Teaching reading and writing: Developing critical learners

By: Emi Emilia

Presented in a one day seminar and workshop on the teaching of English in Gunadarma University, Jakarta

19 April 2010

Structure of the Presentation

Reading and writing and the success of learning

Text and Context?

What is reading?

The teaching of reading: Critical Thinking, Critical literacy, critical pedagogy

What is writing?

The teaching of writing: The SFL genre-based approach

Literacy, the ability to read and write, encourages a more abstract form of thinking, it brings greater precision to the definition of terms, and it allows us to refer back, to think about our thinking, to weigh arguments, to supplement memory, , to communicate with others, and to learn in autonomous ways. No wonder such a powerful form of intelligence provides the key to success in school and beyond (Fisher: 1990: 5).

The term text, comes from the Latin word for weaving, referring to:

Words and sentences woven together to create a single whole (Christie and Misson, 1998: 8).

The socially and contextually complete unit of language (Kress, 1993: 24), which may be written or spoken (Eggins, 1994:.5).

The coinsideration of text has nothing to do with its size or length or form, but with meaning of the stretch of language working together as a unified whole (Feez and Joyce,

1998:4).

The word context originally meant being woven together, where the prefix con carried the sense of being together and over the passage of the centuries, it has come to refer to those elements that accompany a text (Christie and Misson, 1998: 8).

Context of situation - immediate environment of language (Field, Mode, Tenor).

Context of culture - a broader background against which the text has to be interpreted (Halliday, 1985c:46).

Field: the ongoing activity or subject matter, or what is happening, the topic that is written about.

Tenor refers to who is taking part, or the role relationship between interactants; their relative status and the amount and type of contact they have with each other, the way we relate to other people when doing what we do.

Our society, like other human societies we know of, is structured in such a way that people have power over one another. This power is various kinds: mature people tend to dominate younger ones, commanding their respect; bosses dominate employees; teachers dominate students and so on. There is no escaping this, however nice we try to be about it. When you think people are bossy or above themselves it is usually because they are asserting an inordinate amount of power over you. When you think someone is quiet, evasive and looking insecure, it is often because they are being overly diferential to you. And of course you can resist, as when feminists struggle to renovate the power relations between women and men. Renovation is hard work as we all know, and however democratic our ideals, there always seems to be a lot of power pushing us around (Martin, 2010:16).

Mode refers to the channel of communication (Martin, 2010:16). The distance between the people communicating in terms of time and space, whether they are face to face or separated by time or space fundamentally determine the nature of the language (Feez and Joyce, 1998a).

Context of culture refers to the broader cultural context in which any context of situation occurs. Any culture has accepted ways of conducting any social activities, all of which affect what occurs in the particular context of situation. For example, Australia and Indonesia both have context of situation in which people trade with each other. In the Indonesian culture, it is appropriate that one bargains, but that is not acceptable in the Australian culture in most situations.

Suppose you are sitting in a room, and hear someone yell: John, dont do it there mate! (if you know about another language, think about how you would say this in that language). Now, however faithfully you translate this sentence into another language, it will still be the case that unless you know what John was doing, you cant really know what the person talking to him meant. You dont know what John was doing, what he was doing it to, and where he was doing it. If however you had a translation of this sentence, and a description of the context of situation in which it is uttered (say John dumping a load of broken mud bricks inro a drainage through), then you would be able to understand the text. So, in order to explain the meaning of a sentence, you need both a description of that sentence and of the context in which it was used (Martin, 2010:15).

A critical social theory of literacy:

Literacy must be seen not so much as a monolithic entity but rather as a set of contextualised social practices (Barton and Hamilton, 2000; Pennycook, 2001); or a social action (Kress, 2003), embedded

in social contexts (Hamilton, 2000).

Writing and reading are social activities. That is, we are always reading something, written by someone or writing something for someone. These others are always in some relationship to us-often materially or symbolically unequal relationships of power but always relationships in which versions of ourselves and others are implicated and constructed. Even those texts we read or write that come from or are intended for people we do not know assemble versions of our identities and positions as readers - as men and women, students and teachers, taxpayers and newspapers readers, and so forth. (Luke & Freebody, 1997: 193).

What is reading?

Reading can be seen from two senses:

A narrow sense: Getting meaning from printed material.

A wider sense: Understanding the world around me.

The teaching of reading should lead the learners to play different roles while reading, including as a code breaker, text participant, text user, and text analyst and critic (Luke and Freebody, 1990: 8-14; 1997: 214, see also Gibbons, 2002; Comber, 2002).

As a text analyst, students should be encouraged to recognize that:

All texts represent a particular view of the world and that readers are positioned in a certain way when they read it

What does this text do to me? (Luke and Freebody, 1997: 114; Comber,

2002:1).

Who would feel left out in this text and why?

Do any of the claims made in this text clash with your values, beliefs, or experiences?How is the reader positioned in relation to the author (e.g. as a friend, opponent, someone to persuade, invisible, or someone who agrees with the authors views)?

Are there gaps or absences, or silences in this text? If so what are they? Is there a group of people missing who logically should be included? (Love et al, 2001)

Pre-reading

Why is this topic (the text) being written about?

How is this topic being written about?

What other ways of writing about the topic are there?

Who is writing to whom and what is the topic.

What the text is (seemingly) about drawing on a scan of the headline, pictures, photos, subheadings, etc.

While-reading

Offering students alternative readings of a text, devise tasks which offer the reader a possibility of more than one way of reading a text. This strategy is important given a disparity of values which may exist between a writer writing in the past and a contemporary reader.

Identifying parallel discourses: identifying where contrasting people, places, countries, or phenomena are described, the writers use of language which favours one person or social group over another.

Analysing linguistic choices using the Field/Mode/Tenor.

Who takes what subject positions in sentences?

What types of process and participants dominate?

How are active and passive constructions allocated?

What modal constructions are employed?

Post- reading tasks serve the purpose of heightening the readers awareness of other ways in which the topic could have been written about.

For example: Comparing two texts which deal with the same topic, comparing lexico-grammatical choices in the texts, identifying unspoken beliefs of the writers (see Perkins, 1998; McGregor, 2002a,b).

Text to Text

Text to Life

Text to the World

Critical Thinking Standards:

clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, significance, fairness, logic, depth, and breadth, evidentiary support, probability predictive or explanatory power, stereotypes, ambiguous and vague language.

Activities that make up CT:

Carefully exploring situations with questions;

Viewing situations from different perspectives: a willingness to listen to and examine carefully other views and new ideas; a willingness to learn from others, often from the voices he/she dislikes (Askeland http://www3.wittenberg.edu/laskeland/critical_thinking.htm)

Discussing ideas in an organised way,

Exchanging ideas in the process of take and give (Chaffee, 2000, p. 69; see also Tsui, 2002).

Critical Pedagogy

Dialogic education

Reading the word and the world

Reading and writing are transitive verbs; that is texts are always about something in the world. Reading, accordingly, always entails engagement with problems and values of the social world (Freire, 1970, cited in Luke and Walton, 1994, p. 1195).

Classroom as a democratic public sphereA concrete set of learning conditions where people come

together to speak, to dialogue, to share their stories, and to struggle together within social relations that strengthen rather than weaken the possibility for active citizenship (Giroux, 1997: 106).

The teaching of writing: A genre-based approach

Genre: a staged, goal-oriented social processes which integrate field, mode and tenor choices in predictable ways (Martin, 1993 cited in Kress, 2003: 93)

Basic principles

Reading and writing multiple texts

Learning as a social activity

Learning is, above all, a social process, and the environment in which educational learning takes place is that of a social institution ... . Knowledge is transmitted in social contexts, through relationships, like those of parent and child, or teacher and pupil, or classmates, that are defined in the value systems and ideology of the culture (Halliday, 1985: 5).

An essential feature of learning is that it creates the zone of proximal development, that is learning awakens a variety of internal development processes that are able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with peers. Once these processes are internalised, they become part of the childs independent developmental achievement(Vygotsky, 1978: 90).

Explicit teaching: The shematic structure and linguistic features of a text students have to write.

Students learn under the guidance of the teacher in apprenticeship with the students as an apprentice and the teacher in the authoritative role of expert on language system and function

Stages of a genre-based approach

Building Knowledge of the field

Modelling

Joint Construction

Independent Construction

Personal Responses to literature

Element of the structure

Orientation: Tells the reader what the writer is responding to and prepares the reader for what the writer is going to say.

Text description: Tells the reader about the text the writer is responding to. This can be about the events in the story or the way the text is constructed.

Comment: Gives the writers personal reaction to the text.

An example of a personal response to literary work (From Joyce and Feez, 2004:37).

Orientation

The Prelude to the gathering by Isobelle carmody sets an evil atmosphere for the novel.

Text DescriptionThe Prelude tells us about the main character Nathaniel coming

into the new town that he and his mother are moving to. As Nathaniel and his mother drive into the town we see the town through Nathaniels eyes and we get some idea of his background. For example, we learn that he is moving here with his mother and that he is not particularly happy.

As soo as I read the first line I felt scared as the authordeveloped a sense of foreboding. I kew that this would be a story about good versus evil as soon as I read the first line. Some times you get a feeling about something that you cant explain, a premonition of wrongness. I knew immediately that the main character would be involved in strange and unusual events.

The description of the twon and the school made me feel creepy which is the way Nathaniel feels. I could clearly see the treeless and cold playgroun d of the school and when Nathaniel said: Fear crept through skin and bone and folded itself in my chest, I shivered. I think the author is very clever in the way she throws the reader instantly into an atmosphere of eeriness. This makes the reader afraid and then it is easy to predict something very unusual will happen to Nathaniel.

Comment

I think that the Prelude is very effective. It cleverly drew me into the atmosphere of the novel so that I wanted to continue reading to find out what would happen to Nathaniel.

Linguistic features: Use first person pronouns (I, my and me).

Contains words which refer to the whole or parts of the text; the novel, The prelude, the first line, main character.

Contains verbs (processes) to show how the writer feels and thinks about bthe text., e.g. I think, I feel.

Contains opinion words which clearly show the writers reaction and which aim to make the reader agree with this reaction; ... she throws the reader instantly into an atmosphere of eeriness. This makes the reader afraid ... . The description of the town and the school made me feel creepy.

The writer discusses and evaluates texts and use words to evaluate. e.g. I think that the prelude is very effective. It cleverly drew me into the atmosphere of the novel.

Thank you