Abstract
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” In a modern-day classroom, students are surrounded by visual imagery through textbooks, notice boards, television, videos, or computers. Many middle school classrooms are filled with colorful pictures and photographs. However, it is unclear how – or if - these images impact the middle school ESL students who are developing reading comprehension. The focus of this article is on ESL middle school language learners’ use of these graphics as information organizers while comprehending a passage for main ideas, supporting details, facts, opinions, comparisons and contradictions. This article also examines and proposes different forms of graphic organizers for achieving better understanding of texts. Differences in performance between the students who are exposed to the use of graphic organizers and the students who are not similarly exposed have been analyzed in this article. The experimental and control groups of this research are middle school students in ESL classes. The analytical method, ANOVA, is used to project the performance difference between the controlled and experimental groups. The result of the post-test suggested that the experimental group students have improved in all the five types of reading questions compared to controlled group students. Therefore, using graphic organizers is effective in reading questions like (1) identifying the main idea, (2) finding the supporting details, (3) dealing with vocabulary and (4) fact and opinion & (5) making inferences. Furthermore, the pedagogical implication here is the use graphic organizers during reading comprehension sessions indirectly motivates the students to create their own graphic organizer for the passages they read and comprehend. This improves their creativity.
Highlights
Daniel Willingham (2008) classifies learners into three different types: Those who learn by looking, those who learn by listening, and those who learn by manipulating things - or visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners
The result of the post-test suggested that the experimental group students have improved in all the five types of reading questions compared to controlled group students
Using graphic organizers is effective in reading questions like (1) identifying the main idea, (2) finding the supporting details, (3) dealing with vocabulary and (4) fact and opinion & (5) making inferences
Summary
Daniel Willingham (2008) classifies learners into three different types: Those who learn by looking, those who learn by listening, and those who learn by manipulating things - or visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners. Middle school ESL learners may struggle in other areas while comprehending a passage While they may be good at recognizing and pronouncing the words, they struggle to understand the central theme of the passage. They learn the skill of classifying information of a passage under a schema. Once they master this skill, they can divide the passage into different lexias such as main idea, supporting details, topic sentences, data, fact, opinion, etc. Incorporating graphic organizers in reading comprehension helps middle school ESL students in developing their comprehension skills. Helping students organize the content helps them better comprehend texts for information such as main ideas supporting details, facts, opinions, comparisons and contradictions. Another issue relating to graphic organizers lies in the wide range of understandings of what a graphic organizer is and how it should be designed for research or instructional purposes
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.