A Vygotskian perspective of foreign language learner discourse during small group reading activities.

摘要

This dissertation, a naturalistic inquiry, explored the participation and discourse patterns of thirty-nine high school foreign language students as they were engaged in small group post-reading activities. The study also considered the correlation between the amount of participation by each student and individual proficiency scores. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were done. Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, which emphasizes speech as mediation, provides the theoretical framework for the qualitative analysis of the case studies of each reading group.;The quantitative analysis of the discourse patterns and the qualitative analysis of the case studies showed many similarities among the groups' choice of metacognitive and cognitive strategies. The discourse was expressed in both L1 and L2, with more than half of all the utterances expressed in L1. Many groups used L1 as a mediational tool to "speak to understand". Like private speech, the groups' discourse, in many cases, was used to comprehend the text and/or to orient the group to organize and plan their recalls of the stories. Both the quantitative and the qualitative analyses showed how L1was always used to discuss grammatical points and to answer vocabulary questions. There was only one group that began to express affective or procedural statements in L2. Most of the students spoke in Spanish (L2) when they were taking turns recalling story events or when they were trying to figure out what to write for the graphic organizers. Graphic organizers, e.g., story maps and summary webs, were created by some of the groups during three of the four reading activities. The simultaneous discussion and creation of a graphic organizer did elicit more discourse about grammar, vocabulary, and how to express in written form what the students were thinking. The three activities that involved both oral and written discourse reflected a reading-to-recall and write process, with many utterances that reflected the writing process as well as the reading comprehension and recall process.;The case studies also discussed the students' stages of regulation (object-, other-, and self-regulation). The students in the groups who showed object-regulation were regulated by each word in the text or they read directly from the text, or in a few cases, they would abandon a part of the text they did not comprehend. The other-regulated groups relied on the questions from a story map, e.g. who, what, where, and what happens, to guide their recall and discussion. The groups and individual students who showed self-regulation or an emerging self-regulation initiated and sustained recall statements about the stories in their own words.;The final questions considered whether or not there was a correlation between participation rates and proficiency scores. The analysis showed that there were unequal participation rates among most groups during all four activities. Furthermore, pre-proficiency scores on a state-mandated test were not generally predictive of the amount of participation and student participation was not related to oral proficiency on a post-interview about a story. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).