Subtext in the English Classroom
EN100 College Writing
and
EN101x Accelerated English
Final Report for the Mobile Learning Initiative
By
Kathleen W. Lampert
Student Success Initiatives
www.massbay.edu/title3
Published Summer 2014
Produced by Massbay Community College Faculty in partnership with
The Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology Innovation
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education Title III Grant 2010 – 2015
“My students can’t read!” How many times have we heard this, or said it
ourselves? It seems almost a truism that today’s students’ print literacy is
substantially diminished from previous generations’. And we know the culprits:
television and the new media have reduced time spent with books, social
networking has reduced the need for creating and understanding the complex
sentences without which complex thought is impossible, parents have abdicated
their responsibility for their children’s literacy, reading is no longer fun for the
“Entertain me!” generation.
We educators have been quick to complain about students’ reading skills
but much slower to explore ways to identify essential skills and effective methods
for teaching them. Most of us would agree that intensive practice identifying
characteristics of decontextualized paragraphs about bird migration or the
spinning wheel is ineffective. But what would work?
We need to begin by acknowledging that “can’t read” can describe many
quite different problems:
• Decoding – making a meaningful connection between symbols on a page
and the world as we understand it;
Even this skill is complex – the problems may arise from lack of relevant
vocabulary or from the absence of lived experience (cultural capital), or
from verbal memory or other language processing issues;
• Attention/Fluency: sustaining focus on a text for an extended period of
time sufficient to see how ideas are interconnected;
• Connecting: recognizing how a text connects with a reader’s personal
experience and/or how it connects with its immediate classroom context or
with the world in general;
• Questioning: approaching a text as an active participant in a dialogue
about content’s meaning and interpretation;
• Recognizing Patterns: Identifying patterns of language use unique to a
particular text and/or rhetorical and structural patterns unique to particular
disciplines or genres;
• Engagement: Recognizing that reading is an active process of interaction
with a text and that it can be enhanced by interacting with other readers.
The above, undoubtedly incomplete, list of reading skills makes the prospect of
effective reading instruction at the college level even more challenging. It
certainly explains why the usual passage analysis approach yields limited results.
What is needed is an approach which addresses the complex of skills effective
college reading requires. Subtext, a web based app offered by Renaissance
Learning, provides one such approach.
Subtext is an iPad app which offers multiple resources for teaching and
enhancing students’ reading skills. While the free version offers most of the
available options, for a relatively small additional fee, resources such as tracking
individual student progress and text to speech are also available.
More specifically, with Subtext an instructor can:
• Upload books and articles to share with individual classes, drawing from
remarkably useful pre-selected content or from books and articles on-line.
•
•
Purchasing books online is relatively easy, though they must be available
as e-pub or Google offerings. Uploading articles is slightly more time
consuming but not particularly difficult. Students can also upload free
books from their public library.
“Within the digital text, teachers can highlight any text and add a
comment, a link to a video or website, or [various forms of comprehension
check]. After annotating the text with these features, teachers can use the
app's built-in teacher dashboard to share a book with their students and
track their students' progress through the pages of the text. From the
student perspective in the app, students may also annotate the text and
view annotations from their teacher and other students. When a user
inserts an annotation, his or her picture appears in the right margin,
emphasizing the social element of this app and its concentration on
reading as a shared and collaborative experience. “ The instructor can
also create smaller working groups within a class, set up inter-class
sharing groups, or interact with individual students by responding to their
comments or questions.
https://www.graphite.org/app/subtext
Students can look up the meaning of unfamiliar words within the digital
text. Instructors can also embed links to material, which provides
background information and other forms of enrichment.
Using Subtext, an instructor can address each of the reading subskills listed
above:
• Decoding: Students can check the meaning of unfamiliar words by simply
double clicking on the word – no need to exit from the text to do so.
Similarly, the students can google an unfamiliar reference or concept
within the text they’re reading. And the instructor can insert links to web
sites, videos, etc. to ensure that all students know relevant background
material. Other language processing issues require resources which the
app cannot necessarily provide, but both the voice to text feature and the
various ways of encouraging interaction with the text can certainly
supplement those resources.
For example, students can locate definitions by clicking and holding
on specific word or by reading an embedded link to a definition. For
example, when working with Whitman’s “I hear America singing”, I
embedded a link to the definition of a ‘carol’ as a song of celebration,
which might or might not be religious in nature.
• Attention/Fluency: The app enables students to remain focused directly on
the text for extended periods while its multiple opportunities for interaction
ensure active engagement with the text. Students have opportunities to
interact not only with the text but also with each other and with the
instructor. And the instructor has access to immediate data about student
progress and comprehension and can modify instructional strategies as
needed.
•
•
•
For example, I frequently include discussion questions, which
required paraphrasing or summarizing key ideas in the text. (See
attached)for a sample embedded question.
Connecting/Questioning: Students are encouraged to ask questions of the
instructor and fellow students. Templates are provided for analyzing and
challenging author’s claims. The end-of-chapter blog feature allows
students to express personal responses and evaluations.
More specifically, as a way of introducing Intertextuality, an
instructor can pair two short pieces and asks pointed questions requiring
students to move back and forth between the works. When working with
Whitman’s “I hear America Singing”, I could grouped it with Langston
Hughes’ “ I, Too, Sing America” and Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song
For the Day” and ask students to address the authors’ visions of America
as suggested by subtle similarities and differences in word choice and
content.
Recognizing Patterns: The app provides genre-specific templates for
analyzing characteristics of narrative and argumentative writing.
Additionally, the instructor may provide students with a set of rhetorical
features characteristic of writing in a particular discipline and create
specific questions to guide students through representative examples.
I focus here on reading research reports, frequently assigned in
many college courses and very difficult reading without an understanding
of the purpose and conventions of scientific research and writing. I
provided students with a brief handout, “How to Read a Research Essay”
then imported research reports into Subtext and asked students to identify
and state the purpose of each major section. This approach has the added
advantage of helping students find meaning in long reports without
needing to understand all the complex statistical manipulations they
contain.
Engagement: The instructor can use as many of the interactive features
as seems appropriate to engage students with the text, the instructor, and
each other. These features also support smaller group collaborations
within or between sections.
Comments:
The examples I’ve discussed above suggest a few of the specific ways an
instructor can use Subtext’s rich array of features. Discussing them individually
does not, however, emphasize sufficiently their collective impact on a students’
ability to focus on a single text for an extended period. I should add that students
need ample time for discussion, especially of difficult textual content. It is also
important that, as they work intensively on individual texts, students see the
purpose of such work; connecting it early to a class assignment or to specific
work being done in another class is needed to ensure closer reading is relevant
to students’ larger concerns.
At present, there is no objective evidence that using Subtext improves
students’ comprehension of individual texts or that the skills practiced will transfer
to other reading challenges students may face. One small piece of anecdotal
evidence: students final assessment essays written by the EN101X and EN100
students whom I worked with displayed more comfort with using sources and
citing them than similar classes with no Subtext practice.
It is important to see Subtext work as relevant not only to the analytic
writing required at the college level, but also to the personal response writing
(Britton’s “expressive” rather than “transactional” prose).
Critics of Subtext, and of digital reading in general, bemoan the loss of
tactile and aesthetic experiences of reading print. At least one reviewer cites
research that suggests retention and interpretation are problematic when a tablet
rather than a print text is used ( http://kulowiectech.blogspot.com/2012/05/social-­reading­on-­ipad-­subtext-­x-­custom.html) One response to these concerns is to note that
Subtext is, here, a teaching and learning tool; it need not be presented as the
best resource for reading for pleasure or for creating lifelong readers. It may also
be that a totally digitized generation will experience little or no nostalgia for print,
or may be able to move quite comfortably between digital and print texts
Finally, it is not clear what effect Renaissance Learning’s purchase of
Subtext and the subsequent increase in emphasis on Common Core standards
will have on future versions. Similarly, the beta version for on-line needs a lot of
trouble-shooting. If it works as well as the app, it will be accessible for a much
larger audience and for many more classes.
Appendix
HOW TO READ A RESEARCH REPORT
Background
Formal research reports require special reading skills, skills not often
taught. I hope this activity, and the application of the same approach to your
own journal article, will make you a more confident and informed reader.
First a word about the purpose of research reports: Scientists use journal
articles reporting research to share their findings with their professional
colleagues. The purpose of such sharing is not simply, “Look what I found."
Rather, the purpose is to enable professional colleagues to understand and
replicate studies that will forward their discipline in some important way. Applied
research leads to changes in real-world actions. So-called “pure” research leads
to changes in the ways scientists think about/understand an aspect of their
discipline.
There are three kinds of research methods: quantitative (uses statistical
analysis), qualitative (uses structured observations, interviews, etc.) and metaresearch (looks at other research studies in order to find patterns of ideas, etc.).
All research reports are “juried” or “peer-reviewed” – read ahead of time by the
writers’ professional colleagues and edited in response to readers’ comments.
Practice: The Parts of a Research Study
As I will demonstrate with the accompanying research study, reading such
studies becomes much more manageable if you can identify each part and its
very specific function in the article.
Make sure to take notes in the outline below and on the article itself, as I take us
through a reading of a research article about factors contributing to young people
taking up smoking.
The Abstract: A summary/overview of the whole article. Use it to decide if the
whole article is relevant enough to read.
Background: Here the writers present two extremely important aspects of their
work:
• The question or hypothesis they are exploring, their research question or
hypothesis.
• A clear statement of where their particular focus fits in a broader research
area and, frequently, how it will contribute to the community at large.
Methodology: The writers are obliged to lay out in very specific detail exactly
how they conducted their research. Methodology includes a description of the
sample population, details about kind of analysis (statistical), qualitative
(including all interview questions, ways of analyzing data, etc.), or meta (with
details of what studies they studied, their methods of analysis, etc.
Findings: This is usually the most difficult section to read and understand. I’ll give
you some tips about how and why to read it.
Discussion: Here, the authors discuss their findings and the relevance of those
findings in relatively clear language.
Conclusions: Here’s where you’ll find what they think their answer to their
research questions is, and a discussion of an limitations of their study and how
other scientists can build on it. This section is sometimes combined with the
Discussion section.
Notes and References: Useful for finding other relevant materials for your own
research