Teaching reading of composite texts: use and transformation of tools by teachers
Submitted by:
Bernard Schneuwly
Abstract:
Reading materials have changed considerably over the last decade: be they narrative or documentary, texts combine several semiotic systems (Kress, 2010; Jewitt, 2014), which makes learning to read and teaching reading more complex. Such “composite” texts are read at school in many disciplines, where they reinforce school inequalities (Bonnéry, 2015). The communication aims to describe and understand the uses and development of didactic instruments (“psychological tools/instruments” in the sense of Vygotsky, 1930/1997) in the field of teaching and learning reading comprehension of narrative and digital composite texts. We observe the use of tools, developed in collaborative research, in function of two independent variables: text genres and school levels (students age from 7 to 14).
We gather teachers of 4H and 5H (students 8 to 9 years old) for the first transition between cycle 1 and 2, and teachers of 8H and 9H (12-13 years old) for the transition between cycles 2 and 3. Each grade includes 3 teachers (3 X 4 grades), i.e. 12 teachers for the first year of our research. This experimentation will be reproduced over a three-year iteration (Nb=36 teachers). We proposed two contrasting texts: an illustrated album containing a rather complex story, familiar to the teachers, and a digital documentary text, unfamiliar to the teachers. Researchers and teachers met to plan a sequence combining different didactic tools that was realized and videotaped. The analysis compared the structure of the planned and realized sequences in function of the two variables.
The analysis of the teaching sequence shows important differences between school levels and texts, and above all a more important difference between planned and realized sequences for the digital texts and for the teachers of secondary level. The reasons of these results will be discussed.
References
Bonnéry, S. (2015). Supports pédagogiques et inégalités scolaires. Études sociologiques. La Dispute.
Jewitt, C. (2014). Different approaches to multimodality. In The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (pp. 31–43). Routledge.
Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality. A Social-Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. Routledge.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1930/1997). The Instrumental Method in Psychology. In: The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Cognition and Language. Springer.