Cindy Hicks
CCLRG, March 11, 2010
Vignette: Focus on the text
English 102 is a basic skills reading, reasoning, and writing class that is one semester
prior to freshman comp. There is no prerequisite for English 102; any Chabot College
student may enroll and if he or she receives credit, he or she may proceed to English 1A.
English 102 is a 4-unit class, which meets twice a week for 2 hours and 10 minutes each
class period.
I want my English 102 students to use the text and to begin going deeper into the reading
that we are doing, particularly as they read the articles related to their current assignment:
deciding whether the U.S. health care system is better than the French health care system
or vice versa or whether combining traits of the U.S. and French health care systems
would be optimal.
After introducing the reading by asking students to share what they know about the U.S.
health care system and clarifying the public health care that currently exists in the U.S.—
i.e., Medicare and Medicaid—I assigned the 26 pages of reading on the topic as
homework, asking the students to, as always, Talk to the Text (T4) as they read. (I didn’t
model T4 for this reading, since I’ve been doing so all semester and the students seem to
know what to do.)
The next class period, I checked their books for T4 notes—about 2/3 of the students had
made notes on a least half of the reading. Then I divided up the reading and asked each
student to:
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read a two-or-three-page section,
review the T4 notes and add questions in the assigned section, OR
if the student hadn’t read the section he or she had just been assigned, to read it
now and T4, focusing on asking questions.
The students needed about 20 minutes to read and T4 or review their notes. After they
finished, I had them share with a partner what they noted when talking to the text, asking
them to focus on questions that had come up.
After about 10 minutes, I stopped their discussions and had them go back to the pages
they were responsible for and write a metacognitive log. The log is attached; I asked
them to find just three entries for the “Evidence” column. In the “Interpretation” column,
I asked them to write questions, predictions, or connections, related to the “evidence.”
The students needed about fifteen minutes to complete the logs. After a break, the
students got into groups of three to share their logs and to decide as a group on a question
they wanted an answer to.
After about fifteen minutes, when the students finished talking with one another in
groups, they came back as a class and asked the questions, which I typed up and
displayed on the screen as they were asking them. Their questions are attached. We
went over the “in the text” questions first, numbers 3, 4, 6. Next class we will use the
other questions to form the basis for a discussion that stems from the text.
I haven’t used a metacognitive log in a basic skills English class prior to now, but I’m
experiencing success with students’ metacognitive logs in my transfer English class—the
students are going deeper into their reading, making connections, and coming up with
counter-examples--and I’ve been very impressed with my life sciences colleague’s use of
such logs, so I decided to give it a try.
I was pleased with the engagement of the students in these activities—when we got to the
point of generating questions, students kept thinking of new ones, beyond the one they
had come up with in their groups. Questions that I thought could be linked with the topic
that they will be writing about, I wrote at the top of the page; questions that were more
tangential, I wrote in a “Parking Lot” section. Students who asked those questions
wondered what “Parking Lot” meant and were pleased when I answered that these were
important questions but we couldn’t answer them with the information we had available.
Later, students debated with me about whether or not a question was a parking lot
question, based on the criterion I had established, and I liked that.
I liked, too, that students referred to the page and the quote that sparked their questions.
Health care is a topic everyone has an opinion about, so I had to figure out how to keep
the students focused on the text and the eventual writing assignment. Having them T4
and write even a short metacognitive log seemed to accomplish this.
I’ll know on Tuesday, March 16, whether or not these in-class activities led to more
students completing the reading and how helpful the questions generated are in directing
the class discussion. And I’ll know the extent to which the RA activities enhanced
students’ comprehension of the reading when we begin specifically discussing the
essay—figuring out, for example, what information the students think should be included
where and why. I’ll get more information on that, as well, when I read their essays.
I’m wondering still if I want to:
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Assign the students the two pages they will Talk to the Text to before they start
reading and tell them to ask questions, make predictions, or make connections at
home;
Bring more QAR concepts into the questioning—I need to review these;
Just focus on questioning in the T4 and metacognitive logs, rather than include
connecting and predicting.