Activating background knowledge and making predictions

Background knowledge activation started in the preview stage where students briefly and quickly read the entire passage. In this brainstorming stage, students brought their prior information about the topic to the task. This is a top-down reading process, moving in only one direction (Grabe, 2009). Managerial tools, such as instructions, scaffolded students’ progress and kept them in pursuit of the task objective (Wood et al., 1976). Interestingly, fading, as a key element of scaffolding, did not seem to be optional for single students: the whole group tended to decide when no further scaffolding was needed: that is, when all the students understood the requirements of the brainstorming stage they take the next step, touching the “new note” tool in order to start writing notes about their previous knowledge on the topic. This fading is similar to that in Model-It (Jackson et al., 1998), where scaffolding is student-initiated and is faded with “stop reminding me” buttons. In DCSR, scaffolding from instructions is faded individually because not all students start writing notes at the same time. Another managerial tool is the “done” tool by which system scaffolding and peer scaffolding are faded to allow transition to the next stage.

The “new note” tool is a managerial tool used to create a digital note (a material tool). It aims at promoting reflection on parts of the reading task by providing a digital note on which to input text. Jackson et al. (1998) provided similar prompts named reflective scaffolding tools; these provided notepad windows for students to input text. The DCSR digital note also agrees in

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function with Fretz et al.’s (2002) “articulation text box scaffold which prompts learners to articulate explanations and descriptions (of objects, variables, and relationships)” (p. 571). Material tools in the brainstorming stage were “digital note”, “add group”, and “group”. The ZPD of each student started when they read instructions about how to perform the brainstorming stage, create new notes, input text, and put similar notes into groups. Findings revealed that the strategy of putting digital notes into groups was effective in scaffolding collaboration; it appeared to promote collaboration and push the discussion towards achieving the goal of the reading task in general and the brainstorming task in particular. This was clearly seen in all the extracts (see Chapter 5) that involved verbal scaffolding strategies—where language was the main strategy for mediating collaboration and pushing discussion forward. Discussion about the digital notes involved explanation, elaboration, procedural instructions, spelling, translation, reading peers’ digital notes, and reading one’s own notes.

The “new note” and “digital note” tools aimed to elicit responses from students during interaction with the reading text on the tabletop computer surface. These responses were writing ideas onto notes and grouping similar responses; their scaffolding functions were direction maintenance and recruiting. The two extracts below, taken from the interviews with the students, show how the use of digital notes on the tabletop computer was viewed as involving sharing their ideas via the digital notes and linking ideas in groups. This required employment of critical thinking and discussion.

Here you write notes and you have to do group after. so this implied you have first of all listening, listen to all the other ideas, and after you have to think how they are linked to each other. So you have to do this kind of work, link different ideas.

First of all, when you write notes, you think, and also as, when you make groups, it is good because you have to listen and see other ideas, and also you have to find the link that there is between different ideas.

Digital notes encouraged the making of groups or putting shared ideas into groups. The grouping stage was made easy because of the inclusion and saving of all ideas in digital form, as these students’ explain:

Yes. And also you can hear how the same idea that you brought before, someone explain but in another, a different way. And you can get expression that you think is useful, or better than yours, note.

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The grouping is ok because you hear, you see what the others note or sentences

Creating digital notes was also viewed as supporting the practice of language skills such as writing, because making the notes usually involved summarization skills:

In one text, you can use listening a little bit because you are speaking with your classmates… You are writing, if someone then corrected the notes that you wrote, it is like you are practising the writing; the speaking if your teacher is listening you; and also reading, and comprehension of the text.

During the prediction stage, the same system scaffolding tools were involved (i.e. “new note”, “create one idea per note”, “digital note”, “add group”, and “group”) because these were embedded in the system and were static. However, peer scaffolding will not always be the same because it is contingent/dynamic and adapts according to peers’ needs. Students on the tabletop computer scaffolded their peers’ behaviour recognised by Langer and Applebee (1986) as peer assistance and later developed by Donato (1994) and renamed collective scaffolding. They scaffolded one another using different verbal and non-verbal strategies (see Figures 5.2, 5.4, and 5.6). According to sociocultural theory these are cognitive strategies by which students mediate their understanding through social processes that allow them to appropriate such scaffolding strategies as their own. This view has been validated in studies such as those of Donato (2000) and Ohta (2000). For verbal scaffolding strategies (speaking and reading), language was the symbolic strategy for mediating language learning and reading comprehension on the tabletop. Other non-verbal strategies, used as symbolic ones by students, were pointing and commenting, pointing without commenting, and the system tool. At the end of each stage, new knowledge was constructed and internalized through various symbolic strategies and tools and through interactional strategies (Walsh, 2012) that afforded opportunities for language learning.