3. Students can be a source of ER materials for one another.Reading Alone Together: Enhancing Extensive Reading via Student-Student Cooperation in Second-Language Instruction
Extensive reading (ER) programs involve students in silently reading large quantities of materials. These materials are usually at a level that permits students to gain at least a fair understanding of what they are reading without outside help. Such programs’ benefits for first- and second-language (L1 and L2) learners are well documented (Coady, 1997; Day & Bamford, 1997; Elley, 1996; Krashen, 1993; McQuillan, 1994; Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987; Ng, 1988, 1994; Yu, 1993, 1999; see also an annotated bibliography of works on ER in L2 contexts).
Despite this strong, widely disseminated evidence supporting ER, implementation has been infrequent and often less than a complete success. Greaney (1996) notes that in many lower income countries, ER programs must grapple with such problems as lack of reading materials and inadequate preparation of teachers. However, these problems apply worldwide, even in countries which could afford large quantities of books for ER if they placed a higher priority on it. Day and Bamford (1997) suggest that the key impediment to successful ER implementation lies in a teacher-centered view of reading instruction. In this view, teaching means talking: if teachers are not talking, then they must not be earning their salaries. Extensive reading is seen as something students should be doing at home, after they have finished their homework (Tong, 2001). In contrast, Day and Bamford propose a combination of teacher-led intensive reading and large quantities of in-school and out-of-school ER.
Other reasons for not using ER are of a more practical nature. Teachers often face a great deal of pressure from administrators, community members, and others to finish the syllabus -- to do every single activity on every single page of the textbook or workbook. Further, ER is less easy to assess than are discrete reading skills. While the research suggests that ER is precisely the prescription for attaining high scores on reading exams, in an increasingly exam-oriented environment, a short-sighted “practical” view of exam preparation that has students doing large numbers of exercises that mirror exam questions often prevails.
Extensive reading involves students in independent silent reading. Thus, it may seem a contradiction to talk about ER and student-student cooperation, but actually the two can come together smoothly, as is described in this article. The first section discusses the possible benefits of adding a group element to ER. The second presents cooperative learning principles that can facilitate effective group interaction to accompany ER. Section 3 provides examples of activities that blend principles of cooperative learning with ER in various student groupings.
A Rationale for ER and Groups | Cooperative Learning Principles | Using Cooperative Learning to Enhance ER | Sample Activities: Showdown, Trade-a-Problem, Round Robin, Roving Reporter, Three-Step Interview, Book Wheels, Peer Feedback | Conclusion | References
A Rationale for Blending Extensive Reading and Groups
In a pretest- posttest study with 415 fourth-grade students in the United States reading in their native English, Manning and Manning (1984) sought to test the value of combining ER with peer interaction. Their two dependent variables were attitude toward reading and reading achievement. Students and teachers were randomly assigned to one of four conditions:
The researchers found that students who did ER accompanied by peer interaction significantly outperformed students in the three other conditions on gains in reading achievement, and that the ER with teacher conferences and ER plus peer interaction conditions were related to significant gains on the attitude variable.
The following five-part explanation can be advanced for the potential benefits of adding a group element to ER.
1. Students can infect one another with enthusiasm for reading.
Knowing that their peers are reading can motivate students to read more. Motivation plays a key role in all education (Slavin, 1991), and reading education is no exception. Fader (1971, online abstract) stresses that in the case of students who are weak readers, programs that attempt to remediate via skills instruction can mistake the symptom (low reading proficiency) for the disease (low motivation). To increase motivation among weak readers, Fader suggests instead of remedial classes, heterogeneous classes that incorporate cooperative learning.
Much of the literature on ER stresses, quite correctly, the role of the teacher as a motivator and enthusiast for reading (Yu, 1993). When students are reading silently, teachers should be reading silently, too. However, peers can sometimes provide more powerful examples than teachers and other adults (Harris, 1998), in part because peers present a more accessible model for students (Murphey, 1998). It may be easy for students to dismiss what teachers do and enjoy as something only an expert could accomplish and relish, but the sight of peers enjoying reading offers an example less easy to cast aside.
2. Students can suggest good ER materials to one another.
Recommendations from peers can lead students to explore new genres, new authors, and new topics for ER (Parrott, 1987). Along the same lines, students can give one another ideas about where to find ER materials (Derewianka, 1997) and advice on materials and places to avoid. Students might even arrange to go together to visit a library, bookstore, website, or the bookshelves of one of their homes.
3. Students can be a source of ER materials for one another.
Students can bring materials for ER to school from their homes, relatives, neighbors, public libraries, and other sources, such as websites (Lituanas, 1997). Further, students can write ER materials for peers to read (Davidson, Ogle, Ross, Tuhaka, & Ng, 1997; Dupuy & McQuillan, 1997). This writing can be done alone or in groups, but even if students write single-authored works, peer feedback should be used along with teacher feedback. These peer-generated materials are likely to fit students well in terms of both reading level and topic. Plus, knowing the author increases the reader’s interest in reading. This is one of the reasons that teachers often seek out information about children’s book authors to share with their students.
4. More proficient students can help other students.
Less proficient students can read and discuss materials with more proficient students, and then can read them later independently. One form that these partnerships can take is cross-age tutoring, in which an older student helps a younger partner (Rodgers, 1997; Samway, Whang, & Pippitt, 1995). This kind of coaching arrangement helps both students (Topping, 1995). As they help their tutee, tutors have opportunities to reinforce and deepen their own understanding, as well as boost their confidence. Additionally, more proficient students can help their partners write stories that the less proficient students can then read on their own.
5. Peers provide an audience with which students can share what they have read.
After students have finished reading, many avenues exist for them to share -- including speaking, dramatizing, writing, and drawing about their reading. Sharing with others can make the reading more meaningful by supplying an audience interested in knowing about what was read (Gee, 1999; Lie, 1997; Strong, 1996, online abstract). As students exchange ideas and feelings that emerge in the course of their reading, peers can provide new perspectives.
Additionally, postreading sharing encourages students to try out new language that they might have encountered in the texts. This may be particularly important for L2 learners. Swain (1999) argues that receiving large quantities of comprehensible input in the target language is vital but not sufficient for second-language acquisition to occur. This input, Swain believes, must be supplemented by output in the form of speaking or writing. She highlights three functions of output: (1) while attempting to produce output, students may notice gaps in their understanding; (2) output involves students in formulating hypotheses about what works in the target language and in testing those hypotheses in the language they produce and the response they receive from interlocutors; (3) less frequently, output implicates students in metatalk about the target language (for instance, they might discuss what a word means or how a particular grammatical construction could be untangled).
In this section of the article, five reasons for adding a peer element to ER have been proposed. The next section presents some principles for structuring student-student interaction in order to enhance its effectiveness.
Cooperative Learning Principles
Cooperative learning can be defined as concepts and techniques for enhancing student-student interaction. This approach has a history dating back more than 100 years (Johnson & Johnson, 1998) and finds support from diverse traditions in psychology, social-psychology, sociology, and education. Different cooperative learning theorists take different principles to be central. In this article, we use Kagan’s (1994) basic principles, captured by the acronym PIES, for positive interdependence, individual accountability, equal participation, and simultaneous interaction. Here, we will briefly describe PIES. In later sections of the article that describe cooperative learning in the context of extensive reading activities, these basic principles will be used to analyze the group activities designed to enhance ER.
Positive interdependence. Many consider this principle the key to cooperative learning. Positive interdependence is the feeling among group members that what helps one member of the group helps all members, and what hurts one member hurts all members. In other words, positive interdependence is the feeling of “one for all, and all for one,” the idea that the group sinks or swims together, the belief that no one can go it alone. To analyze whether the activities described later promote positive interdependence, we ask these two questions:
Individual accountability. Sometimes a group can produce a good product -- a good essay, for example -- but only one or two members of the group would be able to produce a product of nearly similar quality working alone. In cooperative learning, the focus is not on what the group can do but on the learning of each individual member of the group. This is where individual accountability comes into play. Slavin (1990, p. 3) defines individual accountability as a condition in which students feel that “the team’s success depends on the individual learning of all team members.” Thus, for a group to succeed, each member must learn, display his or her learning, and participate in the learning of others. When we analyze the activities to see if they encourage individual accountability, we ask, “Is individual public performance required?”
Equal participation. A common problem in group activities arises when some member or members of the group take very active roles while others seem to do very little. When we do the PIES analysis of the group activities, we ask, “How equal is the participation?”
Simultaneous interaction. In the typical teacher-fronted classroom, the dominant interaction pattern consists of sequential interaction -- that is, one person speaking at a time. Commonly, it goes like this: the teacher talks, then asks a question, and calls on a student; that student answers, the teacher evaluates the answer, talks some more, and then calls on another student.
When a class does group activities, the pattern changes to one of simultaneous interaction: many people in the class speak at a time. For instance, if a class of 40 students works in groups of four, potentially ten people are speaking at the same time -- one person in each of the groups. One lesson to be learned from the principle of simultaneous interaction is that the smaller the group, the more students in the class are speaking simultaneously. Thus, from the perspective of increasing the amount of student talk, the smaller the group, the better. And increased student talk has been linked with progress in L2 acquisition (Long & Porter, 1985).
For this final ingredient in the PIES analysis, we ask, “What percentage of students in the entire class is active at once?”
These four principles of cooperative learning -- positive interdependence, individual accountability, equal participation, and simultaneous interaction -- supply valuable insights into group functioning. The literature provides many ideas and techniques, accumulated from many places over many years, for attempting to bring these four principles to life. (A list of Internet resources on cooperative learning can be found at the website of the International Association for the Study of Cooperation in Education.) The next section of the article describes how some of these ideas and techniques can be applied to ER.
Using Cooperative Learning to Enhance ER
This section presents only a small sample of the many ways that ER can be combined with student-student interaction as part of L2 instruction. Each cooperative learning technique is followed by an analysis of ways in which it incorporates the four principles described above as PIES.
Most commonly, ER involves each student choosing his or her own book to read. This means that students generally read books that fit their proficiency level and interests, doing so at their own speed. However, sometimes ER involves “class readers,” a single book read by a whole class (Greenwood, 1988). A third possibility is for the class to work in groups, with each group reading a different book. We look at cooperative learning techniques that can be used in each of these three ER formats.
Class Readers
Heal (1998, online document) describes a class reader program in which she used group activities to increase students’ motivation to read the book the class was studying in an L2 setting. Students met in groups periodically to answer questions about the section of the book the class had been assigned to read. Initially, the groups answered questions written by the teacher. Later, each group wrote questions for other groups. Group rewards were used as motivation. Heal reports that, based on her observations, this approach was successful in increasing the amount of student reading. Hess and Jasper (1995) also describe the use of student questions to encourage ER among L2 students, in this case in combination with film versions of the books students were reading.
Two additional cooperative learning techniques that could be used when students are reading the same book are Showdown, for when students are answering the teacher’s questions, and Trade-a-Problem, for when students are generating questions for other groups (Kagan, 1994). These techniques are described in the linked files available below, illustrated with photos from a Primary 5 classroom in Singapore (students aged approximately 11 years). The teacher is Haslindah Bte Bahrom, shown in the photo at right.
Individually Chosen Reading
When each student reads something different, students cannot discuss what they read without first explaining something about the text. This poses a problem in that L2 students may lack the proficiency to give and understand such explanations in the target language. On the other hand, students can be challenged to close the information gap that exists when they each read different books.
| Art provides one medium through which students can share what they read. For instance, students might create posters, murals, board games, collages, book covers, bookmarks (see Figure 1 for a sample), comics, or drawings of key scenes to advertise books they like. Art supports L2 students as they engage in language tasks. Round Robin (Kagan, 1994) is one technique that can be used after each student has completed a simple art project, such as designing a bookmark. Roving Reporter (Kagan, 1994) can be used either before or after Round Robin. |
Student Artwork Created in Response to Reading
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Another way for students to recommend books to their peers is through book reviews. These reviews can be brief; a requirement that they be lengthy can cause some students to shy away from reading. The short reviews could provide a ranking of the book, a one-paragraph critique, a graphic organizer such as a skeleton that includes the book’s title and author, a brief plot summary, or brief comments (a sample is shown in Figure 2). These reviews not only alert students to books they might enjoy but also warn them of books they may wish to avoid. They can be shared in groups using the Round Robin technique described above or the Three-Step Interview (Kagan, 1994).
Figure 2
A Sample Student Book REview
Literature Circles
Midway between the class all reading the same book and each student reading a different book is the situation in which small groups of students, working in literature circles, read the same book (Dupuy, 1997, 1998; Dupuy, Tse, & Cook, 1996; MacGillivray, Tse, & McQuillan, 1995; McQuillan, 1996; McQuillan & Tse, 1997). (Hill and Van Horn, 1997, describe a similar technique called Book Clubs.) In the L2 classrooms, students can read for pleasure in small, self-selected groups that meet regularly to discuss books that the members themselves have chosen. Although students work in their literature circles without direct instruction, teachers circulate to help students form groups, advise students on which books to read, assist with comprehension problems, unobtrusively observe group progress, and assure students that pleasure reading can indeed promote language acquisition.
Discussions in literature circles are enhanced if students have instruction in the use of collaborative skills (Johnson & Johnson, 1994). A wide variety of such skills are vital to successful interaction. Examples of roles that students can play in their literature circles are
It might be argued that using roles would make the discussion artificial; however, roles can increase student awareness of group function and encourage them to try out different roles and the language that accompanies them. One way teachers can assist students in using the language appropriate to their roles is to teach the gambits that accompany a given role -- for the controversy kindler, for example, phrases such as “Have you ever thought about it this way?” and “What about...?” Teachers or students can also suggest certain roles in order to promote better group interaction or to provide opportunities to use certain features of language (e.g., a function such as disagreeing politely).
In terms of the PIES construct, literature circles have the following features.
| P | No one can do all the roles. Also, everyone needs to have read the group’s book to contribute to the discussion. By doing each role well, group members contributes to their group’s success. |
| I | Each person is encouraged to perform a designated role. |
| E | The use of roles encourages each student to participate. Also, roles such as paraphraser can rotate so that after each person speaks, another person paraphrases what has been said. |
| S | One student in each small group speaks, so that several are speaking simultaneously in the classroom. |
Another example of the use of group roles, this time when each student has read a different book, is Book Wheels (Jacobs, 1993, adapted from Laughlin, 1987).
| Writing
As mentioned earlier, students can be a source of ER materials. In the spirit of collaboration, students can work together to create materials for themselves and others. For instance, Malgwi (1999) describes how the lack of reading materials in Nigerian schools and the lack of a reading culture in students’ homes is partially addressed by having students work in groups to tell one another and then to write out local folktales in the target language. To prepare themselves to write, students read storybooks by other authors. Illustrations and book covers are added after the teacher has given feedback on the writing. These books become part of a class library and can be exchanged with other classes. (An example of the cover of a student-authored book is shown in Figure 3.) Ideas from cooperative learning can supplement such a scheme. Peer feedback is one way this might work. |
Cover of a Student-Authored and -Edited Book
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Conclusion
As this article is appearing in an online journal, it is appropriate to point out that the Internet offers students many new ways to collaborate. For instance, chat rooms can be used to discuss books, and art about books can be scanned or drawn using computer tools for posting to a website. All the cooperating learning techniques described here could be done electronically. Further, the Internet offers students a greatly expanded range of groupmates with whom to collaborate about reading.
This article has presented a rationale and practical suggestions for adding the element of student-student cooperation to the solitary task of extensive reading in a second language. One colleague who read an earlier draft of this article was somewhat skeptical, wondering how students can collaborate on postreading activities if they have not made the effort to read in the first place. Yes, motivation is key, and group activities, even those structured according to cooperative learning principles, are not a guarantee that everything will work well. The argument made in this article is that when ER is supplemented with cooperative learning, peers may be able enhance ER by modeling enthusiasm for reading, acting as resources for finding reading materials, creating more reading materials, facilitating comprehension, and serving as an audience for sharing what has been read.
Another qualm raised by this astute colleague concerns the issue of the first language when students do group activities: Is it acceptable for students to use their native language while working in groups? This important issue is one that lies beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that context plays a key role, including such factors as the language context outside the classroom and the proficiency level of the students. Further discussion of this and other issues implicated in the use of ER in L2 instruction can be found at the Extensive Reading website.
To conclude, reading brings with it great delights. Extensive reading programs aim to help students experience these delights by spreading the joy of reading. As Nuttall (1989, p. 192) puts it, “Reading is like an infectious disease: it is caught, not taught.” Cooperative learning offers a means by which students can share this joy with one another. In the words of a Native American proverb, “To have joy one must share it. Happiness was born a twin.”
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About the Authors
George Jacobs, an education consultant based in Singapore, holds a doctorate in educational psychology from University of Hawaii at Manoa. His books include Learning Cooperative Learning Via Cooperative Learning (published by Kagan), The Teacher’s Sourcebook for Cooperative Learning (forthcoming from Corwin), and Successful Strategies for Extensive Reading (RELC). George has conducted workshops and courses on cooperative learning and reading in Asia and the United States. He is coeditor of the newsletter of the International Association for the Study of Cooperation in Education. Reach him by e-mail at gmjacobs@pacific.net.sg.
Patrick Gallo (e-mail pbgallo@yahoo.com) is a lecturer at the National University of Singapore, where he teaches critical thinking, writing, and communication skills courses to undergraduates. His current research interests include cooperative learning, extensive reading, and computer-assisted language learning.
Authors’ Note: We would like to thank Andy Barfield, Julian Bamford, Miguel Kagan, Stephen Krashen, Tom Robb, and Rob Waring for their feedback on earlier versions of this article.
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Citation: Jacobs, G., & Gallo, P. (2002, February). Reading alone together: Enhancing extensive reading via student-student cooperation in second-language instruction. Reading Online, 5(6). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=jacobs/index.html
Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted February 2002
© 2002 International Reading Association, Inc. ISSN 1096-1232
