Integrating multicultural variations and graphic organizers in enhancing Chinese story writing in Grade Four students in Hong Kong
Submitted by:
Wai Ming Cheung
Abstract:
Graphic organizers have been adopted in the teaching of reading and writing as they facilitate students’ comprehension and the structuring and organization of information and texts. Four teachers and two university researchers formed a team to conduct a Learning Study (Marton & Tsui, 2004) to enhance story writing in 130 Grade Four students in Hong Kong. Learning Study is a research method that integrates Lesson Study and designed experiments. The team explored the use of multicultural variations and graphic organizers, particularly Freytag’s Pyramid (Lapp, Wolsey, Wood, & Johnson, 2015) in the teaching of synoptic texts (Dole, et al., 2014) and systematically evaluated students' learning against the intended object of learning. The team selected a single story, with two versions, one with the Chinese culture and the other with English versions. The teachers guided the students to read across these two versions and made use of Freytag’s Pyramid (Lapp et al., 2015) to illustrate the structure of the story with different cultures. By comparing the stories with different cultural elements, students were guided to discern the critical features of story writing. This is followed by a group writing sessions, where students developed and wrote their own stories rooted in different cultures with the help of Freytag’s Pyramid. The paper discussed the design and enactment of the lessons using Variation Theory (Marton & Booth, 1997). The interviews and works of story writing of students of different abilities were analyzed to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. This study brings insights on the critical features of story writing and also the integration of culture and graphics in teaching and learning of writing.
References
Dole, J.A., Donaldson, B.E., & Donaldson, R. S. (2014). Reading across multiple texts in the common core classroom, K-5.
Marton, F., & Booth, S. (1997). Learning and awareness. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Marton, F., & Tsui, A. (2004). Classroom discourse and the space of learning. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lapp, D., Wolsey, T. D., Wood, K., & Johnson, K. (2015). Mining complex text, Grade 6 to 12. Thousand Oaks CA: Corwin.