Reading Literacy Practices in Norwegian Lower-Secondary Classrooms: Examining the Patterns of Teacher Questions (original) (raw)
Related papers
Summary This thesis investigates practices of how teachers teach and readers read involved in developing reading comprehension in English in Norwegian upper secondary school. It is an article-based thesis comprising three articles and an extended abstract. The latter includes a review of reading research, theoretical framing, methods and research design, and a summary and discussion of the three articles. The general theoretical and conceptual framing of this thesis is that reading instruction and reading comprehension in Norwegian upper secondary school take place within a sociocultural environment. Therefore, the thesis draws primarily on Vygotskian thinking on the importance of the active learner and the teacher who supports such learners, the use of reading comprehension strategies as tools for learning, and reading proficiency as an externalisation of reading comprehension. This theoretical framing is integrated with reading theories and reading comprehension research. Methodologically, the thesis uses a mixed methods approach to study the qualitative and quantitative aspects of practices involved in developing reading comprehension in English as a second language (L2). Article I is a qualitative study which investigated reading instruction, reading strategies, and metacognitive awareness among teachers. It examined how English teachers and those who taught in the first language (L1) reported to include reading comprehension strategies in their instruction, and how they made their tacit knowledge of such instruction explicit after participating in a teacher professional development (TPD) course. The findings showed a change in how the teachers described their teaching over time. A small repertoire of reading strategies was identified, along with how and why these were used in the reading instructions. Article II is another qualitative study of reading instruction, reading strategies, and metacognitive awareness, this time among teachers and their students. This study investigated how L2 teachers taught reading comprehension strategies in their instruction one year after the TPD course, how their students used the strategies offered to them, and how the students reflected on their strategy use. Classroom observation showed that reading strategies were not only taught by the teachers and used by the students; interestingly, strategy use seemed to have a personal purpose for the students in vocational programmes, but not for the students in general programmes. Moreover, while the teachers in vocational programmes demonstrated a gradual release of responsibility for strategy use to their students, the teachers in general programmes did not. Article III is a large-scale quantitative study that investigated reading proficiency within and across English L2 and Norwegian L1 across a national sample of upper secondary school students, including a number of those in Article II. The results of this study support the view that girls read better than boys and that students in general studies read better than vocational students. However, while the gender effect was relatively smaller for the L2 than the L1, the study programme effect was relatively larger for the L2 than the L1. This study also found that, while vocational students were in majority among the poor readers, only half of them were poor readers in both languages; the others were poor readers in one language and proficient readers in the other. Contrary to expectations, among the latter was a group of boys in both study programmes who were proficient readers in the L2, while being poor readers in the L1. A final finding was that, in the sample as a whole, 49% of the explained variance in the students’ reading proficiency in English L2 was accounted for by a combination of gender, study programme, and L1 reading proficiency. Based on the findings in the three articles, the main contribution of this thesis is increased knowledge about how teachers teach and readers read when developing reading comprehension in English in Norwegian upper secondary school. The findings show that reading proficiency in the L2 is closely related to reading proficiency in the L1 and study programme, although this is not a linear relationship for all students. The findings further show that reading strategies can be valuable learning tools that help readers develop their L2 comprehension, and that the teachers do indeed teach such strategies. Nevertheless, the findings also suggest little reason to claim that reading strategies are effective when taught in isolation. Instead, they have to be explicitly taught by the teachers, and then used individually and independently by the students seeing personal purposes to do so.
Teachers' quality questions contribute to enhancing students' existing thinking and reasoning skills. The practice of teacher questioning in the EFL reading classroom is critical in supporting student learning, especially in such contexts where there is limited research on these issues as in Indonesia. This study investigated the practice of teacher questioning and teaching reading in secondary schools in Indonesia. Teachers from three grade 11 classes from three different secondary schools participated in this multiple-site case study which was employed to generate rich explanatory data across sites. Data were gathered from the teachers in the form of observations, interviews, and textbook analysis. The findings from this study show that the teachers relied on the textbooks for pedagogies for teaching reading and for the kinds of questions they asked to assist in reading comprehension. The teachers were exposed mainly to low-level questions. Thus, they faced some challenges in generating high-level questions in these conditions, and required assistance in order to do this. The study provides important information about the practice of questioning strategies in a foreign language context in Indonesia and put forward implications for changes in reading lessons.
An Investigation of Teachers’ Questioning in the English Reading Classrooms – a Case Study
Hue University Journal of Science: Social Sciences and Humanities
Questions are a crucial part of classroom life and so questioning is one of the strongest tools at a teacher’s disposal as it engages students in the learning process and challenges levels of thinking. Many of the questions teachers ask in each lesson are concerned with the recall of textbook information. The question then is how classroom questioning strategies can become more effective; therefore, help teachers fulfill their mission of language instructions and development of students’ language competence. The study aims at exploring the questioning strategies used by teachers in the reading classes, through a case study where 3 classes of Reading (by one teacher who voluntarily joined in the study) was audio-recorded and observed. Teacher’s questions (and classroom interaction) were transcribed and categorized. Findings revealed that there are two main categories of questions, audience-oriented questions and content-oriented questions. Audience-oriented questions were found to be...
How do Norwegian second-grade teachers use guided reading? The quantity and quality of practices
L1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 2021
This paper documents how teachers use guided reading practices in Norwegian second-grade classrooms. In a two-part study consisting of teachers' self-reports (Study 1) and video-observations of guided reading sessions (Study 2), we analyzed the frequency and characteristics of guided reading practices. Findings from Study 1 indicate that guided reading is a common practice of Norwegian second-grade teachers and that discussing word meaning, text, and pictures are the most frequently addressed literacy components. Findings from Study 2 illustrate that the teachers regularly make optimal use of the before-reading phase, while the after-reading phase is relatively lacking. The observational data also indicate that teachers are more likely to simply check students' understanding of word meaning rather than to work in-depth with vocabulary. Likewise, teachers were more likely to supply help in the decoding process rather than scaffold students' decoding with strategies. In sum, the data indicate that teachers may not fully use the benefits that guided reading instruction can afford. We discuss how to help educators use more of the potential of guided reading, arguing that the benefits of guided reading can be strengthened by (1) more indepth planning, (2) greater use of strategies, and (3) routines for observing and assessing.
An Analysis of Teacher’s Questioning in Reading Class
JELA (Journal of English Language Teaching, Literature and Applied Linguistics), 2021
Students of EFL (English Foreign Language) classroom need some tools that facilitate them to develop their reading skills. One of the tools is question. Question belongs to one of the most crucial tools in guiding and extending student’s learning (Gattis, 2002:41, as quoted in Sujariati, Rahman, & Mahmud, 2016). This study is descriptive qualitative research. It investigates about questioning in a reading class in one Islamic Senior High School in Bandung. Specifically, it finds out the teacher’s question types and the students’ opinions towards the questions that asked by the teacher in the reading class. In conclusion, mastering English reading skill can be something difficult for students who learn English as foreign language because they do not use the language in their daily lives. However, a teacher can apply both display and referential questions to students. By applying those question types, the students are encouraged to focus in learning reading material in the class and b...
Types of questions teachers use and their importance in the reading classes of English
2007
This article proposes to analyze the teacher's questions in English as a Foreign Language reading classes of the secondary school to verify the extent to which they use the questions from an adequate way to instigate students' critical reading. As part of my MA dissertation about Reading studies in English, I attempted to describe the teachers' profile in Florianopolis public schools, Santa Catarina, in the reading instruction by the questioning perspective to discuss pedagogical impllcations in the questions asked by those teachers. DOI: 10.28998/0103-6858.2007v1n39p159-172
The Use of Questions in Teaching Reading
1972
This review describes some of the main research findings and issues that center around teachers' use of questions in classroom instruction. The paper is divided into, sections dealing with: (1) the classification of questions by type, (2) teachers' questioning practices, (3) effects of teacher' questions on students' behavior, (4) students' questions, and (5) programs to improve teachers' questioning skills. Each section contains a separate review of the literature, a critical synthesis, and recommendations for future research.. (See related document CS 000 187.) (Page 40 may be illegible.