Using Group Discussion with Taiwan’s EFL College Students: A Comparison of Comprehension Instruction for Book Club, Literature Circles, and Instructional Conversations

Fu-Yuan Shen

doi:10.5539/elt.v6n12p58

Abstract

The research presented here involved a one-semester study; during this period of time, reading comprehension instruction representing three major discussion-centered approaches (Book Club, BC; Literature Circles, LC; Instructional Conversations, IC) was designed and implemented. The effectiveness of the three experimental approaches and one control approach (basal comprehension) were compared. BC and LC are peer-led, small-group discussions, while IC is teacher-led group discussions. The design of the instruction for the control approach was based on the basal reading program used in the participating classroom. Student participants (N = 160) were all EFL college students attending a public university on the eastern coast of Taiwan. Assessments of reading comprehension, including three standardized tests and two essays, were developed to compare students’ performance in relation to higher level comprehension. No significant differences were found on one measure of lesson-text understanding, factual comprehension. However, for interpretive comprehension and theme-related essays, the BC, LC, and IC students outperformed the basal control students; occasionally, the BC students scored slightly higher than the LC and IC students did. For the beyond-lesson-text comprehension assessment, there was a modest superior result in favor of the experimental students.

Highlights

Students’ reading proficiency is critical to their academic performance and future career success in light of today’s “knowledge economy” world, where information proliferation and technological innovations lead to high demands for literacy in the present and the future (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999)
The rest of the students were used as the unit of the analysis and the collected comprehension scores were analyzed with one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and with the Scheffe test run for determining post-hoc differences
I examined this hypothesis by investigating the effects of Book Club, Literature Circles, and Instructional Conversations, which were all discussion-based approaches to teaching students reading skills through small-group discussions

Summary

Introduction

Students’ reading proficiency is critical to their academic performance and future career success in light of today’s “knowledge economy” world, where information proliferation and technological innovations lead to high demands for literacy in the present and the future (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999). The field of reading research has succeeded in identifying discussion-oriented approaches for improving students’ reading comprehension (Murphy, Wilkinson, Soter, Hennessey, & Alexander, 2009; Soter et al, 2008) These instructional approaches center on engaging, interesting, and motivational discussions about a text, including Grand Conversations (Eeds & Wells, 1989), Book Club (Raphael & McMahon, 1994), Literature Circles (Short & Pierce, 1990), Instructional Conversations (Goldenberg, 1993), Questioning the Author (Beck, McKeown, Hamilton, & Kucan, 1997), the Junior Great Books Discussions (Great Books Foundation, 1987), Collaborative Reasoning (Waggoner, Chinn, Yi, & Anderson, 1995), Philosophy for Children (Sharp, 1985), and Paideia Seminars (Billings & Fitzgerald, 2002). The characteristics of such discussion-focused approaches include open-ended, student-generated questions, student possession of interpretive authority, and less teacher intervention (e.g., Beck, McKeown, Sandora, Kucan, & Worthy, 1996; Chinn, O’Donnell, & Jinks, 2000; McCann, Johannessen, Kahn, & Flanagan, 2006; Nystrand, Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, & Long, 2003)

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