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The Language Teacher | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This article is about reading strategies, and more particularly, about how reading strategies can be successfully taught, and what goes into successful teaching of reading strategies. I don't think I need to argue that reading is an important means by which, not only is new information learned, but also by which new language skills are acquired. In first language reading, even relatively advanced learners constantly acquire new vocabulary knowledge through reading. In second language reading, learners are exposed to valuable second language input which they can use to advance their second language acquisition. And in both first and second language reading, reading is the primary source of new information about all sorts of topics. The goal of most second language reading programs is to turn "learning to read" into "reading to learn." My focus in this article will be on learning how to read more effectively in order to gain information or to read for pleasure, not just on reading for further language acquisition. I will use the term "second language reading" to refer to both foreign and second language reading, without distinction. The distinctions between the two are irrelevant to the points made in this article. And, although I will focus on reading strategies and reading strategy instruction, of course I do not intend to imply that reading strategies should be the only focus of a second language reading class or program. Obviously, second language reading programs must focus on many other things as well, including extensive reading, exposure to lots of accessible, comprehensible, authentic text, as well as on language acquisition, and primarily vocabulary acquisition. However, my focus herein is on reading strategies and reading strategy instruction. Reading StrategiesReading strategies are of interest not only for what they reveal about the ways readers manage their interactions with written text, but also for how the use of strategies is related to effective reading comprehension. I use the term "strategies" deliberately, rather than the term "skills" because I want to focus on the actions that readers actively select and control to achieve desired goals or objectives, although I recognize that there are different claims in the literature as to how much conscious deliberation is involved in these actions. In my use of the term "strategies," I am aligning myself with Paris, Wasik and Turner have said the following about "strategies" and "skills":
Reading researchers have sought to identify the surprisingly wide variety of strategies used by both native and non-native language readers. Reading strategies run the gamut from such traditionally recognized reading behaviors as skimming a text to get the general idea, scanning a text for a specific piece of information, making contextual guesses about the meanings of unknown words, skipping unknown words, tolerating ambiguity, making predictions, confirming or disconfirming inferences, identifying the main idea, rereading, and using cognates to comprehend, to more recently recognized strategies such as activating prior background knowledge and recognizing text structure. Reading strategies can be virtually impossible to distinguish from other cognitive processes related to thinking, reasoning, studying, or motivational strategies, and I won't attempt such a demarcation here either. For our purposes, reading strategies will include any of a wide array of tactics that readers use to engage and comprehend text. What do we know about reading strategies and strategic reading from the research on proficient first language reading? We know that expert readers use rapid decoding, large vocabularies, phonemic awareness, knowledge about text features, and a variety of strategies to aid comprehension and memory. Pressley and Afflerbach(1995), in examining a number studies of verbal protocols of reading, have shown a great deal of the complexity of skilled reading. Yet they summarize all the complexity of self-reported thinking during expert reading by observing:
Novice readers, by contrast, often focus on decoding single words, fail to adjust their reading for different texts or purposes, and seldom look ahead or back in text to monitor and improve comprehension. Such cognitive limitations are characteristic of young novices as well as of older, unskilled readers. In addition, readers who are older yet poor readers may have motivational handicaps such as low expectations for success, anxiety about their reading, and unwillingness to persevere in the face of difficulty. Given the multidimensional differences between skilled and unskilled readers, why focus on strategic reading and reading strategies as a hallmark of expertise? Strategic reading is a prime characteristic of expert readers because it is woven into the very fabric of "reading for meaning," and the development of this cognitive ability. Reading strategies--which are related to other cognitive strategies enhancing attention, memory, communication and learning--allow readers to elaborate, organize, and evaluate information derived from text. Because strategies are controllable by readers, they are personal cognitive tools that can be used selectively and flexibly. And, reading strategy use reflects both metacognition and motivation, because readers need to have both the knowledge and the disposition to use strategies. A great deal of research in first language reading over the last 25 years has shown that young and unskilled readers do not use strategies often or effectively without help. Failure to use reading strategies effectively has been observed in the first language reading of young or unskilled readers when (1) they fail to monitor their comprehension, (2) they believe that the strategies will not make a difference in their reading, (3) they lack knowledge about text features, (4) they are disinterested in text and unwilling to use strategies, and (5) they prefer familiar yet primitive strategies over less-familiar but more effective tactics. Nonstrategic reading in these situations reflects a mixture of developmental naivete, limited practice, lack of instruction, and motivational reluctance to use unfamiliar or effortful strategies. Second language reading research began to focus on reading strategies in the late 1970s and early 80s. Several early studies -often exploratory, descriptive investigations with small numbers of individual learners, and using think-aloud techniques--these early studies identified relationships between certain types of reading strategies and successful and unsuccessful second language reading. In 1977, Hosenfeld studied high school students in the U.S. reading French, German, or Spanish, but thinking aloud in English. Her example of a "successful" French reader did several things: (1) he kept the meaning of the passage in mind during reading, (2) he read in what she termed "broad phrases," (3) he skipped words unimportant to total phrase meaning, and (4) he had a positive self-concept as a reader. By contrast, Hosenfeld's "unsuccessful" French reader (1) lost the meaning of sentences as soon as they were decoded, (2) read in short phrases, (3) seldom skipped words as unimportant and viewed words as equal in their contribution to total phrase meaning, and (4) had a negative self-concept as a reader. In 1986, Block studied generally nonproficient readers, native and nonnative English speakers enrolled in freshman remedial reading courses in the U.S. She found four characteristics which seemed to differentiate the more successful from the less successful of these nonproficient readers. These four characteristics were: (1) integration, (2) recognition of aspects of text structure, (3) use of general knowledge, personal experiences, and associations, and (4) response in an extensive as opposed to a reflexive mode. In the reflexive mode, readers relate affectively and personally, directing their attention away from the text and toward themselves, and focusing on their own thoughts and feelings rather than on the information in the text. In the extensive mode, readers attempt to deal with the message conveyed by the author, focus on understanding the author's ideas, and do not relate the text to themselves affectively or personally. Among the nonproficient readers investigated by Block, one subgroup which she labeled "integrators" integrated information, were generally aware of text structure, responded in an extensive mode, and monitored their understanding consistently and effectively. They also made greater progress in developing their reading skills and demonstrated greater success after one semester in college. The other subgroup, which Block labeled "nonintegrators," failed to integrate, tended not to recognize text structure, and seemed to rely much more on personal experiences, responding in a reflexive mode. They also made less progress in developing their reading skills and demonstrated less success after one semester in college. There have been several other case studies similarly showing relationships between various reading strategies and successful or unsucessful second language reading ( Devine 1984; Hauptman, 1979; Knight, Padron, and Waxman, 1985; and Sarig, 1987). Yet, the picture is more complex than suggested by these early case studies. Unfortunately, the relationships between strategies and comprehension are not simple and straightforward. Use of certain reading strategies does not always lead to successful reading comprehension, while failure to use these strategies or use of other strategies does not always result in unsuccessful reading comprehension. Research reported by Anderson in 1991 shows that there are no simple correlations or one-to-one relationships between particular strategies and successful or unsuccessful reading comprehension. His research with native Spanish-speaking, university level, intensive ESL students reading in English as their second language and self-reporting their strategy use, suggests wide individual variation in successful or unsuccessful use of the exact same reading strategies. Rather than a single set of processing strategies that significantly contributed to successful reading comprehension, the same kinds of strategies were used by both high and low comprehending readers. However, those readers reporting the use of a higher number of different strategies tended to score higher on Anderson's comprehension measures. More recently, Kern (1997) reported at the American Association of Applied Lingusitics meeting in Orlando on a case study of two American university students reading in French as a second language, one a "good reader of French as L2," one less good. Kern showed that no strategy is inherently a "good" or "bad" strategy; that so-called "bad" strategies are used by "good" readers and vice-versa. For example, using prior knowledge may sometimes be an effective strategy for one reader in one reading situation, but not for another reader or in another reading situation. Kern showed that the same is true of translation as a strategy. Anderson concluded from his data that successful second language reading comprehension is "not simply a matter of knowing what strategy to use, but the reader must also know how to use it successfully and know how to orchestrate its use with other strategies. It is not sufficient to know about strategies, but a reader must also be able to apply them strategically" (1991, p.19). Similarly, Kern concluded from his data that there are good and bad uses of the same strategy, and that the difference between a "good" use and a "bad" use of the same strategy is in the context in which they are used, how they are used and how they interact with other strategies. In other words, Kern says, the differences is how the strategies are "operationalized." So, what does it mean to successfully "contextualize and operationalize" strategies, in the sense of Kern, or to "be able to apply strategies strategically," in the sense of Anderson? That, I believe, is where metacognition comes in. For the remainder of this article, I want to argue that the difference between good and bad uses of the same reading strategies may lie in whether the strategies are used metacognitively or not. Consequently, I will argue that the difference between successful and unsuccessful reading strategy training can be due to the inclusion (or lack of inclusion) of metacognition in the strategy training. Metacognition and Metacognitive Strategy Training/TeachingWhat is metacognition? Well, as one can probably figure out from analyzing the term itself, metacognition is "cognition about cognition," or "thinking about thinking." But what does that mean? Let's try to get at an understanding of metacognition first in terms of learning strategies in general, not just in terms of reading strategies. O'Malley, Chamot, and their collaborators [Stewner-Mazanares, Russo and Kupper (1985)], articulated the contrast between metacognition and cognition in terms of general learning strategies, saying:
According to O'Malley, et al., "students without metacognitive approaches are essentially learners without direction or opportunity to review their progress, accomplishments, and future directions" (1985, p. 561). Pressley, Snyder and Cariglia-Bull (1987) have said about the role of metacognition in general learning that metacognition helps students to be consciously aware of what they have learned, recognize situations in which it would be useful, and processes involved in using it. One reason metacognition is important is that if learners are not aware of when comprehension is breaking down and what they can do about it, strategies introduced by the teacher will fail and the learner will not be able to use the strategies strategically. As early as 1978, Flavell defined metacognition as "knowledge that takes as its object or regulates any aspect of cognitive behavior" (1978, p. 8). Two dimensions of metacognitive ability are generally recognized: (1) knowledge of cognition, and (2) regulation of cognition (Flavell, 1978). The first aspect of metacognition, "knowledge about cognition," includes three components which have been labeled "declarative," "procedural," and "conditional" (Paris, Lipson, and Wixson, 1983). Declarative knowledge is propositional knowledge, referring to "knowing what." A learner may know what a given reading strategy is, for example, s/he may know what skimming or scanning is. Procedural knowledge is "knowing how" to perform various actions, for example, "how to write a summary, how to skim or scan" (Winograd and Hare, 1988, p. 134) Conditional knowledge refers to "knowing why," and includes the learner's understanding of the value or rationale for acquiring and using a strategy and when to use it. Conditional knowledge is necessary if a reader is to know whether or not a certain strategy is appropriate, and whether or not it is working effectively for that learner. The second aspect of metacognition, the executive or regulatory function refers to when a "higher order process orchestrates and directs other cognitive skills" (Paris, Cross, and Lipson, 1984, p. 1,241). In reading, these metacognitive abilities relate to the planning, monitoring, testing, revising, and evaluating of the strategies employed during reading (Baker and Brown, 1984). The importance of the executive or regulative function of metacognition in strategic reading shows up in the tactics readers use to monitor comprehension. One of the problems of nonstrategic readers is that they often proceed on "automatic pilot," oblivious to comprehension difficulties. First language reading studies have shown clear differences in the spontaneous comprehension monitoring of good and poor readers, as well as clear developmental differences in monitoring. Poor and underdeveloped readers commonly manifest an inability to detect inconsistencies or nonsense in a text. Comprehension monitoring is a kind of "executive" function, essential for competent reading, directing the readers' cognitive processes as s/he strives to make sense of the incoming information. Thus in reading, the two key metacognitive factors, knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition, are concerned, respectively, with what readers know about their cognitive resources and their executive control of these resources. Because students may have many misconceptions about the nature of reading and incomplete awareness of reading strategies, or of executive processes for monitoring and regulating comprehension, some researchers have called for fostering better metacognition and reading comprehension through direct instruction. "An essential aim of direct instruction," according to Baker and Brown (1984), "is to make the reader aware of the active nature of reading and the importance of employing problem-solving, trouble-shooting routines to enhance understanding. If the reader can be made aware of (a) basic strategies for reading and remembering, (b) simple rules of text construction, (c) differing demands of a variety of tests to which his [sic] background knowledge may be put, and (d) the importance of attempting to use any background knowledge that he may have, he cannot help but to become a more effective reader. Such self-awareness is a prerequisite for self-regulation, the ability to monitor and check one's own cognitive activities while reading" (1984, p. 376). Researchers interested in reading strategy instruction, appreciating the importance of the learner's active or metacognitive participation, have, therefore, attempted to enlist it through careful and complete explanation of the procedures and values of the particular strategy in question. As Roehler and Duffy (1984) point out:
Thus, successful reading strategy instruction involves the development of metacognitive awareness of the strategies. But, we may ask, what constitutes a careful and complete explanation of a reading comprehension strategy? What should teachers do, who want to give their students not only a repertoire of reading strategies to draw upon, but who also want to help make their students metacognitively aware of those strategies and their use of the strategies? Drawing upon the prior work of a number of other instructional researchers, Winograd and Hare (1988) proposed the following five elements as constituting complete teacher explanation: (1) what the strategy is,
(2) why a strategy should be learned,
(3) how to use the strategy,
(4) when and where the strategy should be used,
and (5) how to evaluate use of the strategy.
It has probably not escaped the reader's notice that these five elements of complete teacher explanation are related to the three components of metacognitive knowledge I previously mentioned: teacher explanation of what the strategy is (element 1) addresses declarative knowledge; teacher explanation of how to use the strategy (element 2) addresses procedural knowledge; teacher explanation of why the strategy should be learned or used, when and where to use the strategy, and how to evaluate its effectiveness (elements 3, 4 and 5) all address conditional knowledge. Winograd and Hare (1988) reviewed seven L1 reading strategy training studies which used direct instruction procedures, looking for the presence or absence of the five elements of metacognition. Each of the studies reported significant gains in the use of the strategy taught (e.g., study skills based on SQ3R, main idea identification, summarizing) and each of the studies utilized one or more of the five metacognitive elements. Based on the Winograd and Hare review, it is clear that successful L1 reading strategy training can involve some but not necessarily all of the desirable elements of metacognitive strategy training. The components most often included are those involving procedural knowledge (how to use the strategy), as well as declarative knowledge (what the strategy is). Some, but not all of the studies also contained one of the elements of conditional knowledge In second language reading strategy training there have also been a number of studies which have also included varying amounts of metacognitive training. Without attempting to be exhaustive, I have selected a small sample of studies as illustrative. Figure 1 reports the studies in chronological order.
I must preface my review of these studies by observing that all of them, my own included, suffer from what one might generously describe as a "lack of specificity" with respect to the published description of the methods. Each of the six studies could have benefited from greater completeness in specifying the details of the training methodology. In a strategy training study focused on text structure reported in 1985 (Carrell, 1985), we provided some evidence that all five components of metacognitive training were covered, although I see now in hindsight, as I've grown myself more aware than ever of the importance of the metacognitive components of the training, that the published version of the study could have and should have provided greater details as to exactly how each of the five was covered. We said, for example:
In another 1985 study of what she termed a "text-strategic" training approach, which involved training on a long list of text characteristics, Hamp-Lyons appears to have included instruction in the what but doesn't indicate anything explicitly about having covered the other metacognitive components. Sarig and Folman, in a 1987 study involving a coherence strategy (i.e., formal instruction in what constitutes coherence and how to produce it in reading and writing), claimed to have included declarative and possibly [their word] procedural knowledge relevant to the training of coherence (ms., pp.13-14). They are silent on conditional knowledge. In another training study, published in 1989, focused on text structure and utilizing semantic mapping and the Experience-Text-Relationship method, Carrell, Pharis, and Liberto covered the what, how to use, why and when and where components in the strategy training, but there is not much indication in that study of our covering the evaluation component. In Kern's 1989 description of his strategy training procedures, which focussed on strategies of word analysis and the recognition of sentence and discourse cohesion, it appears that he covered both the what and possibly also the how to use components of metacognition, but his description gives no indication that he included any emphasis on the why, when and where, or evaluative components. Finally, Raymond, in her 1993 strategy training study on text structure, modelled after Carrell 1985 top-level-rhetorical structures, asserts that all five components of metacognition were covered in the study, but gives no indication of how these elements were presented in the training. She says of the training:
In all of these L2 studies, significant positive effects were found for the strategy training when compared with control groups or traditional approaches to instruction. Thus, as with the L1 training studies, we have evidence from these L2 training studies that reading strategy training which includes a focus on the metacognitive aspects of strategy use show significant positive results. I would argue that the positive results were obtained because of the inclusion of the metacognitive components. Yet, the researcher in me cannot be satisfied with simply asserting this conclusion. I want to know it as an empirical fact, not as an asserted truth! I want to be able to answer the question: To what extent is direct, explicit instruction in the metacognitive components of strategy use necessary to achieve success in strategy training? To answer this question, I am currently engaged in a study testing the hypothesis that ESL reading strategy training which includes metacognitive strategy training in all three components of metacognition (declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge--including not only the what, how to use, and why components, but also the when and where and how to evaluate components as well) that such reading strategy training will contribute significantly more to reading strategy training than that which only includes the what, how to use, and why components. The following is a brief summary of our study's methodology and current status. Our project is being conducted in an English for Academic Purposes reading program for college-level ESL students at a major southeastern university in the United States. We are using one control group and two experimental groups. The control group receives the usual curriculum of the EAP advanced reading course. One experimental group receives strategy training in addition to the usual EAP curriculum. The strategy training consists of a number of strategies known to be relevant to EAP college-level reading. These strategies include (1) main idea extraction (Baumann, 1984), (2) text preview and survey methods (SQ3R) (Robinson, 1941), (3) top level rhetorical structure recognition - a text structure strategy (Meyer, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c), and (4) summarization (Hare & Borchardt, 1984). The strategy training includes information on what each strategy is, how to use each of the strategies, and why each strategy should be learned. The second experimental group receives metacognitive strategy training of the same strategies as the first experimental group. This metacognitive strategy training consists of the three elements of strategy training I just mentioned (what, how to use, and why), plus the following additional metacognitive aspects: added emphasis on why, when to engage in utilizing the various strategies in a variety of reading settings and purposes, when and where the strategies are recommended for use or not, whether the strategy is appropriate in particular reading situations, and how the learner can evaluate his/her own use of the strategy and its effectiveness for the learner in a particular reading situation. Control variables include the measurement of the learners' overall second language proficiency (as measured by the TOEFL), the learners' second language reading ability (as measured by the reading section of the TOEFL), and the learners' basic approaches to learning (also referred to as their "learning styles" or their "personality types," as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, cf., Myers & McCaulley, 1985). Our pre and posttests include a number of measures relevant to the strategies being trained, as well as to the English-for-Academic-Purposes (EAP) curriculum: namely, (a) a test of main idea identification for both short and longer passages, and implicit as well as explicit main ideas; (b) a summary writing task; and (c) a reading and written recall task for passages with particular top-level rhetorical structures. My collaborators at Georgia State University and I have just completed the data collection phase of this project and are currently undertaking data analysis. As both educators and researchers, we are struck by the complexities and nuances of metacognitive strategy presentation within the classroom with students of advanced ESL proficiency. We have also been challenged to devise appropriate classroom activities and dependent measures which are sufficiently sensitive to tease apart the effects of each type of strategy training. We hope that our efforts, when all of our data are analyzed and interpreted, will prove beneficial for researchers, educators, and more importantly, students. In the meantime, others have continued to take metacognitive awareness training into the L2 reading classrooms, and not just for experimental or research purposes but for pedagogical reasons. One such example is the recent article by Auerbach and Paxton (1997) on "Bringing Reading Research into the ESL Classroom." In that article, Auerbach and Paxton report an informal and successful attempt to bring metacognitive awareness into the L2 reading class. The article presents a retrospective account of an undergraduate ESL reading course that trained ESL students to investigate their own reading as part of the pedagogical process, and invited the students to apply their discoveries to their reading. The authors report that students' strategies, conceptions, awareness and feelings about reading in English were positively affected by the course. Using data which included pre and postcourse reading interviews, reading conception questionnaires, strategy awareness questionnaires, reading inventories, think-aloud protocols, and comprehension tests, the authors conclude from their findings that:
And, lest we think that metacognitive strategy training is limited to more cognitively mature students like Auerbach and Paxton's undergraduate university students, let me just close by mentioning one additional pedagogical study showing that metacognitve strategy training can be effective with younger, less cognitively mature learners. In a case study of 5 bilingual Latino students with low literacy levels in English--they were reading up to 4 grade levels below their current 7th grade placement (approximately 12 years of age)--and probably not great literacy skills in their native language, Spanish, either--Jiminez in another recent article (1997) demonstrated that reading strategy training with a focus on metacognitive awareness had a positive effect on these students. The strategies the students were trained in included (1) resolving the meanings of unknown vocabulary, (2) asking questions, and (3) making inferences. These students were also encouraged to use their bilingual language abilities, such as searching for cognate vocabulary, translating, and reflecting on the text in either their L2 or their L1. Over the six-month period of the training and observation, the students demonstrated positive shifts in their attitudes toward their L2 literacy and their ability to succeed in L2 reading, as well as greater effective use of the strategies, and effective use of their L1 abilities. Jiminez reports that the students demonstrated a willingness to work hard, and an appreciation of the "goal-directed instruction." ConclusionBoth the first language and the second language research literature on reading strategy training which involves emphasis on some or all of the five metacognitive elements (what, how- to-use, why, when and where, and evaluation) has clearly shown that such teaching can definitely make a difference in the short term. What we need to bear in mind, however, is that skilled readers don't get that way over night. They learn how to do this complex thing we call reading by doing it repeatedly, over long periods of time, with lots of different texts, and with lots of opportunities to practice applying strategies, and monitoring their processes and evaluating the effectiveness of different strategies for themselves in different reading situations. Therefore, metacognitive reading strategy teaching should also be a long term educational process, with constant attention and support over longer periods of time. With teachers explaining and modeling use of a wide variety of strategies, scaffolding student practice and application, providing re-explanations and additional modeling as necessary and helping learners to experience reading strategies as personal cognitive and metacognitive tools for making meaning, reading strategy use should be seen not as means to pursue a "correct" in-the-text meaning, but as long-term means to personal understanding and interpretation of text that is, nonetheless, based on the text. Or, as Pressley and Afflerbach (1995) label it, the reader should be able to come to a "constructively responsive" reading of the text.
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