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Group Reading Diary? Yes, it is a diary a group
of students keep on their readings. It is the practice of having EFL writers respond to
each other's comments on the same piece of writing, and it is a teaching method that
promotes second language development while the learner is engaged in genuine meaningful
communication.
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The class, in this case, a class of third year
English majors, is divided up by itself into small "research teams," each with
three to five students. After the team or group chooses a work of literature or some other
material, one team member will write the first entry, giving his/her opinion on the work.
For instance, with one team, the first entry reads:
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In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty , by
James Thurber, reality is interwoven with dreams..
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Compared with Walter Mitty, his wife is more
realistic. Unlike the female characters in much of literature, she is an independent lady
and to some extent, controls Walter Mitty's life. She is no longer an oppressed figure. By
creating an oppressed husband and a domineering wife, Thurber humorously and ironically
criticizes the social system (under) which women should obediently do as men tell them.
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The diary is passed on to a second member, who
will then respond both to the work under study and to the first person's comment. Here,
the second person on the team writes:
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As Yan Gu (not a real name) has pointed out,
Walter Mitty lives between reality and dreams. In reality, he is a most common person,
timid, sensitive, while in his dreams, he becomes a brave and steady navy commander, a
successful doctor, a crack shot, a courageous pilot, and an undefeated man looking death
in the face..
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As for James Thurber's criticism [with regard
to] gender discrimination, I do not quite agree with Yan on this point. I do not think the
writer puts his emphasis on the woman's control over her husband. He creates Mrs. Mitty, a
rather "independent lady" as Yan has said, in order to show the sharp contrast
between the heroic Mitty in his dreams and the real Mitty in true life. Probably there is
some humor or irony in describing Mitty's obedience to his wife..
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Then, the third person joins in:
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In her entry, Yan Gu describes Mrs. Mitty as
"an independent lady" who "is no longer an oppressed figure" and Wei
Qiu also agrees to this point although she will hesitate to go further to accept Yan's
point on gender discrimination..
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It seems to me they both think a bit too highly
of Mrs. Mitty. In my view, Thurber in fact shows his subtle sympathy for Walter Mitty and
describes Mrs. Mitty somehow with a kind of irony..
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On the surface, she may seem to be a domineering
wife, but in fact, at least in Mitty's inner world, she is almost nothing. Being a
simple-minded woman, [she] may think of herself as domineering but will never understand
her ignorance..
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The debate, in this case, on Mrs. Mitty, may go
on and on. When the diary returns to the first person, he or she, if still enthusiastic,
may launch into a counter-criticism. But the group may also decide to move onto another
work whenever it feels like doing so.
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While students are engaged in their written
discussion, the teacher may step in at any time, either to offer additional evidence for
an interesting point or to cast doubts on a questionable assertion. Taking sides in a
debate may, in fact, generate more discussion, but trying to please everyone may distance
oneself from the young debaters. If the students are truly "hooked on it," the
teacher can correct learner errors without hampering the willingness for meaningful
discussion.
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From time to time, the teacher can have each
student go over his/ her own entries and develop out of them a full-fledged essay. Again,
the teacher can be confident that the student is writing on a topic of his/her own
interest and, therefore, repeated revision is less likely to be a burden than it would be
if the teacher assigned a topic.
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The group reading diary approach to teaching
composition, as sketched here, promotes concepts we as second language teachers always try
to encourage-from the opportunity for language practice to that for meaningful group work,
from tapping student initiative to providing assistance in literature study. What
interests us most, however, is the fact that a group reading diary is conducive to second
language "uptake" in a communicative context. By second language
"uptake," we mean the growth of the learner's language through incorporation of
target language features that are new to the learner. With the group reading diary, such
growth takes place through the learner's engagement in genuine exchange of opinions with
other learners. This can be further clarified in two aspects.
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First, a group reading diary provides a
communicative context. Keeping such a diary is an interactive, self- generated reading and
writing experience, a process by which meaning is negotiated and developed over successive
turns of reading and writing as students question, clarify, evaluate and elaborate an idea
that arises out of their readings. Here, the focus is on real communication, not on form.
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Often in a writing classroom, students write
because they are asked to practice or demonstrate their command of some linguistic or
rhetorical patterns. Language is at best practiced for its own sake. Even keeping a
journal is not always free of artificiality since, here, the teacher is the only reader.
Given the heavy workload of a teacher, his/her contribution to the interaction may not go
very far beyond simple, offhand remarks.
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The group reading diary provides an excellent
chance of motivating students since they are given full freedom in choosing their own
topics. As teachers, we know that students write well when they are fully engaged. The key
to success in fostering a process of meaning cultivation and writing improvement lies in
whether or not students have the opportunity to generate their own themes, relate to
issues of their own concern and interest, and therefore discover the joy and satisfaction
in writing.
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The group reading diary helps create an
atmosphere in which students feel that their self-expression is encouraged and respected;
and that they are engaged in some sort of intellectual exchange with one another as
grown-up individuals in an equal, trusting partnership. When they are fully occupied with
developing, clarifying, and evaluating the ideas they themselves have generated, there
would be less concern for formal correctness that is so often imposed on them and makes
them passive, uninterested learners. In addition, the desire to express themselves may
also drive them to consult and study the correct language forms, be it the spelling or
meaning of a word or the use of a grammatical structure.
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In keeping a group reading diary, it is more
likely that students can be motivated to write with a clear sense of purpose and audience,
and to struggle to bridge up what Prabhu (1987) regards as the "information
gap," "reasoning gap," and "opinion gap," characteristic of real
life communication.
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The group diary also changes the teacher's role
since it is essentially a student-centered learning activity. Too often we work as
coroners pronouncing the cause of death of a student essay. The tradition of a
relationship between learned professor and modest student weighs heavily even though we
may try hard to live it down and to refrain from making judgmental comments such as
"Good," "Very interesting," "You are making progress," or
"Unsatisfactory."
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Since the group reading diary is primarily a
laboratory for uncoached and un- staged student discussion, the teacher's role is to a
great extent reduced to one of stimulator, facilitator, and candid critic. When students
are developing their ideas, we stand not in the middle, not above, but on the side, a
position that helps remove the inhibition students often feel when they are to be assessed
and graded by the all-powerful teacher.
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It promotes language uptake
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The second aspect of the group reading diary
concerns what takes place in the communicative context it creates. Here, we are dealing
with a fact advocates of communicative language teaching may overlook: Mere exposure to
target language data, or, to use a phrase held dearly by Krashen and associates, the
"comprehensible input," does not necessarily lead to success in acquisition.
Even keeping a private diary may not always be helpful because, like other forms of
communicative activities, it "gives the student no assistance to go beyond what he or
she already knows how to do" (Staton 1991) and gives no "interactional
scaffolding" (Cazden 1983), that is, the supply, in the course of interaction, of
linguistic resources fulfilling the needs of language interaction.
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The group reading diary approach, on the other
hand, may promote such second language uptake. When students are responding to a work,
they make an effort to find evidence that supports their interpretation. As a result, they
read more carefully and learn more from the text than they would when they read it, for
instance, in order to answer reading comprehension questions.
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The failure of the "comprehensible
input" theory in second language literacy education is obvious. It has been long
noted that for adult learners, better reading does not always lead to better writing. They
may attain near-native levels of reading skills but still have trouble writing a simple
paper. By contrast, school children, whether in first or second language settings, may not
demonstrate much greater reading abilities than advanced adult learners. but their written
work can be far superior in terms of the idiomatic use of the language. The gap between
receptive and productive skills is much greater with adult second language users than with
young adolescents.
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Second language acquisition researchers point
out that the utilization by adult learners of "compensatory strategies," that
is, strategies used to compensate for a lack in the underlying interlanguage system, may
enable them to by-pass the kind of speech requiring the use of this system and, therefore,
may hinder the restructuring and improvement of this system (for example, Paribakht 1985;
Schmidt 1983; Schmidt and Frota 1986; Swain 1985; Skehan 1992). Because with the use of
these strategies, adult learners neither practice their interlanguage nor notice the gaps
between the interlanguage and the target language; the "comprehensible input"
does not turn into linguistic uptake. The same phenomenon shows up in second language
literacy education. When adult learners bring various compensatory strategies into their
reading processes, they may correctly guess the meaning from the context and achieve
comprehension without using and improving their overall proficiency and thus without
making significant progress in composing skills.
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In a reading class or a reading exam, priority
is given to comprehension. This is entirely legitimate since reading in real life is
indeed almost exclusively meaning driven. However, insofar as such practice encourages the
application of various compensatory strategies that serve the pressing need of meaning
extraction, it may also, at the same time, attenuate the pressure for the use and thus the
improvement of the learners' emerging second language system, or remove this pressure from
the process of learning to read in a second language.
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Keeping a reading diary is a way of coping with
this problem. Unlike free writing or keeping a personal diary, writing an entry for a
reading diary which will be subsequently shared among those who have done the same reading
(but may hold different opinions about it) may encourage closer reading and encourage
simultaneous attention to content and form in the course of reading. When learners know
they are expected to do some written work in response to The Secret Life of Walter
Mitty and to hold discussion on it with their peers, they may feel the need to attend
to and adopt from the story expressions that can help convey their own thoughts about the
story. They may modify the way they read because they know that focusing on surface level
comprehension will not be enough to enable them to generate and convey ideas in clear
language. Even when they write, they may go back to the text for closer re-reading. In
short, having to prepare for writing and defending their own opinions predisposes learners
to pay attention to the way meaning is conveyed in works of mature writers.
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When students quote the description of Walter
Mitty, they are benefiting from the linguistic sources or "scaffolding" that
James Thurber supplies. Here, the language structures and chunks in the text are not
singled out for practice in their own right but are employed meaningfully; that is, they
are employed to express, support, and expand the learner's own thoughts in response to the
writer's- often elaborated with the same structures and chunks.
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While using the group reading diary method, we
may encourage close reading and language uptake by advising students to take several steps
in writing a diary entry:
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- Read the text for meaning (first reading).
- Read in order to prepare for writing the entry, jotting down all the chunks (words,
expressions and sentences) that might be used in the entry (second reading).
- Draft the entry, using these chunks in appropriate places.
- Read the original text again to check how the chunks borrowed into the draft are used in
the text (third reading).
- Revise and proofread the entry.
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Traditional, grammar-centered language teaching
attempts to develop the learner's second language in isolation from the context of
communication, whereas a communicative approach may emphasize the simulation of real life
interaction to the neglect of developing the underlying second language system. Promoting
second language uptake in a communicative context, as discussed here, is more than finding
a middle ground between the two. Using group reading diaries in the composition class
seems to require that we as teachers reflect on our readiness to allow our students to
take more initiative for their own learning and to use their creativity, knowledge and
experience as the foundation for acquiring second language literacy
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Ting
Yen-Ren is a professor of English at the School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing
University. He is also Associate General Secretary of the Amity Foundation. |
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Return
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- Cazden, C. B. 1983. Quoted in Staten (1991)
- Prabhu, N. S. 1987. Second language pedagogy: A perspective. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
- Paribakht, T. 1985. Strategic competence and language proficiency. Applied Linguistics,
6, pp. 132-46.
- Schmidt, R. 1983. Interaction, acculturation, and the acquisition of communicative
competence. In Sociolinguistics and second language acquisition. Eds. N. Wolfson and E.
Judd. Rowley MA: Newbury House.
- Schmidt, R, and S. Frota. 1986. Developing basic conversational ability in a second
language: A case study of an adult learner. In Talking to learn conversation in second
language acquisition. Ed. R Day, Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
- Skehan, P. 1992. Second language acquisition strategies and task-based learning. In
Working papers in English language teaching. Eds. P. Skehall and C. Wallace, Thames Valley
University. London: ELT Department, Thames Valley University.
- Staton, J. 1991. Introduction: Creating an attitude of dialogue in adult literacy
instruction. In Writing our lives: Reflections on dialogue journal writing with adults
learning English. Eds. J. K. Peyton and J. Staton, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall
Regents.
- Swain, M. 1985. Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and
comprehensible output in its development. In Input in second language acquisition. Eds. S.
Gass and C. Madden. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
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