Reading comprehension as explained through schema theory cannot be separated from literacy development in sociocultural theory. Engagement and skill have to be developed hand in hand in order to develop the literacy of our students.

Reading and writing do, eventually, have to become an individual cognitive process but as Vygotsky’s writing has shown, prior to developing the skill needed to use literacy tools effectively, our students need to have the social interactions and discussions with “knowing” adults or peers that influence their social and cultural lives.  These interactions help students to make meaning our of the activities they engage in that develop their thinking.

Yet, as a critical reading teacher, I know that schema is useful for understanding the reading process and that this process does not happen just in the mind of the individual.  Even Rosenblatt  brings attention to schema in her discussion of the transaction that occurs between the reader and the author:
“Human activities and relationships are seen as transactions in which the individual and the social, cultural, and natural elements interfuse” (1989).

My thinking, I think, is further supported by Wertsch (1991) who noted, “We must explore how social and cultural tools and activity mediate learning and development.”  The individual literacy knowledge learned through social and cultural experiences are internalized through the individual processing of this knowledge and learned from shared experiences.

The thoughts shared here continue to be a work in progress. Jump into the construction where ever you can help to build knowledge or help me to redraw the plans on this construction site.  :)

The Dimensions of Sociocultural Theory in Written Expression

There is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the process of writing to learn is  an interactive collaborative activity because in learning, in the construction of knowledge, students work together with others,  therefore, the social environment of learning must be considered.   

Teachers understand that students bring different approaches to the literacy activities they engage in at school; these approaches are connected to their social and cultural backgrounds and affects their thinking and language around the practice of literacy instruction. This sociocultural theory present in literacy instruction suggests that students’ experiences at home, at school, and in their communities can influence their development in reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

The theoretical model I have envisioned is designed to represent my thinking around the dimensions of learning teachers may consider when teaching written expression.  The stance I have taken is from a sociocultural perspective because successful academic writing in a school setting comes about as a result of four dimensions that  are interdependent as students write to communicate a message or to construct meaning from their learning.  

Writing to show learning  is a process that allows learners to share their thinking around a topic.  In order to share thinking, students participate in classroom contexts where speaking and listening about specific content area topics occur.  This participation in these classroom communities make learning to write an activity involving the personal, social, cognitive and knowledge building dimensions. These interrelated dimensions of literacy help student writers become successful at communicating their learning and expressing their thinking. 

Thoughts on Schema and Sociocultural Theories

I agree with Gee that reading is more than processing skills- once our students have these skills, and even while attaining them- they are socially connected through culture and interaction.  Alvermann, Unrau, and Ruddell (Eds.) interpret Discourse through Gee’s “communities of practice”.  This seems to support my thinking about reader’s/writer’s needing these Discourse communities to make meaning in a socially supported setting. 

Gee asserts that meaning is gained from a person’s experiences and then stored in their “library of experiences”.  “As we face new situations or new texts we run our tapes-perhaps a prototypical one, or a set of typical ones, or a set of contrasting ones, or a less typical one, whatever the case may be.” We do this to apply our old experiences to our new experience and to aid us in making sense of it.  So, according to Gee this function #1 of human language is “situated action.” 

In “perspective-taking”, Gee’s function #2 of human language, he proposes that language “is about communicating perspectives on experience and action in the world, often in contrast to alternative and competing perspectives.” So, it is important for students to interact through discussion, with more advanced peers and adults, about the reading and writing they are assigned in school. This is where instruction and scaffolded instruction with gradual release becomes very important in literacy instruction.  

Tatum and Lee indicate that teachers need to understand the perspectives of their students, their cultural orientations, to develop meaningful literary instruction that will result in critical reading/close reading and written response. If teachers want their students to really read they cannot only change student’s skills, they must also improve their will to read.  They have to want to read. As teachers we have to develop engagement and skill in order to get our students to the levels of reading experienced by Lee at Fairgate High School and Tatum in his experiences with his students. This requires much scaffolded instruction on the part of teachers.

These ideas fit closely with my thinking about teaching middle school students how to express their thinking about reading through written expression.  Language Experience Approach (LEA) is one idea that I have used with struggling students but I think could be expanded to include whole group instruction because of the dialogue that ensues and the important impact of modeling that students find so useful in developing their own writing and thinking.  This approach seems to fit the idea presented by McVee, Dunsmore, and Gavelek in “Schema Theory Revisited.” I agree with this premise that literate processes are influenced by the social and cultural lives of our students as they engage in meaning-making activities. 

Reading comprehension as explained through schema theory cannot be separated from literacy development in sociocultural theory.  These two theories go hand in hand when teaching.  

The research on re-engaging students through the professional development of their teachers  done by Flurio-Ruane, Raphael, Highfield, and Berne supports my thinking on the intersection of these theories: 

“Our work is grounded in the theory that all learning begins on the social plane.  This means that, while individuals are learners, their learning is fundamentally a social process that occurs within social contexts, activities, and interactions with others. Within this view of learning, engagement is socially created.  It is, for the individual, authentic participation in a community’s contexts, activities, and interactions. Engagement enables and sustains both the learning community and its individual members by means of participation in activities.  Members of this learning community vary in knowledge and expertise, but newcomers are gradually socialized into membership” (Cole, 1996). 

“The teachers’ role(s) within a classroom are closely related to the type of classroom discourse.  Au and Raphael (1998) characterize variations in teachers’ roles in terms of the amount of teacher control and student activity.  They define five teacher roles: (a) explicit instructing, (b) modeling, (c) scaffolding, (d) facilitating, and (e) participating. These reflect decreasing control by the teacher and increased activity on the part of the student” (Pearson & Raphael).

These activities have both schema theory and sociocultural theory imbedded in the practice of developing necessary skills by engaging students in learning through socially constructed lessons.

“Students are most passive when teachers are engaged in direct instruction, and they are most active when the teacher simply participates with them in the talk of the classroom.   Au and Raphael’s description implies that it is just as mistaken to assume literacy learning is limited to situations in which the teacher is engaged in explicit instruction as it is to assume that learning is meaningful only when the teacher is out of the picture” (Pearson & Raphael).

I created this "Smore" for a discussion in LTRE505.

Fluency & Automaticity

Reading Comprehension as Cognitive-Based Processing

The importance of schema theory to reading comprehension lies in how the reader uses schemata. I don’t think this issue has yet been resolved by research, although it seems to show that some mechanism activates just those schemata most relevant to the reader's task.

There are several models based on cognitive processing.  For example, the LaBerge-Samuels Model of Automatic Information Processing (1974) emphasizes internal aspects of attention are crucial to comprehension.  This model is foundational to the theory of  fluency. 

A beginning reader can only pay attention to decoding when they are in the early stages of reading.  As the beginning reader becomes more proficient with word recognition they begin to switch between decoding and comprehension, paying attention to both, but neither are automatic, so comprehension suffers.  Finally, the automatic stage of Automatic Information Processing results when a reader recognizes words without attention and comprehension exists.   

The LaBerge-Samuels model suggests 3 characteristics of attention: 

*alterness: which is the reader's active attempt to access relevant schemata involving letter-sound relationships, syntactic knowledge, and word meanings.

*selectivity: referring to the reader's ability to attend selectively to only that information requiring processing.

*limited capacity: which is the fact that our human brain has a limited amount of cognitive energy available for use in processing information. In other words, if a reader's cognitive energy is focused on decoding and attention cannot be directed at integrating, relating, and combining the meanings of the words decoded, then comprehension will suffer.

"Automaticity in information processing, then, simply means that information is processed with little attention" (Samuels, 1994).  This results in comprehension difficulties  because the reader cannot rapidly and automatically access the concepts and knowledge stored in the schemata.

Another example of a cognitive-based model is Rumelhart's (1994) Interactive Model. Information from several knowledge sources (schemata for letter-sound relationships, word meanings, syntactic relationships, event sequences, and so forth) are considered simultaneously. The implication is that when information from one source, such as word recognition, is deficient, the reader will rely on information from another source, for example, context clues or previous experience.

Stanovich (1980) explains that when there is a deficiency in word recognition, interactive-compensatory processing becomes necessary because the reader (any reader) compensates for deficiencies in one or more of the knowledge sources by using information from remaining knowledge sources. Those sources that are more concerned with concepts and semantic relationships are termed higher- level stimuli; sources dealing with the print itself, that is phonics, sight words, and other word-attack skills, are termed lower level stimuli.  In Stanovich’s interactive-compensatory model, the reader will rely on higher-level processes when lower-level processes are inadequate, and vice versa.

These cognitive based processing models of reading support my thinking that teachers need to use a variety of approaches when teaching reading. Studies conducted by Chomsky (1978) and LaBerge (1979) indicate that striving readers made greater gains in comprehension and reading speed when attention was paid to fluency and automaticity.  To increase fluency, reader confidence and motivation we should provide our students with the practice and strategies they require to help them become automatic readers.