Teaching secondary English Learners to understand, analyze, and write interpretive essays about theme

Olson, Carol Booth, Land, Robert, Anselmi, Thelma, & AuBuchon, Charlie. (2010/2011). Teaching secondary English Learners to understand, analyze, and write interpretive essays about theme. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(4), 245-256.

This article describes an explicit instructional approach designed to teach secondary-level English Learners how to write analytic essays about literature readings. The idea was to prepare these students to perform well on high-stakes state writing assessments (in this case, the state was California). The article centers on details about the approach and its implementation, and goes light on actual discussion of the data and how they were collected and analyzed. The authors do claim to have evidence that the students who experienced the instruction described here did better on the state assessments than did “control groups” (I use quotation marks here because this was not really a true experiment with true control groups) who did not receive the explicit instructional approach. The instruction described here is highly scaffolded, and focuses on cognitive strategies. The article contains several tables and figures that clearly delineate what concepts and strategies were taught, and these would be helpful for a teacher attempting to reproduce the approach in his or her own classroom. Students were clearly told what a theme was and provided examples, modeling, and practice in the determination of themes in stories. They looked at examples of student-written analytical essays and practiced color-coding various types of assertions. Then, in what to me is the most powerful piece of this approach, they looked at essays they themselves had written (which functioned as a pretest for research purposes), and they coded and revised their own essays. This provided a level of authenticity that has to account for some of the success of the approach. It is something that would be worth trying for anyone who teaches writing. I plan to try it in my own college classes.

Although the evidence provided here supports the transfer value of this approach to actual testing situations, I found myself wondering how students made the transition from the supportive, scaffolded environment of their classes to the “sink or swim” environment of the standardized test-taking situation. For example, in class the students had the texts read aloud to them (I assume that was necessary or it would not have been done). How did they do when they had to read on their own in the test-taking situation? In addition, this approach focused on theme in fiction, but how would these students do at analyzing expository text, which tends to be more difficult? All in all, this approach seems like a practical way to help secondary students learn to write analytical essays, and it probably would work with more students than just English Learners. For me, the only sour note here was that once again, standardized testing, and the goal of improving those all-important scores, was the driving force behind the design of instruction. Students here learned to write in a particular genre that is narrow, formulaic, and highly structured, and it doesn’t seem that creativity and original thought were particularly fostered, not to mention motivation to write. One has to wonder how students perceived the nature of writing, and themselves as writers, after experiencing this approach.