We are going to derive these concepts from the characteristics of literary texts, particularly from their ambiguity and polyvalence, and relate our framework to existing concepts of educational dialogue in literature classes. Moreover, we systematize teacher moves by applying notions of task research to whole-class dialogues. With these verbal moves, teachers can help their students to (collaboratively) interpret literary texts. Setting out our framework, we contribute to domain-specific concretizations of instructional quality and scaffolding. Furthermore, we propose a domain-specific definition of high-level comprehension
Exploring transcription processes when children with and without reading and writing difficulties produce written texts using speech-to-text
Get PDFFluent transcription is hard to establish for children with reading and writing difficulties, due to problems with spelling. It has been proposed that composing by speech-to-text (STT) could facilitate their transcription, by circumventing the spelling process. To investigate this, transcription and error correction processes, and their relation to production rate (text length/time on task) was investigated in a sample of Swedish 10–13 year olds with and without reading and writing difficulties using STT to write expository texts. We determined effects of individual abilities: working memory, spelling, decoding, and the ability to interact with the STT tool under optimal conditions (STT success rate) on burst length, burst accuracy and production rate. Production rate was predicted by working memory capacity, by how long bursts the children produced, and by how accurate those bursts were. Further, burst accuracy was only predicted by a child’s STT success rate (in a test), but none of the other individual abilities. Dictating more than one word at a time and combining STT and keyboard use were identified as two useful strategies that can be taught in STT instruction. The results indicate that composing text using STT is a cognitively complex process placing heavy demands on working memory, and that STT success rate (that is, the combined effect of the technical capability of the STT tool and the participants output) is crucial to gain a fluent transcription without unnecessary disruptions
Insights into Teachers\u27 Funds of Knowledge:: Comparing language arts teachers’ stances toward the same poems in everyday and school settingstexts
Get PDFOver more than a century of formal schooling in literature, generations of students have become acculturated to authoritative school-based discourses that devalue everyday literary practices. However, research indicates that when students draw on their everyday practices in the classroom, they engage in rich literary reading experiences. In the current study, we argue that school-based discourses may limit teachers just as they limit students, and that teachers’ literary funds of knowledge may be another potentially powerful resource for closing the distance between school and everyday reading. Drawing on social and literary metaphors of distance and closeness, we compared the discussions of the same teachers reading the same poems in personal (book club) and professional (lesson planning) settings. Analysis showed that teachers’ literary stances differed across conditions. For instance, in the book club condition, teachers were more than twice as likely to enact a close stance when reading—immersing themselves in the text-world and empathizing with characters. We recommend that researchers and teacher educators attend more closely to and make visible the constraints of school-based discourses and the value of everyday funds of knowledge—not just for students, but for teachers
Towards a Dialogic Ethical Criticism:: Examining student responses in classroom debates of poems with ethical invitations
Get PDFSince the late 20th century, Literature educators have adopted dialogic pedagogies that connect aesthetic appreciation and other-centred approaches to literary texts. However, classroom research on students’ ethical meaning-making has rarely been connected with theoretical developments of ethical criticism or conducted in non-western contexts and classroom debate settings. To map how Literature classroom interactions open or close possibilities for ethical meaning-making, I propose a dialogic ethical criticism that synthesises an other-centred ethical criticism influenced by Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical philosophy and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of hermeneutic conversation.
Using deductive and inductive analysis, I develop and apply a coding framework to examine classroom discourse in a high-ability Singapore Secondary Four (Grade 10) class in an Asian poetry unit. I focus on a series of classroom debates comparing poems with ethical invitations on the representations of asylum seekers, the process of embracing diversity, and reasserting identity amidst discrimination. While some students keenly consider others’ perspectives and develop the strength of their interpretive possibilities with close textual evidence, other students simulate an ethical openness by selectively using textual evidence. Although antagonistic forms of literary debates can inhibit students’ ethical meaning-making, student adjudicators providing constructive feedback with close textual support can facilitate responsible interpretive possibilities
Phenomenological Exploration in Literature Education : On the theoretical development of a phenomenological approach to inquiry-based literature teaching as a focal point for a large-scale intervention study in Denmark
Get PDFWhat does it mean to be inquiry-based and to explore literature in a teaching context? Based on phenomenological and pragmatic traditions, this theory-developing article is based on a perception of literature as an aesthetic exploration of existence, in that the aesthetic design is used to express and articulate ways of sensing, understanding, approaching, existing in, and exploring the world (Ingarden, 1931; Richard, 1964; Poulet, 1969). Therefore, exploring literature has a dual character in an inquiry-based approach to teaching literature. It becomes a pedagogical design for exploration of the aesthetic and existential exploration embedded in literature. This article offers a framework for a phenomenological-hermeneutic inquiry-based approach to literature education substantiated by empirical research (Elf et al., 2017) and elaborated in dialogue with cognitive and socio-cognitive studies (Zwann, 1993; Olson & Land, 2007; McCarthy, 2015). The focal point is a model for scaffolding teachers’ and students\u27 analysis and interpretation of literary texts in order to practice a dialogical and exploratory approach in the classroom. This model will be conceived as theory-driven and empirically derived, as it has been tested in a large-scale RCT-study with positive statistically significant effects on students\u27 competencies to interpret aesthetic texts (N = 86 schools, 265 classes, 5531 students)
Separating the relevant from the irrelevant: Factors influencing L1 student teachers’ ability to discern (ir)relevant arguments in time-pressured grammatical discussions
Get PDFIdentifying relevant information and evaluating evidence are considered characteristics of critical thinking. These skills are important for language teachers, for example in evaluating pupils’ grammatical reasoning in the context of grammar education. Therefore, the current study has examined whether Dutch language student teachers (N=298) in different educational tracks (Bachelor full-time, Bachelor part-time and Master) are able to distinguish relevant arguments from irrelevant (or incorrect) ones in two grammatical discussions. Results indicate that student teachers are better at evaluating relevant arguments in grammatical discussions than they are at evaluating irrelevant arguments. Multilevel analyses show that the factors partly explaining the Relevant Argument score are students’ education and their Need for Cognition. The factors that partly explain the Irrelevant Argument score on the other hand are the perceived difficulty of the task, and strikingly, age. The paper discusses explanations for these findings, as well as practical implications for teacher education
High school students’ attentional stance, modes of reading engagement, and self-insight during literary reading
Get PDFThe primary aim of this study was to analyze the validity and reliability of an instrument capable of measuring high school students’ attentional stance, modes of reading engagement, and self-insight during literary reading. For this purpose, a self-report questionnaire was administered to high school students in three Austrian regions (N = 417). First, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to test the validity and the reliability of the preconceived measurement model. Second, the interrelationships among the validated constructs were analyzed through structural equation modeling. The fit and the validity of the structural model were evaluated, and the mediating effect of expressive reading was tested. The study yielded an instrument with valid and reliable scores that assesses 9 dimensions of high school students’ reading experiences. The basic Kuiken-Douglas model (2017) on reading engagement and reading outcome could be replicated. Structural equation modeling indicated that high attentional focus negatively predicted expressive-experiential reading that in turn facilitated self-insight. This implies that students should be allowed leaky attention so that they can work with literary texts in a self-modifying way in literature education. Limitations are discussed
Profiles of poor and good spellers in German noun capitalization
Get PDFThis study investigated how fourth graders with different proficiency levels (1st and 4th quartile, 192 and 195 pupils respectively) produce and detect German noun capitalization in relation to two factors, lexical-semantic characteristics of the noun and the structure of the noun phrase (NP). The first factor includes concrete and abstract nouns, and nominalized verbs and adjectives, the second factor the syntactic context of the NP (with or without determiner and/or adjective, including bare noun). The two proficiency groups showed different patterns in the production and detection of capitalization in relation to these two factors after three years of instruction in noun capitalization. The low-proficiency group performed on chance level only for concrete nouns in the context with precedent determiner, the context highlighted at school. The high-proficiency group seemed to make use systematically of the expanded NP in order to recognize and capitalize the noun but still had difficulties with most bare nouns. The paper discusses the type of information low- and high-achieving pupils seem to use in noun capitalization and detection