Reader-based and teacher-centered instructional tasks: Writing and learning about a short story in middle-track classrooms

Journal of Literacy Research, Mar 1996 by George E Newell

This study describes how and what2 classes of middletrack loth-graders wrote and learned when their teacher employed reader-based and teacher-centered instructional tasks for discussing and writing about a short story. The students wrote an analytic essay in response to the story and completed 3 posttests of story understanding. Retrospective interviews of 4 casestudy students were analyzed to examine the students' thinking and reasoning, and to explore their perceptions of the ground rules and teacher expectations as they wrote analytically about the story. The readerbased tasks enabled the students in developing both textual and experiential knowledge about and a thoughtful stance toward the short story. These patterns suggest why the reader-based tasks permitted students to attain significantly higher posttest scores than did the teacher-centered tasks. Reader-based tasks to reading and writing may enable teachers to rethink literature instruction in classrooms with middletrack students.

AT SOME POINT IN HIGH SCHOOL, students from all instructional tracks engage in discussions of and writing about literature. Although we currently know little about what such activities contribute to student learning in particular tracks, Applebee (1993) clearly demonstrates that sheer quantity of discussion and writing are central to literature instruction. Ninety-one percent of the public-school teachers reported "organizing class discussions" as the most highly rated instructional technique, and 82% reported the essay as the most typical writing assignment assigned in representative classes. Given their ubiquity in the English classroom, it seems remarkable that we have only a slender body of empirical research exploring the consequences of discussion and writing for students' literary understanding (Marshall, 1987; Marshall, Smagorinsky, & Smith, 1995; Newell, Suszynski, & Weingart, 1989). Furthermore, we have even fewer studies of literature instruction focused on high-school students in instructional tracks other than college-preparatory classrooms (Marshall et al., 1995).

The importance of conducting instructional research in all tracks (upper, middle, and lower) was made clear in a recent study of classroom discussions of literature (Marshall et al., 1995). For example, although Marshall et al.'s (1995) study suggests that middle-track students had a wide range of abilities and attitudes, the discourse patterns in these classroom discussions were fundamentally similar to the patterns in the discussions in all three tracks, including uppertrack classrooms."The teacher ultimately controlled the direction, the pace, and the organization in most of the discussions we observed" (Marshall et al., 1995, p. 55 . In spite of the range of abilities in middle-track classes, the teachers did not seem to have developed more reader-based approaches (e.g., small-group work and process-oriented writing activities) that may provide for more individualized instruction, a pattern similar to the practices of teachers of mixed-ability classrooms that Applebee (1993) surveyed in his national study.

If teachers are asked to shift the emphasis in instruction from the teacher and the text to the students and the process of understanding, then literature research must provide analyses of the problems and benefits that might be expected, as well as models for reconsidering instructional tasks. Middle-track literature classrooms are particularly demanding for teachers who may feel they must lead oftentimes passive students to a "proper" reading. Even if their literature teachers do try to challenge middle-track students academically, these students may not have an appropriate degree of skill to acquire some measure of success.

How then might we rethink instruction in such a way that both challenges and instructs middle-track students in the study of literary texts? In recent years, many new developments in reader-response theory have emerged from Rosenblatt's (1978) earlier argument concerning the need to return the student to the center of the instructional enterprise. Her transactional theory of reading has become a model of literature instruction - reading as a"quiet conversation"with books. Such a conversation would include students' examinations of their own transactions with texts, and an exploration of how the text and their experiences fostered their responses.

Although Rosenblatt's work offers broad principles for the nature and significance of literary education, it offers few practical guidelines for the enactment of "quiet conversations" within the realities of classroom life. Moreover, we have ample evidence that literature teachers are typically concerned with an academic approach that focuses on how a text"works:'A fundamental assumption operating in many literature classrooms is that the author's meaning remains hidden until unveiled by the teacher's own interpretive agenda (Applebee, 1993; Purves, 1981). As one perspective among many possibilities, this assumption does not pose a problem. In the case of middle-track students, however, if Marshall et al.'s (1995) descriptions are at all representative, these students need instruction in the inquiry process with more explicit attention to making sense of their own understandings.