David G. O'Brien

Reexamining Roles of Learner, Text, and Context in Secondary Literacy

(2000). Reexamining Roles of Learner, Text, and Context in Secondary Literacy. The Journal of Educational Research: Vol. 93, New Discoveries in Literacy for The 21st Century, pp. 165-180.

On writing qualitative research

The authors explore the challenges of conducting and writing up qualitative research studies, and discuss four key issues: problems in distinguishing between levels of theory; holistic and microlevel issues in methodology; crises in representation and legitimation; and differences in the writing and write-up process.

New literacies and the institution of old learning

Book reviewed in this article: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. James Paul Gee. 2003. New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel. 2003.

Reading Multimodally: What Is Afforded?

Technological changes and the proliferation of digital devices have created new reading experiences for students. The rapid transition from print to digital texts is evident in the movement toward the adoption of an e-book standard, increasing sales of e-book readers and tablet devices, and projections that universities and public schools may use more e-textbooks and e-book devices than print curricula in the near future. Considering these changes, it is necessary to examine the digital tools and the theoretical perspective of affordances, a term originally coined in ecological psychology. This column discusses how affordances are related to multimodal texts. It examines three promising tools with multimodal affordances and argues that this perspective might offer educators a new way of conceptualizing how to use emerging digital technologies.

Story grammars: Some cautions about the translation of research into practice

Abstract Story grammar instruction is considered “state of the art” in promoting comprehension of narrative text. This article examines some of the intentions that guided the research into story structure, considers some of the validity problems inherent in the research, and outlines some flaws in instructional practices resulting from misinterpretations of it. The article concludes with some suggestions for using the structure of stories as a basis for enhancing childrens interactions with them.

Fostering Students’ Science Inquiry Through App Affordances of Multimodality, Collaboration, Interactivity, and Connectivity

This study examined 6th graders’ use of the VoiceThread app as part of a science inquiry project on photosynthesis and carbon dioxide emissions in terms of their ability to engage in causal reasoning and their use of the affordances of multimodality, collaboration, interactivity, and connectivity. Students employed multimodal production using images with audio or written annotations on VoiceThread to describe their analysis of the photosynthesis process. Analysis of these annotations indicated that the majority of those annotations represented causal reasoning reflecting the use of science inquiry thinking. Students reported that working collaboratively in pairs mediated by a shared focus on the same images and formulation of annotations enhanced sharing of alternative perspectives. Being able to readily share their VoiceThread productions with peers and the teacher enhanced their sense of purpose and audience driving their work. And making intertextual connections between alternative meanings of images led students to critically analyze these images. This study suggests how these affordances are mediated through use of VoiceThread to engage students in science inquiry.

The relation between oral reading miscue patterns and comprehension: A test of the relative explanatory power of psycholinguistic and interactive views of reading

The use of oral reading to assess silent reading ability has gained wide acceptance despite the lack of definitive evidence that the two processes are similar. Moreover, there are a number of theoretical positions that run counter to assumptions underlying oral reading error analysis as a measure of silent reading competency. This study examined the relation between multiple oral reading miscue measures and postreading comprehension performance. Correlations between the oral reading and comprehension measures indicated a negative relation between oral reading and recall following the reading of familiar passages and a positive relation between oral reading and an inferential comprehension measure following the reading of unfamiliar passages. In addition, when the subjects read disrupted passages, their attempts at correcting incongruous errors and their self-report interviews indicated that their oral reading was not related to their performance on comprehension product measures. The results, which are discrepant with previous research relating oral reading to comprehension, are discussed in terms of a comparison between psycholinguistic and interactive models of reading comprehension.

Does figurative language present a unique comprehension problem

In order to investigate whether or not the interpretation of figurative passages presented a comprehension problem unique to that of any difficult text, 50 undergraduate education majors were asked to read and interpret a nonliteral comparison passage and two researcher-constructed figurative passages. Subjects took pretests to measure their general vocabulary knowledge and inferencing ability. Performance on these measures was compared with abilities considered unique to the comprehension of figurative expressions. A set of quantitative analyses indicated that the figurative-unique abilities could not definitively account for the interpretation of both figurative passages. However, an additional qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with 10 of the subjects indicated that figurative unique abilities identified in previous research with isolated figurative expressions were operating during the interpretation of the figurative passages used in this study. The study illustrates the benefit of combining quantitative and qualitative methods to answer basic research questions about text comprehension.

Factors affecting the interpretation of figurative language uses

Abstract This study examined the relations among three general language competency factors ‐ word knowledge, comprehension, and paradigmatic/syntagmatic reasoning ‐ and college developmental readers’ ability to interpret two text formats designed to elicit either a literal or figurative interpretation. The two formats were: a) an embedded format where different target expressions were included as the last statement in a context that supported either a literal or figurative interpretation, and b) an extension format in which subjects were asked to complete a passage with either a literal or figurative expression that they perceived as the most logical extension of what was written. The results indicated that word knowledge was related to the ability to interpret figurative expressions in the embedded format while paradigmatic/syntagmatic reasoning was related to the ability to interpret literal expressions in the extension format. The authors conclude with a discussion of the effects of training in specifi...