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CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION
This research aimed to explore an English high-achieving child’s manipulation of reading strategies for different types/topics of reading texts and to observe his strategy use in peer reading situations and in individual reading situations. Based on the results in chapter four, this chapter discusses the findings of the present study with related
literature and explains the possible reasons for the results.
Research Question One: What reading strategies are used by the participant when he reads different types/topics of texts after the reading strategy instruction?
The self-efficacy questionnaire revealed that Joel had a very positive perception toward English language and English culture, and that positive attitude led to his continuous learning. During the reading strategy instruction, Joel kept an open-minded attitude on learning. He expanded knowledge of reading strategies and had a clear understanding about each strategy he learned. However, his preference in strategy use displayed a similar pattern. As reported by Pressley and Afflerbach (1995), skilled readers approach reading tasks with some general tendencies. Joel demonstrated the same tendencies found among skilled readers. No matter what types of texts he read, he used global strategies most often. He tended to read in broad phrases, guess unknown words from contexts, grasp main ideas, activate background knowledge, and continue reading when he felt confused about an isolated word or phrase.
Joel used least support strategies when he read. For instance, he seldom used dictionary to look up unknown words in the middle of reading. He mentioned the hesitation on some particular parts of a reading text hindered his understanding. This situation is in line with Hudson’s study (2007), which indicated a reader’s struggling to make connections between letters and sounds may interrupt the process of his
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constructing meaning from the text. In contrast, if the reader skipped the unknown words and continued reading, he would instead understand better.
Generally speaking, Joel preferred using a meaning-based level of reading strategies instead of a decoding-based level of strategies. His liking in reading with a global view accords with the results of many earlier studies which suggested high proficient readers tend to employ more top-down or context-related strategies
(Brantmeier, 2002; Carrell, 1989; Chamot & Kupper, 1989; Cohen & Macaro, 2007; Lai, 2013; O'malley & Chamot, 1990; Sadoski, 1999; Wallace, 1992). This reading behavior of Joel might be explained by his childhood learning experience. When he started learning English in the kindergarten, he had been taught in a naturalistic way. He has been used to grasping the meaning of a reading from the context. He was more of a field-dependent learner. As Wyss (2002) indicated, field-dependent learners tend to ignore the details embedded in a text, and they pay more attention to the whole picture.
Joel was good at grasping the main ideas, but he tended to skip the isolated words or detailed events. This habit of learning also applied to his learning on other subjects. For example, he was found to have a clear concept about a math problem and was able to demonstrate the calculation process; however, he often missed out on getting a perfect score because of a small miscalculation. The finding of similar strategy use across different subjects is in line with the finding presented by Chamot and Kupper (1989).
The participant usually noticed the organization and structure of a reading first, and then employed corresponding strategies. This finding echoes those of previous
researchers that claimed that text structure awareness can facilitate readers' reading comprehension (Hall, Sabey, & McClellan, 2005). An example can be found in
expository readings: Ke (2009) indicated that one characteristic of expository reading is its clear layout, and that the title usually reveals the content of the text. Readers usually have a purpose in mind before reading an expository text. Joel’s regular use of global
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strategies, such as “using typographical features like bold face and italics to identify key information” and “taking an overall view of the text to see what it is about,” seemed to accord well with the characteristics of expository readings.
Joel expressed a clear concept about the three types of reading texts. He said,
"Expository texts tend to present concrete ideas in a logical, step-by-step way. The writing style of stories seems to be free of limits. As for descriptions, you need more imagination. If you don't have any prior experience to relate to, you'd better be good at envisioning." (May, 2014)
He was sensitive to the text structure, and he adjusted his strategy use according to the structure, albeit in an unconscious way. As he mentioned in an interview,
“I don’t use any strategies on purpose. It comes naturally. All I want to do is to understand what I’m reading.” (March, 2014)
The text structure between expository and story/descriptive texts is very different.
Story and descriptive types of reading texts have more predictable sequences; therefore, they often follow one structural pattern. This might explain why Joel mentioned in the last interview about how he read stories. He enjoyed reading with the flow and seldom stopped to check unknown words.
Expository texts, on the other hand, usually include multiple structures, such as comparisons/contrasts or cause/effect relationships, and thus readers would need more prior knowledge and cognitive capability to comprehend an expository text. In other words, more complicated cognitive skills are needed to read this kind of formational texts (Hall et al., 2005). Take the expository text How to Use a Fire Extinguisher as an example: Joel successfully activated his prior experience in the disaster prevention drill to help him understand the meaning of the text, though there were several difficult words in it.
Descriptive reading texts describe places, people, and incidents. Usually many
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adjectives as well as nouns are used in this type of text. Although the participant tended to neglect the details embedded in a text and enjoyed the flow of reading, his
comprehension was forced to stop when the reading contained too many unfamiliar words, such as when Joel read a highly challenging descriptive text titled The Last Butterfly. He confessed that a lack of sufficient vocabulary caused his reading difficulty.
This situation is similar to those in earlier studies indicating that limited vocabulary knowledge is the most common reading problem detected among students (Carrell, 1989;
Lai, Li, & Amster, 2013; O’Malley & Chamot, 1990; Sadoski, 1999;). However, comprehension might be improved by a reader’s expanded vocabulary and improved control of grammar (Alyousef, 2006; Hirsch, 2003). When a reader’s language ability progresses to a higher level, as Hudson (2007) indicated, he/she will be able to utilize some brain capacity to do more comprehension work. Joel was noticeably spending less time on reading similar lengths of passages, and the frequency of using the “rereading”
strategy decreased as he continued to learn English. This finding echoes Goodman’s notion (1978) that as learners’ language control develops, their ability to manipulate skills like confirming, predicting and sampling strategies improves. However, the results also revealed that if the level of difficulty is too high for the participant, he would just give up reading or immediately solicit the teacher’s help without further attempts at reading.
The story type of reading always catches children’s attention. The entertaining characteristic of a story allows children to focus on reading. Joel said,
“I’m used to reading through a story without stopping, unless there’s a special reason.” (March, 2014)
According to a survey, many people are visual learners (Peterson, 2011). Stories for young readers usually come with colorful pictures or illustrations. Joel was able to make use of these visual aids. Pictures and videos contained in a reading significantly
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contributed to his comprehension. This might explain why he spent less time on reading stories.
Gambrell (1996) pointed out that an ongoing conversation between the reader and the writer of a story in a natural situation can better involve the students in learning;
however, Joel’s reading behavior seemed to contradict this notion. Joel tended to read through a whole story without stopping to conduct self-questioning. Possible
explanations might be that Joel’s level of language proficiency was above the level of the reading at hand; therefore, he was able to read smoothly and silently. Moreover, at the time of reading, he was progressing toward puberty, and it would have been perhaps a little funny and ridiculous for him to ask himself questions.
When the topic of a reading was unfamiliar to the participant, even a simple reading text could be confusing unless visual aids like photos or videos were provided. As
Krashen (1982) indicated, to understand a reading text, people use more than just the linguistic competence. Their knowledge of world, the context and extra-linguistic information are all needed. Nishino (2007) also claimed that background knowledge usually has positive influence on helping readers achieve comprehension. Joel showed better comprehension when he attended to reading texts that he could relate to. For instance, when Joel read the expository text How to Use a Fire Extinguisher and the descriptive reading Sun Moon Lake, he retrieved his prior experience and then activated his background knowledge to help him understand. This finding also corresponds with Alyousef’s (2006) and Lee's (2015) studies, which mentioned that when the content of a reading text is familiar to the reader, the images stored in the reader’s memory or
previous hands-on experience would be brought out to help him/her understand.
The results showed that the number of strategies Joel claimed to use was more than that he actually used. The difference between his claimed use of strategy and his actual use of strategy might be due to his immature metacognitive ability, as Brown (1978),
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Garofalo, and Lester (1985) indicated in their research. The situation might also reveal that his reading ability was better than he thought. He achieved comprehension with less reading strategies than he perceived. A possible reason for the mismatch might be the self-report strategy questionnaire was conducted “after” the reading practice, not “with”
the reading practice. A strategy might be used one time, but it happened to be the most useful strategy which helped him comprehend the reading text, and therefore this most useful strategy was mistaken for the most frequently used strategy.
In accordance with Wallace’s study (1992), the results of this study suggested that when reading integrated with listening and writing, the participant’s interests increased, and his ability of manipulating reading strategies was strengthened.
Observed from this study, Joel sometimes did not take the reading practice
seriously; he would fool around by reading the words out loud. Yet after a few sentences, he would quiet down and read silently. When asked why, Joel replied,
“I understand better if I read silently.” (March, 2014) Samuels (2002) claimed that it is important for children to develop fluency in word recognition. Fast word recognition occupies less cognitive capacity, which enables them to understand what is being read. Learners should be encouraged to read silently if they have already achieved a certain level of English proficiency. This may explain why a high-achieving English learner like Joel seldom used the support strategy of “reading aloud.” This finding also echoes the results of earlier research suggesting that the
“reading aloud” strategy has more of a display function than an understanding function (Wallace, 1992).
However, there were times when the participant found reading aloud to be useful.
He said,
“When I read aloud a word, my only intention will be to articulate this unfamiliar word. By doing this, I feel the sound of the funny looking word might help me recall
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something related to this word.” (May, 2014) Besides reading aloud, strategies that Joel rarely used were self-questioning, paraphrasing, translating, taking notes, and looking up words in a dictionary. These findings are in accordance with those of earlier research indicating that advanced readers use more inferring strategies and less decoding strategies than poor readers (Chou, 2008).
Many researchers indicated that successful readers can not only identify which strategy to use for which type of reading, but also manipulate the strategies that work for them (Brown, Armbruster, & Baker, 1986; Carrell et al., 1989; Hughes, 1989). A similar behavior of strategy use was found on Joel’s reading toward picture books and expository bulletins. He was able to make good use of visual aids in a picture book to overcome the language difficulty. When he read the expository bulletin, he would not read through the whole article as he read a story. Instead, he read the boldfaced or italicized words and grasped the information he wanted.
The global strategy of “using pictures in text to increase understanding” was used very often when Joel read online instructions. For a child growing up with technology, learning with the help of computers is never a problem. When reading online, especially game instructions with a significant amount of vivid animation embedded inside, Joel always expressed strong motivation and highly involved himself in reading. Due to the great information accessibility of the Internet, he never asked for the teacher’s help;
instead, he used problem-solving strategies like “rereading” and “adjusting reading speed” many times. This finding is similar with that of Chun and Plass’s study (1996).
The result once again revealed that Joel’s employment of reading strategies was influenced by how much he liked the topic and how he read. The high level of interest enabled Joel to read at a proper rate and kept him involved in the text regardless of its syntactic difficulty.
Other than the text itself and the participant’s level of interest toward the reading,
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the results of the present study suggested that Joel’s strategy use was also influenced by many other factors. His personality, his English proficiency, his reading habits, the environment in which the reading occurred, and his level of familiarity with the reading all contributed to the changes in his strategy use.
As mentioned in chapter three, the participant enjoyed learning English and was used to thinking in English. This thinking behavior could be traced back to the English-learning experience of his early childhood. He was accustomed to the sounds and forms of English. When learning a new vocabulary, Joel was able to pick up the word quickly and connect the sound of the word to his old memory. The encouragement from his parents was also an important factor that contributed to Joel’s reading behavior.
His father sometimes asked him to translate emails without using the dictionary and this helped him to gain more confidence in guessing. Since he was trained this way, he had a sense of how language is naturally expressed. All of these experiences explained why Joel did better with strategies such as “inferring” and “summarizing” than he did with strategies such as “looking up words in a dictionary.” He felt awkward when he was required to use a particular strategy intentionally for reading. It seemed that he tended to benefit more from implicit learning than from the teacher’s explicit instruction, just as Schmidt’s finding (2010) about children’s learning.
Joel said,
"I know those strategies but I'm not used to using them. I need to remind myself to use them, which takes a lot of extra effort." (May, 2014)
Clearly, this intentional effort slowed down his reading rate. Joel preferred to employ strategies with which he felt most comfortable and familiar. This preference toward certain strategies is in accordance with MacIntyre and Noels’s (1996) finding.
They found that the high frequency of strategy use will be predicted only when readers perceive a strategy as effective, know it well, and consider it as easy to use. This
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tendency might also be explained by the result presented by Garofalo and Lester (1985), which indicated that while younger students may have the awareness of a certain reading strategy and know how to describe it, it does not mean that they actually know how to use it.
Skills in reading depend on the efficient interaction between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world (Clarke & Silberstein, 1977). As young EFL learners, such as Joel, might not have enough of these kinds of knowledge, they need strategy
instruction. However, after Joel received the reading strategy instruction, his strategy use during the entire research seemed to remain focused on certain strategies. This result appears contradictory to those of some previous studies (Anderson, 1999; Duke &
Pearson, 2002; Sheorey & Mokhtari, 2001), which mentioned that readers will be equipped with better ability of manipulating strategies once they receive the reading strategy instruction.
Although some strategies were rarely used by Joel, it does not mean that the seldom-used strategies were useless. A strategy cannot be called ineffective if it has never or rarely been used or tested in different contexts, as MacIntyre and Noels (1996) indicated. The underuse of some strategies might suggest that either Joel lacked practice in the manipulation of these strategies or he was incapable of controlling his
comprehension process. This result corresponds with Garner and Alexander’s (1989) study. Joel’s reading strategy preferences might also be explained by his extroverted personality. As Safdarian, Ghyasi and Farsani (2014) proposed, extroverted readers tend to use less reading strategies than introverted readers. Another possibility for Joel’s preference in strategy use echoes Barrentine’s finding (1996), which suggested that Joel did not really master some of the reading strategies, so he tended not to use them. He needed more time to be engaged in using a strategy in order to internalize it. An earlier research reported that very young learners often demonstrate a poor use of both
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cognitive and metacognitive strategies. They need support to develop the ability to use these strategies and to monitor and evaluate their use (McCrudden, Perkins, & Putney, 2005). In Joel’s case, the scaffolding of the teacher and his classmates gave him this kind of support.
According to the researcher’s observations, Joel was more of an impulsive learner, who sought immediate gratification in his reading. He tended to read through a passage rapidly to catch the main ideas instead of lingering over unfamiliar words, which is in accordance with Brown’s (2007) description about good readers’ behavior. The participant responded quickly to the teacher’s questions and dared to take risks at guessing the possible answers. In short, his personality and learning style affected his strategy use, which is exactly like the findings presented in earlier studies (Ehrman &
Oxford, 1989; Nishino, 2007; Oxford & Green, 1995).
If researchers examine Joel’s strategy use from Brown’s (2007) point of view, who indicated that the best use of strategies depends on the reader’s age, personality, and purpose of reading, the results would seem even more reasonable and understandable.
Research Question Two: How does the participant’s strategy use in peer reading
Research Question Two: How does the participant’s strategy use in peer reading