Reflctions from readings (June 2 2009)

Hypertext and Linear Text

Hypertexts offer a different way from linear texts in terms of online-reading and multiple related links. In linear texts, readers have to look up a dictionary or other references when they had some questions. But in hypertexts, it has become much easier for readers to access information and enables readers to save their time to look up a dictionary. One of the issues that this article raises is the role of readers’ abilities. Compared with skilled readers, poor readers’ decoding skills is less effective and they are likely to more depend on the context to understand the text. I believe that one of the reasons is poor readers have less background knowledge than skilled readers.

Reading hypertexts requires extra processing load to readers by making readers navigate the text. In other words, there are a lot of choices which information readers will take in hypertexts. That can be a great advantage for skilled readers whereas that freedom can be disadvantage for poor readers. This is because poor readers are likely to be controlled by interference from the additional task of navigating the text. Therefore, since readers’ ability plays a key role in hypertexts as well as in linear texts, readers should recognize difference between texts and hypertexts and learn readers’ strategies to enhance reading comprehension.

Reflctions from readings (June 2 2009)

Designing Metacognition Activities

Metacognition is the mental process of regulating and monitoring cognition. Many research show that students do better job when students participate in metacognitive activities such as self-assessment and monitoring. But, generally students do not have any chances to engage in metacognitive activities. So, this article tries to suggest an outline to design metacognitive activities. The framework this article proposes is a balanced metacognitive training involving both strategy training and creation of social environment.

I was interested in when I read prompting of strategy training. Some researchers such as Berardi-Coletta et all (1995) and King (1992) used prompt cards to help students produce metacognitive questions. From my experience, this is a very powerful tool to help students more deeply think about their work. I often go to a WLRC (Weingarten Learning Resources Center) to revise my writing (Especially, grammatical error correction). According to Writing Center’s policy, instructors at WLRC do not provide any idea about contents of students’ work. Instead, the instructors stimulate students’ self-explanation for metacognition through prompting. When the instructors want to encourage students to produce more ideas, they ask students prompt questions; “What is another example of this phenomenon?”; “Why do you say so?”; “How does A effects B?” Sometimes, I do not produce new ideas despite of their prompting question. But, in many cases, the prompting question encourage me to generate some ideas that I didn’t think of before. So, I believe that the using prompt cards or questions should be considered when designing metacognitive activities.