From Reading-Writing Research to Practice

Sophie Briquet-Duhazé, Catherine Turcotte, Sophie Briquet-Duhazé, Catherine Turcotte

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786303554
• eBook ISBN: 9781119610731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Méthodes pédagogiques pour la lecture

Teachers regularly seek to update their practice with newly-developed tools from the realm of research, with the aim of applying them directly in the classroom, particularly for teaching reading and writing. Thus, teachers' continuing education is dependent on the effective dissemination and appropriation of research results. This book explores this problem from multiple angles, presenting research projects from France and Quebec, Canada. Using a variety of methods, including creating teaching materials and engaging classroom teachers in the research process, the authors demonstrate the importance of ownership and dissemination of research results in schools. Although this necessity sometimes complicates the work of researchers, it is vital to develop and maintain the relationship between reading–writing research and its practical applications.

1
Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies: A Research Program Combining Partners from A to Z

1.1. Introduction

In Quebec, starting in Grades 3 and 4 of elementary school, informative texts become more dense and complex in all disciplines, requiring the mobilization of new skills and strategies among students. According to Dockrell et al. (2015), this is a very cognitively demanding reading activity, since it requires both processing new information of understanding its structure. Thus, since reading these texts requires the articulation of knowledge about a subject, knowledge of syntactic skills (consistency between sentences), and knowledge and skills in information structure (text macrostructure), teachers face a major challenge. In order to find solutions, researchers and teachers have developed an approach to teaching strategies for reading comprehension of informative texts, as part of action research training. This chapter describes the stages of this project, which took place between 2010 and 2014, as well as the various initiatives aimed at the appropriation and dissemination of the knowledge resulting from this project.

1.2. Problematic and conceptual framework

Teaching reading comprehension across different school subjects requires high-level and specific knowledge and skills from teachers. Gajria et al.’s (2007) research synthesis, on the effectiveness of teaching approaches to understanding informative texts, states that explicit teaching of strategies is the intervention method that has the most positive effects on students’ understanding of these said texts.

Approaches have, in this sense, proposed the explicit teaching of strategies to support understanding (Cervetti et al. 2007; Scharlach 2008). Among these strategies, those targeting the formulation of inferences, the identification of main ideas and the recognition of the text structure are the most complex, but also the most crucial strategies to support the understanding of informative texts (Hogan 2011; Williams 2014).

Indeed, to generate a mental representation of the text, the reader must go beyond the literal understanding at the basic level of the text (Kintsch 2013). Inferential understanding and understanding of the macrostructure of the text, which is not based solely on what is explicitly revealed by the author, requires an articulation of knowledge, skills and strategies that must be taught to a very large number of students (Blouet and Marin 2010; Jitendra and Gajria 2011).

However, although this teaching method is interesting for promoting the learning of comprehension strategies, at the end of elementary and beginning of secondary school, teaching reading comprehension is not always a priority (Scharlach 2008). Indeed, teachers say they do not always know what reading strategies to teach, and then how to approach this teaching. They also report a lack of material support and guidance to structure their implementation (Alvermann et al. 2013; Denti and Guérin 2004).

Moreover, according to the Conseil supérieur de l’éducation du Québec (Quebec’s higher education council) (Conseil 2014), in-class support, which could facilitate the improvement of their comprehension teaching practices, is not governed by a common framework. Thus, on the one hand, reading comprehension strategies are complex to master and, on the other hand, they are difficult to teach. This dual problem of professional development and the complex teaching of comprehension strategies for informative texts is at the heart of the project presented in this chapter.

1.3. Presentation of the project and the stages of dissemination and appropriation

The project presented in this chapter followed several steps, some of which were planned from the beginning and others which were added as they progressed. The first phase of the project consisted of action research training on teaching comprehension strategies. The subsequent steps, which are part of a transfer and dissemination process, are conducive to the results and fruits of this research.

1.3.1. Step 1: appropriation through collaboration, training and support

Since this project focused on the professional development of teachers over a long period of time, it was necessary to maintain a dynamic relationship with the various actors involved. In this regard, Bissonnette and Richard (2010) surveyed more than 5,000 Francophone school stakeholders to determine the factors considered most beneficial for professional development. Three categories emerged from this study: personal factors, professional factors and relational factors. The collaboration project between researchers and teachers is based in particular on these factors.

1.3.1.1. The personal dimension

The first factor is the personal dimension. Professional development activities must correspond to teachers’ values and needs, and be in line with their recent requests for training or support. This personal dimension of development and training for practitioners is crucial. Indeed, when the needs and problems are those that teachers have identified themselves from their practice, the professional development attached to them is likely to make much more sense than when the problem and needs come from outside.

With regard to this first dimension, the collaborative project was initiated following a discussion with teachers who had worked with students in late elementary and early secondary school stages (ages 10 to 14). According to them, students’ comprehension strategies were not consolidated when they entered secondary school, which did not allow everyone to read independently in all subjects. It is in this context that the project was designed on the basis of a possible solution: to start teaching strategies for understanding informative texts earlier and in a more structured way. Teachers invited to participate in the project later on therefore already had an interest in experimenting with new ways of doing things that would meet these expressed needs.

1.3.1.2. The professional dimension

The second factor is the professional dimension. According to Bissonnette and Richard (2010), professional development activities must allow new practices to be tested quickly with a minimum of new resources being created. This professional dimension of activities implies not wanting to disrupt teachers’ practices and knowledge, but rather provoking imbalances and questions. It is therefore not only a question of exchanging practices, but of taking the means to improve them through an approach aimed at continuous experimentation, monitoring and reflection.

In terms of the professional dimension, this project has articulated a diversity of modalities allowing teachers to receive training, both at a theoretical and practical level. Some training was given during the school year in sub-groups to encourage exchanges and the sharing of experiences, while at other times, teachers could request individual support in the classroom.

To structure this support and encourage teachers to discuss their experiences together, the team developed activity sheets that proposed teaching certain comprehension strategies based on a common text. The following eight strategies were specifically taught: predicting, activating knowledge on the subject of the text, identifying the structure of the text, making inferences, asking questions when reading, understanding substitute words, understanding new words in use, using context and morphological cues, identifying the main idea, both explicit and implicit. Each week, a strategy was introduced to the students; the teacher explained its usefulness, modeled its use and proposed many guided and autonomous practices in order to encourage the strategy to be used in various contexts for reading informative texts. Every three weeks, reading activities were planned to use all the strategies previously seen.

These sheets were also subject to major revisions and modifications based on teachers’ comments and the reviews of students who had used them. In addition, at the beginning and end of the school year, reading comprehension tests were developed to see students’ progress in their skills and strategies for understanding informative texts. The test items all corresponded to the strategies taught, which made it possible to observe to what extent the development of a strategy, for example, useful for understanding an unknown word in a text, had borne fruit after its teaching. All these steps allowed teachers to take action and take risks, while benefiting from the support of their peers or researchers.

1.3.1.3. The relational dimension

The third factor is the relational dimension. As stated in Bissonnette and Richard (2010), professional development activities must include follow-up and support over time in order to be considered beneficial. According to them, facilitators, researchers and coaches, must have expertise and great dynamism when they offer training and direct support. Finally, when several teachers from the same school are involved, the exchanges are even more beneficial.

In our project, at least three teachers from each of the four schools participated in order to engage collaboration and exchanges, both formal and informal, on the strategies taught. In addition, this relational dimension was provided by a team composed of a researcher, a pedagogical advisor and a master’s degree level remedial teacher. These three participants with complementary expertise proposed a schedule of sub-group meetings and classroom support, as well as content based on a theoretical model (Irwin 2006). Training was carefully thought out and planned, concrete examples were provided, and activities involving new knowledge were designed so that teachers would take ownership of the knowledge and strategies before teaching them.

As mentioned previously in this chapter, at the beginning and end of the school year, students were tested, which allowed them to view their progress. In addition, these results were presented to teachers in order to allow them to reflect on the scope of the new practices developed. Classes of students not participating in the project had also agreed to complete the assessments at the beginning and end of the year, which allowed for comparative analyses and a better understanding of the project’s impacts on student learning. This gave rise to rich reflections among the team of researchers and te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Teaching Reading Comprehension Strategies: A Research Program Combining Partners from A to Z
• 2 Scientific Project: Creating a Website Dedicated to French Didactics
• 3 Teacher-researcher Dialogue in Differentiated Support to Develop Students’ Skills in Syntax and Punctuation
• 4 The Learning Community Mobilized to Raise the Reading Levels of Adolescents with Intellectual Disabilities
• 5 Teaching Practices that Promote the Development of Reading Skills in Inclusive Secondary Schools
• 6 Supporting the Professional Development of Elementary School Teachers: Action Research in an Aboriginal Context
• 7 When Researchers Discover that Organizational and Collaboration Models that are Still Not Very Explicit for School Stakeholders
• 8 Encouraging the Appropriation of Research Results on Morphological Knowledge by School Stakeholders
• Conclusion
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement