Text-type information in tasks designed by teachers for academic texts

Abstract

The study investigated the effect of knowledge on teachers' practice. In particular, the study was interested in finding out whether teachers would produce more structured and sophisticated tasks as a consequence of learning models of written discourse. Two matched groups of twelve teachers who were enroled in a teacher training programme received instruction on the topic type theory. The theory, first proposed in Johns and Davies (1983), describes types of information categories appearing recurrently in non-fiction writing. The two groups were taught five topic types which were believed to be useful for reading school texts: instruction, physical structure, characteristics, process and state/situation. On three occasions, occurring before and after instruction, the teachers were asked to write tasks for their students based on given process and state/situation texts. The tasks produced by the teachers were evaluated for structural features and for the likely comprehensiveness of the target students' involvement with the resource texts. The structural features were measured by using rating scales and by counting the number of information units in the task. The second measure, comprehensiveness, was assessed by looking at the literal, the structural, and the situational levels of reading required by the task. The design of the experiment permitted the effects of instruction to be separated from the effects of practice alone for both groups of teachers. The trends in the data, however, suggested that it was practice rather than instruction that produced the marginal improvements in the design of tasks based on the texts. The results suggest that, for a course on text structure to be effective in improving the quality of tasks that teachers make, the course should be intensive, show commitment to the context of teachers' teaching practice, and be explicitly related to other parts of the teacher education programme. Above all, it must provide considerable opportunities for practice and feedback.