Reading and Writing from Overlapping Texts

Abstract

Background The need to redesign an academic reading course at a national university in Thailand provided the opportunity to assess the value of a new module that focused on the strategic reading of several texts about a given topic for knowledge acquisition and communication purposes. The new module was in contrast to the established programme where the emphasis was on the intensive study of a single text for language development ends. Instructional materials The new module was designed to develop the competencies associated with reading-to-write tasks. Students were shown how to use structure building as a way to integrate information from different sources. They made base notes from the first text read, they mapped new information from subsequent texts onto the base notes, and restructured the notes if discrepancies between items of information were observed. It was assumed that a note-taking system of this kind would influence the type of memory representation of the topic that would then be carried over to the writing phase of the tasks. Theoretical framework Gernsbacher (1997) has suggested that the effects of structure building can be explained through two processes, the building of relations, and the building of distinctions. When the source material is expository text, relations can be understood as the creation of links between pieces of information within and across texts, and with background knowledge of the topic. Distinctions, on the other hand, refer to the creation of a unique representation for sets of information relative to other sets. When composing new texts, students draw on their structural representation of the sources as they fulfil task requirements. Aim The primary aim of the study was to examine the effect of the new module on the ability of students to integrate information from source texts both in notes and in four new texts written for different purposes: to summarise, explain, give reasons and recommend particular actions. A secondary aim was to identify the tactics used by selected case study students as they processed the texts, made notes, and composed new texts from sources. Sample Sixty-six students who were enrolled in the academic reading course volunteered to take part in the research. The students were allocated at random to one of three groups: an experimental group and two comparison groups. Eight students from the experimental and comparison groups provided 'think-aloud' data during each phase of the reading-to-write tasks. Method The performance of the experimental group was compared with the performance of two comparison groups in respect to the quality of notes made during the reading phase of the tasks and the quality of the writing outcomes. Quality of notes referred to evidence of structure building (use of organising categories, sampling from sources, and coverage of information). Quality of texts referred to the relevance of the ideas in the new texts, the level of constructivity achieved, and the rhetorical features of the new texts. Think-aloud protocols were coded for instances of tactics that appeared to indicate how texts were being processed, how notes were being made, and how task requirements were being fulfilled. Results The new module affected the kind of notes taken from source texts in a situation that was similar to the situation experienced during the intervention. Items of information drawn from the source texts were integrated within a single set of notes, using a range of organising categories and visual devices, in contrast to the piecemeal approach to note-taking evident in the pre-test and among students in the comparison groups. There was, however, no relation between the structure building intervention and the quality of the new texts prepared from the sources. Neither the selection nor the transformation of source material was associated with the intervention for the types of writing tasks sampled in the study. The verbal reports gathered from case study students confirmed that instruction in the new note-taking procedure influenced the way texts were processed, but not the way source information was used. Conclusion In the context of the EFL academic reading course, structure building techniques transferred to the way multiple texts were processed on a post-test, but did not influence the way new texts were created from the sources. Whatever was constraining development on reading-to-write tasks for the students concerned, it was not the form of the notes made during text processing.