Summary
This study included 37 students (all but two spoke Spanish as their first language) in a fifth grade class at an elementary school in a large city. The study researched “how often and in what ways bilingual students helped each other and their limited English proficiency (LEP) peers while working together in small, heterogeneous groups as they implemented CSR” (Klinger & Vaughn, 2000, p. 75). Collaborative strategic reading (CSR) is a cooperative learning classroom technique that was developed to reap the benefits of collaboration for language development. Mixed ability students (i.e., students with various reading and achievement levels) assist one another in using four reading strategies to aid their comprehension of a content-area text. The four strategies are preview, click and clunk, get the gist, and wrap-up. Once students are familiar with the strategies, they are divided into new small groups and each student is assigned a role explicitly taught by the teacher. These roles include leader, clunk expert, announcer, encourager, and timekeeper. During this process, students record what happens in their CSR learning logs and once finished, complete various follow-up activities. This kind of technique was shown to be effective due to the teachers thoroughly teaching the roles and skills involved with CSR. These researchers reported that their students spent more time engaged in academic-related strategic discussion than that found in previous studies. The fifth graders in this study readily helped one another in the ways demonstrated to them by their teacher. CSR in this study also resulted in significant improvement of the students’ scores on English vocabulary tests.
Reflection
This method and study did have some limitations. Since this is a student directed activity, teachers must be keenly aware of what is happening in each group. The teacher should ensure that all of the students are participating and that none of the students get marginalized. This study only looked at one class, so it is hard to determine if the success of this study would be repeated in other classrooms because class dynamics can greatly vary. One further limitation of this study was that the researcher states that her students were “remarkably engaged in learning” (Klinger & Vaughn, 2000, p. 94), while students in other classes may not show the same desire and motivation for learning.
Though I have never taught ESL reading, I believe CSR would be good to try for improving the reading abilities of students. This method goes beyond traditional cooperative learning and adds new dimensions and responsibilities for students to help each other improve their reading and comprehension ability. Along with this, based on the research, students also improve their vocabulary. In addition, it can be used in tandem with other strategies to introduce or reinforce important concepts. This would be a useful strategy to use with students in any type of classroom, whether they are ESL students or not. CSR gives a structure and format conducive to high levels of student engagement and therefore is ideal for a teacher wishing to teach reading comprehension strategies and implement cooperative learning in his/her classroom. If ever asked to teach ESL reading, I would be certain to utilize this method and then compare my results to that of the researchers.
