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

For example, Langer (1992) has suggested that teachers consider two aspects of"collaborative interaction": (a) helping students learn how to engage in discussion, and (b) helping students learn how to think about the content of the text. In this type of reader-based classroom, the teacher encourages students to think through their own understandings but also helps them with appropriate ways of doing so by either increasing or reducing the complexity of the task and by focusing on what the students are trying to accomplish. To a large extent, Langer's (1992) notion of collaborative interaction helped shaped the development of the reader-based instructional tasks in the present study Following Langer, it seems important to examine not only the effects of instructional activities (discussion and writing), but also the shaping influence of the pedagogical purposes of such activities. For example, Many and Wiseman (1992) examined the effects of teaching approaches with differing foci - "literary experience" and "literary analysis" - on third graders' written responses to three picture books. Students from the literary-experience group tended to write from an aesthetic stance suggesting more concerns for the story world, whereas the students from the literary-analysis group tended to focus on a critique of text elements (setting, problem, etc.). Although suggestive of how various instructional tasks (text- versus reader-based) might shape literary understanding, the study focused on the product (written responses) rather than the influence of the process of collaborative interaction between teacher and students. Assuming that these studies add needed breadth to our understanding of the effects of reader-based instruction on students' reasoning and thinking during literature lessons, we also need studies that specify when students learn, what kinds of learning result, and how reader-based instruction can be used to foster literary understanding. Additionally, we need to understand the students' perceptions of what has been taught and what has been learned, especially in classrooms with students of wide-ranging abilities and enthusiasms for the study of literature.

The Retrospective Interview: Studying the Processes of Teaching and Learning Smagorinsky and Smith (1992) have pointed out that literary understanding requires more than a general knowledge of how to read literary texts. General reading skills (e.g., differentiating a literary from a non-literary text) are typically enacted in specific social contexts (e.g., a loth-grade English classroom in a suburban high-school setting) that include various literary genres (e.g., short story, poetry, etc.). Thus, in any instructional context, students are expected to invoke the strategies and conventions appropriate to that context, including an understanding of the ground rules (Sheeran & Barnes, 1991) for how to read, discuss, and write analytically about a range of literary genres.

What we now need are studies that employ methodologies that enable us to acquire a better understanding of the interrelationship between the role of the teacher and the role of the student as they interact in school contexts. Studying the ground rules or the presumed ways of knowing that are part of schooling through the use of retrospective interviews (Swanson-Owens & Newell, 1994) is an attempt to do so.