Abstract:
This study examines the effects of raising the awareness of a group of low achieving secondary school students about reading and writing academic text. The two-fold focus of the teaching programme was on cognitive and metacognitive strategies for comprehending short reading skills passages and how connectives are used in written argument text to signal rhetorical development. The study describes the context of learning for low achieving students in a low socioeconomic decile school and examines definitions of literacy and approaches to the teaching of reading and writing in New Zealand secondary English programmes.
The reading and learning attributions of the students are examined, using a self- report questionnaire, the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory and the results of a Reading Skills pre-test and post-test. These results are considered in relation to their performance in the Reading Skills section of the Year 11 School Certificate English external examination. The use of a writing frame based on the genre of argument and focussed on explicit use of connectives as signals of coherent rhetorical development is discussed.
The results of this study show that the cognitive and metacognitive self-attributions of the Experimental group were raised after training. The performance in the Reading Skills section of the School Certificate English examination showed no significant improvement, but performance in the Writing Skills section did improve.
The implications for teaching and learning of academic reading and writing in the secondary school are discussed and suggestions are made for future research.
