Using an Interactive Approach

Teacher’s Handbook: Contextualizing Language Instruction (4th ed., Shrum & Glisan)

Chapter 6 Summary

Using an Interactive Approach to Develop Interpretive Communication

In this chapter, you will learn about:

· the three modes of communication

· the interpretive mode for teaching listening, reading, and viewing

· Schema Theory

· the processes involved in listening and reading

· L1 vs. L2 interpretive processes

· reader/listener-based and text-based factors in comprehension and interpretation

· integration of authentic texts

· exploration of literary texts

· workshop-style classroom for exploring texts

· acquisition of new vocabulary through text exploration

· use of L1 vs. L2 in checking comprehension

· the Interactive Model for developing listening, reading, viewing

Teach and Reflect: Using the Interactive Model to Explore an Authentic Printed Text; Using the Interactive Model to Explore an Authentic Audio/Video Segment; Teaching Literature at the Post-Secondary Level

Discuss and Reflect: Reading Aloud

Conceptual Orientation

Framework of Communicative Modes

The standards define communication by means of the three communicative modes—interpersonal, interpretive, and presentational—that emphasize the context and purpose of the communication, depicting the four skills as working in an integrated fashion. The framework illustrates how one participates in “cultural discourses,” or within culturally defined contexts (Brecht & Walton, 1995).

The Interpersonal Mode

· two-way oral or written communication and negotiation of meaning among individuals, regardless of skill modality;

· participants observe and monitor one another;

· participants can make clarifications and adjustments in their communication;

· can be face-to-face conversation and written correspondence;

· can involve all four skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.

The Interpretive Mode

· interpretation of meaning in oral and printed texts;

· no possibility of negotiation of meaning or clarification with the writer or speaker;

· cultural context, may require a deeper knowledge of culture;

· listening, reading, and viewing of authentic written or oral material;

· not just “comprehension”;

· readers/listeners “read (or listen) between the lines” and bring their background knowledge and ideas to the task (National Standards in Foreign Language Education Project [NSFLEP], 2006, pp. 36–37);

· involves inferencing, “a thinking process that involves reasoning a step beyond the text, using generalization, synthesis, and/or explanation” (Hammadou, 2002, p. 219).

· not the same as translation;

· includes predicting, reaching conclusions, giving opinions and explanations, questioning textual assertions, and relating the text to other texts or life experiences.

Interpretation is not reserved for advanced-levelhigh school or college students, but rather should be fostered in language instruction in the early grades. In their native language, children engage in interpreting texts routinely when they read stories or see movies—they give their opinions and explain why they liked or didn’t like the story/movie, describe the qualities of the characters, predict how the story will end, describe the moral of the story, and copare the story to others they know. Foreign language teachers at the elementary and middle school levels can capitalize on students’ L1 interpretation abilities and engage them in interpreting stories and

fables in L2. High school and post-secondary language teachers can then build on these interpretive skills and focus on higher level interpretation that may involve aspects such as author’s intent, tone of the text, and L2 cultural perspectives.

Key point: The interpretive mode refers to both (1) a component of daily communication that enables one to make sense of and interpret oral, printed, and video texts, and (2) a vehicle for language acquisition.

The Presentational Mode

· formal, one-way communication to an audience of listeners or readers;

· speaking and/or writing skills;

· no direct opportunity for active negotiation of meaning between the presenter and audience;

· requires substantial knowledge of the language and culture on the part of the speaker and of the audience.

STANDARDS HIGHLIGHT: Exploring the Interpretive Mode Through Listening, Reading, Viewing

Historically interpretive skills have received less attention in language teaching than have interpersonal skills. Teachers often assumed that comprehension would occur on its own or that translation would lead to comprehension and interpretation. However, merely exposing learners to oral or printed input is not sufficient, since they also must be equipped to make meaning of this input through avenues such as comprehension strategies and interaction with others.

Interpretive Communication: Listening and Reading Processes

How Comprehension Processing Occurs

Much of what we know about comprehension, particularly reading comprehension, is based upon Schema. The term schemata (plural of schema) is used to refer to the mental “connections that allow new experiences and information to be aligned with previous knowledge (McCarthy, 1991, p. 168). Readers and listeners link incoming (or new) spoken or written input to the knowledge and bank of experiences that already exist in their memory structures, or schemata. VanDijk (1981) understands schemata as higher-level complex knowledge structures that provide scaffolding (Anderson, 1977). Other researchers define them as organized background knowledge on a topic that leads learners to make predictions (Anderson, Spiro, & Monatague, 1977). Listening and reading comprehension involves active cognitive and social processes and requires an interplay between various types of knowledge. Listeners and readers draw upon the following to interpret a text:

· their knowledge of the target language, e.g., vocabulary, syntax;

· their background knowledge and experiences in the world;

· their knowledge of how various types of discourse, such as magazine articles, literary texts, radio broadcasts, and talk shows, are organized, i.e., use of cohesive devices such as pronouns, conjunctions, and transitional phrases to link meaning across sentences, as well as the use of coherence to maintain the message’s unity;

· their ability to hold information in short-term memory as they attend to the text; and

· their ability to use a variety of strategies to help them bring meaning to the comprehension task.

Some tasks or subskills reflect bottom-up processing, in which meaning is understood through analysis of language parts. Listeners or readers process language in a sequential manner, combining sounds or letters to form words, then combining words to form phrases, clauses, and sentences of the text (Goodman, 1967). Bottom-up subskills include discriminating between different sounds and letters, recognizing word-order patterns, recognizing intonation cues, analyzing sentence structure, translating individual words, and examining word endings. Bottom-up models that seek to explain reading comprehension are text-driven and portray the reader as someone who “approaches the text by concentrating exclusively on the combination of letters and words in a purely linear manner” (Martinez-Lage, 1995, p. 70).

Other comprehension tasks or subskills reflect top-down processing, in which meaning is derived through the use of contextual clues and activation of personal background knowledge about the content of the text. These subskills include identifying key ideas and guessing meaning through a process called a “psycholinguistic guessing game” Goodman (1967). In his description of a top-down approach to reading, Efficient readers select “the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time” (Goodman, as cited in Chastain, 1988, p. 223). Top-down models of comprehension are reader-driven and focus on what the reader/listener brings to the text in terms of knowledge of the world (Lally, 1998).

The current view of the interpretive skills is that the listener/reader arrives at meaning by using bottom-up and top-down processing, in concert (Bernhardt, 1991; Swaffar, Arens, & Byrnes, 1991). According to Scarcella and Oxford (1992), “Listening can best be understood as a highly complex, interactive operation in which bottom-up processing is interspersed with top-down processing, the latter involving guessing” (p. 142). Similarly, in their discussion of the reading process, Swaffar, Arens, and Byrnes state that reading comprehension “results from interactive variables that operate simultaneously rather than sequentially” (p. 21). Furthermore, they maintain that the message of the text interacts with reader perceptions and that these interactions have the following components:

Top-down factors: reader

1. reader background (semantic knowledge)

2. reader perspective (reading strategies)

Top-down factors: text

3. text schema (topic)

4. text structure (organizational pattern of the information)

5. episodic sequence (scripts or story grammar)

Bottom-up factors: text and reader

6. illustrative detail

7. the surface language features of the text in letters, words, and individual sentences

8. reader language proficiency (p. 24)

Eskey’s (1986) interactive reading model proposes that readers use both (1) lower-level “identification” skills through which they recognize words and structures necessary for decoding; and (2) higher level “interpretive” skills through which they reconstruct meaning of whole parts of the text. Both of these skill types are interactive in that they blend into one as readers or listeners interpret a text and make it a part of what they know. Learners perceive top-down strategies to be the more immediate strategies needed for comprehension and bottom-up strategies to be necessary in “repairing” comprehension in the face of difficulty (Vogely, 1995). In addition to these cognitive processes, listening and reading comprehension also involve social processes. In her sociocognitive view of second-language reading, Bernhardt (1991) proposes that readers interact with the features of a text, select the features that they feel are important for processing the information, and then use the selected features to reconstruct the text and interpret the message.1 This process involves a different concept of “text,” one that includes not only linguistic elements, but also the text’s pragmatic nature, its intentionality, its content, and its topic (Bernhardt, 1991). Furthermore, a great deal of comprehension and interpretation is based on the experiences learners bring to the text. Learners gain new insights about the meaning of a text as a result of text-based discussions they have with others. Learners and the teacher interact in the ZPD in order to co-construct meaning and interpretation of a text. This type of mediation mirrors the way in which comprehension is constructed socioculturally in the world outside the classroom.

Key point: Top-down and bottom-up processes are used together in comprehension.

Many FL classrooms still engage learners in unproductive practices that either foster exclusive use of linear bottom-up processing or reflect mechanical activities not associated with comprehension at all. For example, teachers often check comprehension of a reading by asking questions that are worded in such a way as to reveal the answer by making it easy for the student to look back to the passage and make a match. Consequently, students might identify a sentence from the text that correctly answers the question, but they may have no idea of what either the question or the answer means. This strategy reflects the “look-back-and-lift-off approach” (Lee & VanPatten, 1995) to reading and is problematic, since these readers rarely end up reading the entire passage and their comprehension consists of unconnected fragments of information (p. 189). A similar strategy is often used in listening through “listen-to-a-text-and-answer-questions” format (Berne, 2004, p. 522). This type of approach to interpretive communication does not account for ways in which comprehension and interpretation occur and it does not assist learners in building comprehension of a text.

Keypoint: In the “look-back-and-lift-off approach” to reading, students’ comprehension consists of unconnected fragments of information.

The Relationship of L1 and L2 Interpretive Processes

Much of the research in L2 listening and reading cognition is based on studies conducted in L1 (Bernhardt, 1986; Brown, 1998; Fecteau, 1999; Joiner, 1986; Rubin, 1994).2 Many studies have examined the relationship between L1 and L2 comprehension.

For reading:

1. L1 reading skills and L2 linguistic knowledge contribute to L2 reading comprehension (Bernhardt & Kamil, 1995).

2. Reading ability of novice L2 learners is related to the level of their linguistic knowledge, while the reading ability of advanced L2 learners relates more closely to their L1 reading skills.

3. Organization of the text and level of background knowledge are important factors that impact comprehension in both L1 and L2 reading tasks; the “story-like” organization of the text and activated background knowledge of readers led to greater comprehension (Fecteau, 1999).

For listening (Vandergrift, 2006):

1. While both L2 proficiency and L1 listening ability contribute to L2 listening comprehension ability, L2 proficiency seems to be a much better predictor of a L2 listener success.

2. L1 inferencing ability appeared not to transfer to L2 inferencing in listening, which indicates that learners would benefit from strategy training that assists them in making this transfer.

According to Koda (2007b), second language reading differs considerably from L1 reading because it involves two languages in virtually all of its processes. In her summary of L2 reading research, Koda illustrates that a learner’s L1 literacy experience has a lasting impact on L2 reading development, as do factors relating to age and L2 proficiency.3 In comparing L1 and L2 reading, an important consideration is how L1 and L2 readers differ. Koda identified three major distinctions between readers of L1 and readers of L2:

1. Unlike beginning L1 readers, L2 learners can use their prior literary experience, which can offer a great deal of assistance.

2. Beginning L1 readers, as a result of oral communication, have developed their linguistic systems by the time their formal literacy work begins. On the contrary, L2 reading instruction often begins before a great deal of L2 linguistic knowledge has been acquired. Therefore the focus in L2 reading instruction differs. L1 instruction emphasizes decoding to help young readers link print with oral vocabulary, while L2 instruction focuses on building learners’ linguistic foundations. Hence, L2 readers can often decode (i.e., connect print to oral vocabulary), but this decoding does not ensure comprehension since L2 learners do not have a fully developed linguistic system and may not know the meaning of the words they are able to decode. In sum, L2 readers can read aloud with little or no comprehension.

3. L1 focuses on processing in a single language, whereas L2 reading involves skills and experiences in both L1 and L2 (2004, p. 7).

Studies have also compared L1 and L2 listening comprehension, particularly around the issue of discourse signaling cues, which are metalinguistic devices that function as directional guides to signal how readers and listeners should interpret the incoming information (Tyler, 1994). Examples of signaling cues are previews (e.g., There are four stages of this culture shock), summarizers (To sum up so far), emphasis markers (e.g., This is the key), and logical connectives (e.g., and, or, first, and second) (Jung, 2003, p. 563). Many studies confirm that the beneficial effects of signaling cues found in L1 reading research can also be found in L1 listening comprehension (Hron, Kurbjuhn, Mandl, & Schnotz, 1985; Richards, Fajen, Sullivan, & Gillespie, 1997). Researchers found that the positive effects of signaling cues in L1 listening could also be applied to L2 listening (Chung, 2000; Flowerdew & Tauroza, 1995; Jung, 2003). Students who listened to lectures in the target language that contained signaling cues recalled significantly more information (i.e., both main ideas and supporting details) than did their nonsignalled counterparts.