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What makes for an effective literacy learning activity? Seven Years of Observation and Analysis

Brian Cambourne
Abstract: 

After extensive observation, this experienced educational researcher begins to answer the question "What is it that makes some activities work better in teaching literacy than others?" Reprinted from set Special 1997: Language and Literacy, article 9.

Journal issue: 

WHAT MAKES FOR AN EFFECTIVE LITERACY LEARNING ACTIVITY?
Seven Years of Observation and Analysis

Brian Cambourne, University of Woolongong, New South Wales
Reprint of article 9, set Special 1997: Language and Literacy

Origins of the project

This paper grew out of a larger project which has been running for about a decade. I initially set out to understand what happened in classrooms where children were acquiring (or not acquiring) the skills, knowledge, and understandings that were needed to become literate. During this project it became obvious that children were continually expected to engage in different learning activities. The more time I spent observing classrooms, the more obvious it became that activities were an integral part of the literacy learning processes being employed. I also noticed that some activities seemed to be more “successful” than others. I asked myself, “Why?” “What is it that makes some activities work better than others?”

What is a “learning activity”?

I will begin by defining and explaining what I mean by the concept “learning activity”. Activities as I defined them were planned classroom events which:

image occupied varying segments of time (from five to over 30 minutes),

image were given identifying labels by the teachers who used them, for example, “retelling procedure”, “sequencing”, “literary sociograms” (a way of revisiting the meanings or events in a text), “journal time”, “sharing time”, “sustained silent reading” etc.

image followed certain procedural routines which teachers made explicit and students had to learn (for example, how to conduct “sharing time”, or the various steps in a retelling or sequencing activity),

image were integral to the social and cognitive fabric of classroom settings,

image served two broad purposes:

– to create opportunities for students to respond in ways that promoted and supported the attainment of the curriculum’s aims (in this case the acquisition of literacy),

– to provide opportunities for evaluative judgments to be made about student learning.

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In other words by “learning activities that promote literacy acquisition” I mean anything that students are expected to do in order to learn, practice, apply, integrate, evaluate, or in any other way sociocognitively respond to the goals of literacy education which teachers wanted to achieve.

As such they functioned as both instructional tools and assessment opportunities which teachers could use to scaffold, structure, and evaluate student literacy learning.

Learning activities that “work”?

I decided to use a very pragmatic definition of “activities that worked”. Because I had used methods of data collection and storage that were anthropological in flavour (videos of ongoing classroom behaviour, field notes, audio recordings, interviews with students and teachers about activities, artefacts that resulted from completing activities) I had a rich source from which to choose. Ultimately I decided on two basic criteria for identifying “activities that worked”:

image A majority of learners had to be deeply engaged in the activity as they actually did it. I called this criterion “engagement in task”.

image There had to be clear evidence that something that had been experienced, learned, done, understood, practised, etc., in participating in this activity had actually showed up at some later point in time. In my naivety I called this criterion “spillover”, hoping to capture the concept of water in a pool (the water being the analogue for skills and/or knowledge which entered a learner’s linguistic data pool at one point in time) “spilling over” as if from an overfilled pool and splashing over new places and contexts. I have since realised that “spillover” is a synonym for what some have called “transfer” and what others have called “successful application of principles to another context”, and what still others call “intertextuality”.

Figure 1 is a schematic summary of how I identified the activities that work. It is based on the research gathered after working in seven different classrooms over a seven-year-period, one classroom per year. The grade levels of the classrooms ranged from Grade 1(for two of the seven years) to Grade 5 [NZ Yr 2 to Yr 6].

What characterised a successful activity?

So far the analysis of the data has revealed that those activities which manifested both deep engagement and spillover to other learning contexts had these characteristics:

image They were linked to other parts of the teaching-learning session (or day).

image They were preceded by explicitly stated (convincing) purposes for engaging in the activity.

image They involved high degrees of social interaction and cognitive collaboration.

image They coerced learners to use more than one mode of language.

image They coerced learners to draw on more than one subsystem of language.

image They encouraged learners to transfer meaning across and/or within different semiotic systems.

image They allowed a range of acceptable responses, that is, there was no one “correct” answer or response to the activity.

image They were cost efficient and developmentally appropriate.

Each of these is explained below.

image

Contextual links to other parts of the teaching-learning session

Successful classroom activities typically were not isolated, stand-alone events. On the contrary, they were activities that were overtly linked to some other part of the flow of events that occurred each day. Furthermore both students and teachers were aware of these links. A negative example may clarify. Imagine a classroom in which a teacher has organised the class into four groups which, when it comes to activity time in the language session, circulate through four “learning centres” in a linear way. One group does a cloze activity on a passage that has been pre-selected by the teacher, another completes a seatwork activity on prefixes and suffixes using a worksheet photocopied from a book, a third group does a comprehension exercise which comes from a similar book, and the fourth group re-sequences a cut up piece of text. Every 15 minutes the groups move on to the next centre.

image

Such activities are merely time-fillers, which begin nowhere and go nowhere. The students regard them as forms of drill and practice. Typically the students don’t engage deeply.

Now imagine a classroom in which the teacher begins each day by reading aloud to the students for about 15 minutes (teacher reading), explicitly drawing students’ attention to special features of the text (for example, how the writer uses similes to achieve certain effects). Later on in that session (or even later in the week) the teacher may ask one sub-group within the class to revisit the similes from the same text and draw up and display a criterion chart entitled “What makes a simile a simile?” Another sub-group might be asked to find examples of similes in other texts using the criterion chart that the other group has developed. Yet another group may be asked to generate their own set of similes and share them with the class, comparing what they created both with the criteria listed on the criterion chart, and the original set the teacher read. And so on. Each of these activities are overtly linked to each other and with the teacher-reading episode that occurred earlier in the day/week.

Explicitly stating the purposes for engaging in activities

The audio transcripts of teacher language show that successful activities were typically prefaced by teachers explicitly drawing to learners’ conscious awareness such things as:

image The reasons for being asked to participate in the activity.

image How this activity was linked to the underlying purposes of school learning.

image The sub-conscious and/or automatic processes that might be used in the activity.

It seems that learners are more likely to engage with learning activities when they understand how it fits into “the big picture”. Letting learners “in” on the “big picture” is a form of “contextualising” or “situating” the learning activity. It also reflects some principles inherent in the kind of learning that occurs in the everyday world. It also supports the notion that the brain is more attuned to learning which proceeds from the whole to a part rather than vice versa.

Social interaction and cognitive collaboration

The data clearly revealed that those activities which involved learners interacting and collaborating with each other were more effective than those which were done in isolation. Activities which involved sharing, discussing, arguing, clarifying, explaining, making explicit personal connections, thinking out loud so that others could listen, listening to others think out loud, negotiating meanings and interpretations, jointly contracting and interpreting texts, typically resulted in reflection and more often resulted in useable, robust knowledge of, and control over language than those activities which did not include social interaction and cognitive collaboration.

Use of more than one mode of language

Those activities which involved students using more than one of the language systems worked much better than those which involved using only one. For example there are at least two ways of completing what we called a “sequencing activity” (that is, an activity whereby students reconstruct a text which has been randomly cut-up).

One way would be to give the text to individual children and tell them to resequence the text alone, without communicating with any one else. A sequencing activity done under these conditions coerces students to use only one of the language systems, namely, silent reading.

Another way would be to put the children into groups of four and tell them that they are to help each other reconstruct the text, talk with each other about it, and then jointly make a written list of the textual cues they used to help them in the sequencing process which they can share with other groups at sharing time. A sequencing activity done under these conditions would coerce the students to read silently, read orally, talk and discuss, and therefore listen, write, and later discuss and share orally. It uses the four most popular language systems, namely talking, listening, reading, and writing.

Use of more than one subsystem of language

Those activities which involved students in ranging across and drawing on more than one of the various subsystems of language were more effective than those which only involved a focus on one. This does not mean that any one of the subsystems of language (for example, graphophonic relationships) cannot feature predominantly in the course of completing the activity. In fact those activities which involved emphasising one of the subsystems (for example, graphophonic relationships) while it was still embedded in the context of the other systems were most effective. One teacher supplied a metaphor which captured the essence of this characteristic:

It reminds me of pointing a television camera towards a crowded dance floor. With a really wide angle lens you can capture nearly all of the dancers on the floor, and then without pulling any of the dancers from the floor, you can use a zoom lens to zoom in on any one or two individual dancers, observe them closely, but always in the context of the other dancers. What you’re describing is like having the equivalent of a zoom lens built in to the activities we ask kids to participate in, some way of continually zooming their focus in from the whole down to the parts and zooming out again.

An example may help. In the sixties and seventies most teachers who taught the language arts believed that it was crucial to provide lots of individual practice on subskills. Publishers printed many drill and practice books which contained hundreds of exercises on phonics, grammar, spelling, and so on. Such books were eagerly purchased by teachers. A typical phonics worksheet of this era would involve students in matching letters or letter combinations against pictures. A typical grammar activity would involve students in identifying and classifying parts of speech and so-called “incorrect grammar”.

Such activities pulled the graphophonic and/or the syntactic system away from the network of other systems in which they’re normally embedded. In terms of our dance floor metaphor it would be like taking one or two of the dancers on the crowded floor to another room and isolating them from the rest in order to better understand how crowded dance floors “work”.

An emphasis on manipulating meanings across and within different semiotic systems

The term “semiotic system” simply means a “system for creating meaning”. The predominant semiotic system in most human cultures is oral language. Other semiotic systems include art, drama, written language, song, music, sign language, body language, and so on.

By “manipulating meanings across different semiotic systems” I mean taking the meanings that have been constructed using one semiotic system and transferring them into another. A simple example would be taking a text that has been read and converting it to a dramatic performance, or taking a piece of art and describing the meanings which one constructs by viewing it into written text. Yet another would be taking a technical diagram (say a diagram of how a blast furnace or a sewerage system works) and converting it to written text and/or vice versa.

By “manipulating meanings within different semiotic systems” I mean engaging in different forms of paraphrase. Such paraphrasing activities could include:

image Creating a “spoof” (or parody) of a well known form. There are many examples of this kind of paraphrase including “fractured fairy tales”, “politically correct fairy tales”, rewriting nursery rhymes and other forms (for example, Three Blind Mice becomes A Trio of Myopic Rodents).

image Creating puns using different genre (for example, rewriting epitaphs, advertising jingles, same headlines for different kinds of newspapers, bumper stickers which are double entendres, “librarians are novel lovers”), Chinese fortune cookies, graffiti, sweat shirt messages with double entendres, etc.).

image Creating new words for well known tunes (for example, from Carmen, “Toreador don’t spit on the floor spit out the window that’s what it’s for….”).

image Creating new forms of well-known poems: (“There was movement in the playground for the word had got around that the teachers were on strike this very day, They’d joined the big procession to ask for better pay and left the kids in utter disarray.”)

image

The data showed that activities which involved learners manipulating meanings across and within different semiotic systems were more effective than those which emphasised or restricted the range of semiotic systems that were traversed.

This characteristic is similar to the previous one. Both involve learners being given the opportunity for intensive manipulation of text. Both set up conditions which involve learners crossing as many linguistic boundaries and meaning-making systems as possible.

How are such activities related to the development of control of language? I think it has something to do with creating conditions for learners to reflect on and make explicit the connections and relationships between different forms of language and between different ways of constructing meaning.

An emphasis on activities which allow a range of acceptable responses

The data showed that activities which had no rigid, invariant “right” or “wrong” responses worked better than those which did. In other words those activities which allowed students to respond in a range of ways and to create a range of acceptable products (“answers” are considered as products in this sense) rated higher on our criteria than those which allowed for only one response and/or product.

For example it is possible to prepare a cloze activity which allows for only one correct solution to replace the deletion. This is an example of an activity which has no degree of freedom of response. One’s response is judged to be either right or wrong. There are no shades of grey allowed, and no discussion. On the other hand it is possible to prepare cloze activities that allow students to replace the deletion with what they think is the best replacement. This creates a situation where everyone’s replacement needs to be shared, discussed, defended, justified, negotiated, etc. These processes inevitably lead to reflection, intellectual unrest, and modification of one’s pool of knowledge and understanding—and therefore more effective learning.

Cost efficient and developmentally appropriate

Teachers are very busy people. They cannot spend inordinate amounts of time designing activities that give them limited returns. There is little point in spending two hours designing and preparing an activity which engages students for ten minutes. Nor does it make sense for activities to be so complex that only the most able in the class can attempt them, or to be so simple that only the least able find any challenge in them.

My data revealed that teachers coped with this issue by building their activities around a set of processes that could be applied to texts of different levels of complexity by students who had differing degrees of control over language. For example, the processes that students need to draw on in activities such as retelling procedure, sequencing, cloze procedure, literary sociograms, semantic maps, designing a blurb for a book, designing a cover for a book, and so on can be applied over and over again to different texts of different degrees of complexity and difficulty. Every student can attempt a retelling procedure on a developmentally appropriate text; every student can attempt to design a blurb for a book (text) they’ve read during sustained silent reading time, and so on.

Concluding statement

I had originally hoped that when I reached this stage of the research I would be able to state with some authority the kinds of things that teachers needed to know and do in order to design learning activities that would result in optimal literacy learning. Unfortunately I discovered that it was much more complex than this. I realised that the activities that I had studied and analysed were themselves embedded within classroom settings that reflected a certain “culture” that pervaded everything that occurred, especially the responses that learners made to the activities that they were asked to complete.

An important part of such cultures was what I have termed “authenticity”, that is, the degree to which the activity resembled the kinds of activities and learning that occurred in the world outside of traditional, institutionalised schooling. The more an activity was like an everyday activity which was performed outside the school setting, the higher the degree of authenticity it possessed. With respect to reading, writing, and the other accoutrements of literacy, the more that the activity required the students to engage in the kind of reading, writing, or literacy behaviours that highly literate, proficient adults used to address their needs in the world outside of school, the more “authentic” we considered the activity to be.

This means that learning activities that “work” are much more than simple behavioural “things” that teachers expect learners to do. They also reflect an underlying conceptualisation of what constitutes “effective” literacy behaviour, what role language plays in acquiring effective literacy, what it means to “learn”, what it means to “understand”, what it means to “instruct”, and finally what is meant by “assessment” and “evaluation” of literacy learning.

This meant that if I wanted to understand how to design learning activities that resulted in optimal learning for all students, I first needed to understand the nexus between learning activities and classroom culture. This in turn involves addressing these three questions:

image What do such classrooms’ culture actually look like?

image What are the specific “nitty-gritty” details of such classroom culture?

image What do teachers need to “know”, “understand”, and “do” to set up and maintain such classroom cultures?

Unfortunately the answers to such questions will have to be the basis of another article.

NOTES

BRIAN CAMBOURNE is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education, University of W ollongong, NSW, Australia. E-mail: brian_cambourne@uow.edu.au

The research reported in this article is drawn from an ongoing study. It is reported in more detail in:

Cambourne, B. L., Br own, H., & T urbill, J. (in press). The inside story: Understanding and designing learning activities that promote literacy acquisition. Melbourne, VIC: Eleanor Curtin Publications.

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