Vision Statement for Teaching and Learning Online Reading Comprehension

My Beliefs About Reading On The Internet – What counts as online reading comprehension?

I believe that reading today means to understand different written textual genres in different supports, environments and formats. When I say written I am not discarding other languages, but emphasizing the importance of the presence of the written verbal language to characterize the process as reading (stricto sensu), knowing that, inevitably, it will be surrounded by other semiotic resources. “All texts are multimodal. Language always takes place with other semiotic modes and is embedded in them” (free translation from Portuguese, Kress & van Leuween, 1998, p. 186)

Reading online involves reading texts in digital environments. This activity includes accessing and understanding the information, which includes many skills that can be condensed in the following categories (based on Coiro & Dobbler, 2007, Jenkins, 2009, Goldman et al., 2012, Kingsley & Tancock, 2013):

      Finding and accessing information

      Selecting the most appropriate ones for the task or reading aim

      Read and understand – built meaning from the text

      Make connection among the texts or fragment of texts read

      Built a coherent representation with the information found.

All those skills involve constant evaluation of the information, and monitoring of the reading process.

Coiro & Dobler (2007)  point out “the intricacies of rapidly integrating a physical process of clicking the mouse, dragging scroll bars, rolling over dynamic images, and navigating pop-up menus that intertwines with a cognitive process of planning, predicting, monitoring, and evaluating” (p.242), that make online reading so unique.

Reading on the internet involves social and individual skills, social and cognitive aspects. The context and the knowledge that “a reader brings to a text (even if the text is a grocery store) helps to shape the kind of meaning that is made and negotiated. Here, a reader's experiences, background knowledge, and sociocultural identity are as important (if not more so) as the decontextualized cognitive skills necessary to decipher a text." (Hammerberg, 2004 p. 651). Although I disagree that a grocery store is a text – I believe it is the context (van Dijk, 1977) –the social and pragmatic aspects of the communication act plays a fundamental role at understanding.

On the other hand, cognitive skills is also very important to allow the construction of meaning from written texts. According to Coiro e Dobler (2007, p. 217) reading online requires “new comprehension skills, strategies, and dispositions” and involve generating questions, locating, evaluating, synthesizing, and communicating information on the Internet.

In sum, reading involves making meaning from the written code as well as analyzing critically the texts social function.

My Emerging Beliefs About Teaching Reading on the Internet – How should online reading comprehension be taught? 

Two approaches of teaching online reading that go in different direction, but might get into a similar result are (1) the ones that first models to the students and them let the student do by themselves; and  (2) the ones in which the students are given (or create) a question or a problem to solve, and help is offered by the teacher during the process, or metacognitive analysis of the process is made at a latter point of the work or after it.

One example of the first king of approach is the Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT) Model (Leu et al., 2008). This approach starts with the teacher modeling and thinking aloud to show the students how they are supposed to behave as readers. Kingsley & Tancock (2013, p. 391) point out that reading research shows that “teacher modeling followed by collaborative inquiry tasks proved to be a successful instructional framework for Internet instruction (Castek, 2008;  Kingsley, 2011;  Leu & Reinking, 2010)”.

The other approach would be based on a constructionist or constructivist view of learning as Papert (1993) and Ferreiro and Teberosky (1979), respectively, propose for instance. In these perspectives, given a task the student needs to find ways to solve the problem by himself of with other students. The teacher’s role is help the students when they need.

I believe that there is not only way to teach online reading comprehension. Mixing different approaches will certainly be beneficial for the students, because they will be able to choose the ways that best fits them, among a range of options that the teacher showed them. So, blending teacher modeling and scaffolding what the students are expected to do, as well as working with a more constructionist approach of learning might bring good results.

Given all the possibilities that the Internet offers us, to teach reading on the internet should involve different practices, using different software and apps, authentic material and real situations. The vast amount of information we have available, enables a rich and productive use of the inquiry process as a learning tool. This is a way to help students learn to learn so that they will be able to do it in their personal and professional lives, adapting to the changes and challenges introduced by the modes of production and the technology, that are constantly changing.

“Internet inquiry involves curiosity, which leads students to search, scan, and ultimately seek to find an answer to their inquiring minds” (Kingsley & Tancock, 2013). An Internet based inquiry in a participatory culture (Jenkins, 2009), can count on a “Collaborative Problem-solving” situation, in which students will work together in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (Jenkins, 2009, p. 3).

In this perspective the purpose of the teacher should be to make students became motivated, fluent, and critical readers of texts (print and digital). According to Guthrie, Wigfield, & You (2012),

classroom practices and conditions that support student motivation in the classroom context are most likely to impact students’ reading competence by virtue of their effects on students’ motivations, which are then expected to increase behavioral engagement in reading, which is the proximal variable that influences cognitive competence in reading. (p. 629)

Role of the teacher, when focusing on teaching online reading, should be to promote situations that will challenge the students to learn from this huge amount of texts available at digital environments.

Personal Reflection:

Sometimes I think that I might be over estimating the value of Internet and the necessity of helping our students to be better readers so that they can fully exercise their rights as citizens of our contemporary society. However, the more I read, the more I see that there are many other teachers/researchers concerned with this and all the complexities that read, write and learn online and offline involve. 

All those reading and discussions show me that reading online amplifies the necessity of some skills as well as make important skills that were seen as lower level skills. One example is locating information. To locate information online might get much more complex than locating in a single print text. Another one is selecting information. Now we have the Library of Babel (Borges, 1941) available almost anytime, anywhere.

Internet obliges us, as teachers, to focus on higher levels skills. It is not that we did not know about those skills before (Bloom’s taxonomy is from the 50’s; and PISA’s results with the expected levels of reading are available since 2000), but they were “higher” level skills that “some people” needed to develop, now they are essential skills that everyone needs to develop.

The readings, always exploring the “different sides of the coin”, reinforces my beliefs that there is not one truth and the miraculous approach. We need to know many approaches and perspectives to have many tools available to use, and to have many lenses with which to analyze the phenomena and situations.

As far as my teaching style, I tend to be very constructionist/constructivist, in the sense that I normally give the students problems to solve, projects to develop, and I help then during the process. I must pay more attention to the moments when I can scaffold more. As I teach undergraduate and graduate students that are or will become teachers, this will work also as a way to show them how to help their own students or future students.

References

Coiro, J., Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the online comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers to search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly, 42, 214-257. 

Coiro, J. (2003). Reading Comprehension on the Internet: Expanding our understanding of reading comprehension to encompass new literacies. The Reading Teacher, 56(5), 458-464.

Ferreiro, E., Teberosky, A. Los sistemas de escritura en el desarrollo del niño. México, Siglo XXI, 1979.

Goldman, S., Braasch, J., Wiley, J., Grassaer, A., Brodowinska, K. (2012). Comprehending and learning from Internet sources: Processing patterns of better and poorer learners. Reading Research Quarterly, 47(4), 356-381.

Guthrie, J. T., Wigfield, A., & You, W. (2012). Instructional contexts for engagement and achievement in reading. In Handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 601 634). Springer US Chicago.

Hammerberg, D. D. (2004). Comprehension instruction for socioculturally diverse classrooms: A review of what we know. Reading Teacher, 57(7), 648-661.

Jenkins, H. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. The MIT Press.

Kingsley, T., Tancock, S. (2013). Internet Inquiry. The Reading Teacher.

Kress, G.; Van Leeuwen, T. (1998). Front Pages: (The critical) analysis of newspaper layout. In: Bell, A., Garret, Peter. (Eds.) Approaches to media discourse. Blackwell Publishing. p. 186-219.

Papert, Seymour. The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, 1993.

van Dijk, T. A. (1980). Text and context: Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. Longman.