Seminar in Teaching Reading and Writing
Today I'll look at two articles:
Phatiki, and Carrell, Gajdusek, and Wise.
It's nice to see meta cognitive stuff
back on the menu. While earlier authors like Sasaki, and Rinnert and
Kobayashi poked at the issue, I do not believe that they
pinned it down and cut directly into it. Phakiti employs quantitative
and qualitative analysis to evidence a couple claims which come right
to the point:
(1) the use of cognitive and metacognitive strategies had a positive relationship to the reading test performance; and (2) highly successful test-takers reported significantly higher metacognitive strategy use than the moderately successful ones who in turn reported higher use of these strategies than the unsuccessful test-
takers.
Now, we have pivoted over from the world of writing with the
previous authors into the realm of reading with
Phakiti, and I am not sure how this effects comparisons between them. Are the same meta cognative skills applied to
reading as writing? One previous lesson I would like to apply comes
from Professer Mueller's class on literacy. Though I'm momentarily
unable to establish the claim, I was left with the a strong belief
that multiple choice questions are a poor way to determine reading
comprehension levels. What alternatives are there to Phatiki's
questions that are also suitable for her research? Would alternative assessments establish her conclusions?
Phakiti does not speak about acquiring
meta cognative strategies. She only seeks to measure them. Can meta
cognitative strategies, like other strategies, be internalized in a
straightforward way? If so, why are they not simply cognitive
strategies? I suppose it's not the way you learn them but the
application which the distiction will rest. Still, I wounder about the real meanings of our terms here.
On to Carrell and friends, who claim
that lots of different areas of research are pointing toward meta
cognition as playing a critical roll in reading comprehension. First
they will try to clearly identify these areas, and the terms, and
then explain the design of a study they are currently conducting to
evaluate whether metacognative stuff can be taught.
I'm impressed by their taxidermy: it's
a convincing distinction between skills and strategies. They do much to ease my mind, and the answer questions left over from Phatiki. A clear enough picture seems to emerge of
metacognition when it is devied up by question words and three types
of knowledge.
...but I'm not won over yet.
