Fostering Active Readers: A Collaborative Map Creation Activity for Deep Comprehension

This paper describes the procedures of a multimodal activity combining different collaborative, communicative modes—the creation of group concept maps and oral presentation of the maps—to assist college-level students in deciphering complex academic texts. Based on the perspective of social constructivism (Vygotsky, 1978), the authors attempt to explore how the activity provided Japanese university students with an opportunity to confirm and validate their own understanding of the texts and modify and integrate their understanding with that of their classmates with the common goal of attaining a deeper level of comprehension. Strong reading abilities are widely regarded as a crucial part of professional success. However, a considerable number of Japanese readers of English as a foreign language (EFL) are deficient in this area (Butler & Iino, 2005). While a variety of reasons account for the prevalence of this phenomenon, one could be attributed to a lack of practical solutions for fostering active reading (Robinson, 2011). Students in most university reading classes tend to passively consume the content of assigned texts without penetrating the underlying layers of meaning. Missing from many pedagogical practices are challenges that foist students into a more active role of reconstructing ideas through dialogue with texts, their authors, teachers, peers, and above all, the students themselves. This paper primarily chronicles the authors’ attempt to use concept maps as a means of empowering freshmen readers at a Japanese university to gain a deeper understanding of complex academic texts. Since its development in 1972 by Joseph D. Novak, concept mapping has been widely used in various educational environments as an effective method to facilitate the understanding of and relationships between essential concepts presented in texts. As Novak (1990), Novak and Canas (2006), and others have pointed out, creating concept maps facilitates participants’ learning processes by organizing and structuring new knowledge in relation to previously acquired knowledge. Concept maps work “as a kind of template or scaffold “ (Novak & Canas, 2006, p. 7) to visually display networks of interrelated concepts and enable students to trace the evolution of their thoughts. Language Education in Asia, 2012, 3(2), 184-195. http://dx.doi.org/10.5746/LEiA/12/V3/I2/A07/Sudo_Takaesu Language Education in Asia, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2012 Sudo and Takaesu Page 185 The paper begins with an overview of reading comprehension processes and the social constructivist approach based on the work of Vygotsky (1978). After a brief description of the set characteristics of a specific reading course at a Japanese university, the paper describes the procedures of the multimodal collaborative map creation activity and explores how it plays an essential role in facilitating students’ reading comprehension at a deeper level. Reading Comprehension Processes Current reading models regard reading comprehension processes as multi-level. The quality of resulting memory, which has considerable impact on learning, varies significantly, depending on how deeply these processes are activated (Caccamise, Snyder, & Kintsch, 2008). It is generally agreed that there are two major levels of comprehension: text-based and learners’ mental model-based processes. Text-based comprehension consists of local meaning operations and overall meaning operations. The former is primarily activated by decoding syntax or word meaning, whereas the latter is activated by establishing coherence in text meaning through activities such as writing summaries or defining key concepts. In either case, the level of comprehension generally results in memory consisting of only the surface features of texts or the gist of the text and the words or phrases actually used in it. More challenges are a prerequisite to promote deeper comprehension processes. To this end, van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) argued that students must formulate their own mental representations of the contexts expressed by the authors, because people store knowledge in a powerful interlinked network by connecting what they read to what they already know. In other words, by creating a mental model, readers’ newly comprehended information will be transformed to learned information by becoming a part of their own pre-existing knowledge network. Activities necessary to enhance the above processes value what readers bring to the texts more than what they decode in them. Creating concept maps is therefore effective, since it requires readers’ active interpretive and inferential analysis of the content, including abstractions or the author’s emotions implied in the texts. The activity also demonstrates a variety of potentials for meaning-creation. By reading while focusing on what the key concepts are and how they are related, as well as expressing comprehension through a visual display, readers go through multiple tracks to build a stronger knowledge basis. Thus, they go beyond the limitations of monomodal texts and reach hypertext comprehension by constructing their own “multidimensional meaning representation” (Caccamise et al., 2008, p. 84). Collaborative Learning and Social Constructivism The theory of constructivism echoes the view of the current reading comprehension models above in that “knowledge is not passively received but actively built up by the cognizing subject” (Glasersfeld, 1989, p. 162). Drawing on this concept, social constructivism underscores the social nature of learning in reference to children’s cultural development. In the initial stages, children learn through culturally meaningful dialogues with others, such as caregivers or peers. In other words, their initial learning appears on the social plane, as learners are actively involved in an interpsychological meaning construction as a social being (i.e., intermental dialogue) (Vygotsky, 1978). At a later stage of learning, intrapsychological meaning construction, or learners’ active involvement in meaning transformation in their own mind, is required. They internalize the shared understanding formulated through collaborative intermental dialogues and reconstruct the message in their own mind (i.e., intramental dialogue) to achieve functional and structural transformation of their knowledge. In a