Supporting English Reading with Text-Focused Graphic Organizers and Functional Linguistics : A Study with Japanese Physical Therapy Students
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概要
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Every text possesses a hierarchy consisting of micro- and macro-structures (Kintsch, 1998). Sentences are organized under a proposition, forming a micro-structure, and such micro-structures are organized under a macro-proposition, constituting a macro-structure. A text also contains relationships among concepts and statements, which include "cohesion," that is, semantic and logical relationships across sentences (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Students need to understand such structures and relationships in order to comprehend a text. Teachers and researchers help students grasp structures and relationships by using graphic organizers (GOs); these are graphic representations of a text. Traditional GOs are limited in that they focus on only the concepts expressed by a text, that is, "signifie," in Saussure's terms. Thus, it is necessary to devise GOs that focus on the text itself (i.e., "significant"). This action research project develops such text-focused GOs that display linguistic elements from a text (e.g., lexical cohesion and relational verbs) in order to help students consider structures and relationships in the text. The teaching method described in this paper is characterized by the use of tasks that verbalize the information visualized by GOs (e.g., quizzes about a GO) in order to help students understand the GOs. Student interviews and summaries of texts suggest that the GOs and related tasks increased students' awareness of structures and relationships in the texts. Challenges to the teaching method include difficulties faced by some students in understanding GOs and misunderstanding of a text owing to its visual representation in a GO. A possible action to address these challenges will be class discussions of GOs and the related tasks.
- 2011-11-30