Readings for Week 4

A New View of Discussion – Almasi

Almost immediately when reading the first few pages of the Almasi article I thought of the Reader Response Theory which essentially engages the reader as the sole proprietor of giving meaning to a text. A text can exist but without someone to read it, it has no meaning. More specifically, the text has only the meaning what which the audience brings to it and within that textual meaning the reader will be bringing several hundreds of thousands of life experiences along with them even before they open the text for reading.

“Thus, the interpretations of the reader are not static, but continually shaped by transactions between the reader’s experiences and the new information acquired from the text. Under such circumstances the reader’s interpretation constantly evolves, and the interpretation that each person brings to a discussion may ultimately be transformed and shaped by the thoughts and ideas of other group members.” (pg. 1-2)

Ultimately what Almasi is saying is that each different group member is going to be approaching not only the text from several thousand prior experiences but also the conversation and the attitudes which they bring to that conversation will also be inherently influenced by these same markers.

I also like the discussion the article has in the differences between discussion and recitation. Simply stated, discussion is interactive and involves all students from their subjective standpoints while recitation is more teacher-focused.

“In a discussion, the thoughts, ideas, feelings and responses of all participants who have read a givent text contribute to the event and that event has an influence on a participant’s eventual interpretation…In contrast, in a recitation there is little interaction among students, so the teacher is the member of the group whose thoughts might influence a person’s interpretation most significantly. The fact that the teacher determines the questions that will be asked, the order of those questions, and the correctness of the students’ responses to those questions means that the teacher becomes the ultimate interpretive authority in the discussion context.” (pgs 4-6)

Segueing now into the Triplett and Buchanan article that I chose to jigsaw for this week it was disheartening to read some of the teacher responses about why more emphasis is placed in reading on simply pronouncing things correctly and learning how audible pronunciation connects with the written word rather than having full-fledged discussions about the book at hand. Teachers are constantly at a struggle with meeting national guidelines and so instead of going beyond the basics and flourishing understanding with discussions they do the bare minimum not because of laziness but because of nationally-regulated time pressures.

While I think the article is a tad biased towards its own viewpoint, I like that it offers entryways into applying book discussions at even the earliest of school ages.

“After this initial discussion, students often continued to share their own personal experiences and knowledge throughout the reading of pre-primer or primer level texts.” (pg. 6)

Initial questions that might seem at the time to be meaningless provides very fruitful for encouraging student motivation and interest in the reading at hand. If the students are asked about their previous experiences (and what student doesn’t want to talk about what has already happened to them?) then they only become that much more focused because it not only has real world applications for them but it also links back to something with which they are already very well familiar.