Findings provide concrete examples of student engagement in critical reflection and interpretive abilities. The idea for the current study came about after serious reflection on the American Council for Teaching Foreign Language’s 2012 Performance Descriptors for Language Learners. As a language teacher, I have often questioned the effectiveness of
assessment and ways to accurately gauge student growth. Although asking students to turn in an
individual writing assignment, such as a traditional essay, may provide insight into interpretive abilities, individual assessments disregard the benefits of collaboration and fail to record peer- based, community-oriented learning. Transitioning my mindset from a learner centered teaching (Doyle, 2011) to learning centered teaching (Fink, 2013) reinforces the importance of
collaboration and helps transform my approach to language pedagogy.
Research on active learning emphasizes the ways writing can promote critical thinking.
Halpern and Riggio (2002) state that “[w]hen people write, they are required to organize thoughts, make decisions about what is relevant and what is not, select the words that convey their thoughts, and arrive at a conclusion” (p. 4). Social reading, which requires readers to publicly post written content, provides a platform for learners to document their thoughts, not only for themselves and the instructor, but for their peers as well. The public-facing aspect of writing on a digital annotation tool (DAT) goes beyond traditional practices of composition by encouraging learners to share thoughts and formulate new content that includes and considers their peers’ insights. The current study focuses on students’ abilities to reflect critically on their cultural awareness of the world and their role in it. Student comments written in the first person and codes relating to culture, such as Cultural Interpretation and Cultural Relation prove the participants’ willingness to share their understanding of the world in writing.
Interpretive abilities are evident when students are able to bridge the gap between page and application, or from theory to practice. As it relates to social reading, I refer to practice as the ability to use the text as a base for further exploration. Student anecdotes about previous personal experiences or assumptions regarding real-world cultural issues serve as a means to record the “leap” and document student thought processes. One example of an evolving thought process is found in Valeria’s reply to Madison’s third original comment (Appendix O), in which
Valeria admits that Madison’s comment reshapes the way she views the character Hamoudi.
Valeria writes (emphasis added):
Je suis d’accord avec vous que Doria est une narratrice faillible. J’ai fait un commentaire dans laquelle j’étais sympa envers Hamoudi et ses problèmes.
Mais je pense que la point de vue de Doria m’influençait. Doria a certainement une tendresse particulière pour Hamoudi, et elle ne le critique pas souvent.
Hamoudi est un bon mec bien sûr, mais je dois considérer que Doria est aussi une adolescente très biaise. Elle a tendance à voir la vie en rose avec Hamoudi.
[I agree with you that Doria is an unreliable narrator. I posted a comment in which I was sympathetic toward Hamoudi and his problems. But I think that Doria’s point of view influenced me. Doria certainly has a particular soft spot for Hamoudi, and she does not criticize him often. Hamoudi is a good guy, for sure, but I have to consider that Doria is also a biased adolescent. She has a tendency to see the rosy side of life with Hamoudi.]
In this comment, Valeria references her own previous comment (Appendix P), in which she wrote about the sad unfairness of Hamoudi’s treatment when he was fired for alleged theft.
Madison’s original comment is much more critical of Hamoudi and his previous poor life decisions, and this critical lens transformed Valeria’s point of view and forced her to reconsider her own relationship to the narrator and the text. Valeria’s comment demonstrates interpretive abilities to go beyond the text to form individual opinions and ideas and reflects the evolution of critical thinking skills. Social reading platforms provide a space to document this transformative process in a previously unseen way.
Educators are familiar with the “aha moment” in the classroom, where we visibly see the moment when a student understands what was previously unfamiliar. This understanding often comes from one-on-one interaction with the instructor or when students are given the time and space to think aloud and muse over a quandary. When students are assigned to read a text at home, however, “aha moments” are private. DATs document the thinking-while-reading experience and provide a physical roadmap for both the students and the instructor. Though the current study did not incorporate tasks that required students to revisit their previous comments, future research on task design should include assignments that require students to compare their own previous comments with their evolving thoughts throughout the semester. Valeria is not the only student whose comments reflect a shift in mindset from the beginning to the end of the novel. Witnessing and questioning this shift is an exercise in critical self-reflection and
experiential learning that documents yet another way students process their understanding of the world and their role in it.
Insight 2: Social reading gives students agency to connect personal experiences with the text, which increases personal reflections and provides a space to do so.
In the current study, students often write in the first person and typically begin their original comments or replies with the word “je” [‘I’]. This first-person narrative is directly linked to the student’s personal thoughts and experiences and was axial coded into the category
“Personal.” This axial code included the following codes: Personal Anecdote, Personal Relation, and Personal Thought (je, me). These codes indicate direct uses of personal pronouns to describe students’ thoughts, opinions, and revelations about their past. In general, the pronoun “je” [‘I’] is one of the most commonly used words throughout the entire dataset. Table 6.1 provides a brief