Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Zuzana Šaffková
Reading between the lines as an ability to spot and analyse underlying assumptions in text.
Finding and evaluating sources of evidence in arguments and whether the line of reasoning is
ordered in a logical way.
Recognizing and interpreting specific context clues.
Understanding the writer’s point of view is an important comprehension skill for students and therefore
in Unit 1 (Figure 3) the students could practice and consolidate a variety of techniques that help build
up this skill. Consequently, through explicit in-class modeling and examples, and a consequent online
practice, they rehearsed making connections between key points in the passage, drawing
inferences and extracting concepts. In a self-test activity they were required to read a text about the
atomic attack on Hiroshima and prove that they were able to comprehend the text and analyze it (Q1)
so that they could understand the writer’s point of view (Q2).
Q1.1 Specific detail 1
Q1.2 Reason
Q1.3 Specific detail 2
Q1.4 Specific detail 3
Q1.5 Specific detail 4
Q2.1 The w riter´s tone
Q2.2 Figurative language
Q2.3 Word choice
Q2.4 Writer´s point of view
Figure 3: Capturing the writer’s point of view (N=112)
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Correct
Incorrect
The assessment of the students´ first work in a self-regulated online learning environment brought two
different results. The percentage of the students who succeeded in identifying the writer’s main idea
and specific details that support it increased and reached a stable rate (86% on average for Q1.1-
1.5), compared to the diagnostic task (76% on average for Q1.1-2 and 50% on Q2). On the other
hand the students´ struggled when they had to describe the writer’s point of view, which is a skill that
requires “interpreting text by going outside it” and “understanding information when not explicitly
stated” (Grellet 1981, p. 5). On average only 60% of the students successfully answered all the
questions that required these skills (Q2.1-2.4), which was also an important signal for a consequent
face-to-face practice.
Understanding and isolating key information in a text in order to identify argument and distinguishing
argument from different types of messages was the aim of Unit 2 (Figure 4). Within in-class training,
the students were exposed to examples of descriptive and explanatory texts, summaries and
background information passages that usually surround an argument, and were expected to locate
and determine them in short extracts. In an on-line activity, they were to read an article about
extraterrestrial life and identify the conclusion (Q1) as well as the reasons that support it and then
decide which part of the text functions as an introduction, description, explanation, summary and
background information (Q2-6).
The skill of identifying a variety of methods the writer can use to develop his/her ideas was beyond
the students abilities. The main reason for a failure in this task was caused, as the students
mentioned in a successive in-class session, due to some interference from their writing classes,
where the function of a conclusion was characterized as the final word of a paragraph or a summary
statement that restates the topic sentence. Therefore the majority of the students considered the last
sentence of the extract a conclusion (Ql – 95%), which was not correct. This initial misunderstanding
contributed to the fact that once, being taken in the wrong direction, they could not properly analyse
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