2. Multi-sensory pedagogical designs: Catering students’ varied learning styles

While some students find reading a text more effortless than others, students who are still grappling with basic vocabulary and sentence structures may be easily demotivated when faced with a lengthy text, let alone having to decode the sentences and grasp the key messages in the paragraphs. To help these students, teachers break down the process of reading into ‘understanding the concepts’ and ‘understanding the language’ instead of having less able students trying to do both at the same time.

Before presenting students with the text, teachers helped less able students by showing them a video clip from the movie ‘Wonder’, in which the character Auggie has the same experience of being disabled and being bullied like Nick. Teachers guided students in taking notes about Auggie’s problems and how his mother helped him. Then, teachers guided students in comparing Auggie with Nick to help them understand the concept of ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’. By introducing a movie clip with a similar ‘problem – solution’ structure to less able students, it was hoped that they could grasp the concepts before moving on to decode the text and that they would not be demotivated by having to struggle with concepts and language at the same time.

3. Contingent scaffolding: Designing reading comprehension questions with scaffolding to suit the varied readiness of students

Another obstacle faced by students was that questions testing students’ inference skills (See Fig. 1 below) was extremely challenging as the answers cannot be located directly from the text. Teachers discussed the various steps involved in tackling an inference question and instead of giving only lines for students to fill, they broke the thinking process into manageable chunks (See Fig. 2 below).

Fig.1 An example of inference question students have to tackle after reading the text

Fig. 2 Breaking the question into a series of steps to guide students in inferencing

Another type of question that teachers found students struggle with was identifying the main theme of paragraphs and spotting the wrong option(s) in a multiple-choice format. Since the ideas in the paragraphs had been generalized into a single noun phrase, students were required to first identify the options with the paragraph using the key words and single out the option that was not discussed in the text (Fig. 3). To aid less able students, teachers required them to write down the paragraph numbers in which students could find the relevant information (Fig. 4). This not only helped students to eliminate the options they could not locate in the paragraphs, but also helped teachers see why students got the answers wrong.

Fig. 3 Question that requires students to identify the main idea in each paragraph and single out the option that was irrelevant

Fig. 4 Requiring students to write down the paragraph numbers helped them eliminate the option in a more visible manner and helped teachers see the part that went wrong when students got the wrong answers

Conclusion

On the 30-minute lesson that was observed, students were instructed to take notes on (1) Auggie’s difficulties, (2) how his teacher and mom help him and (3) the person he admires as well as some adjectives to describe him/her (See Fig. 5). With the step-by-step guidance of teachers, students were able to fill in the blanks and gained a clear picture of the ‘problem – solution – personality revealed’ structure, which prepared them for a similar table analyzing the main text on Nick (see Fig. 6)

Fig. 5 Students jotted notes on a table form showing the structure of ‘problem – solution – personalities’

Fig. 6 A similar table-form activity helping students to analyze the same structure in the main text about Nick

On following lessons, less able students were able to identify the problems faced by Nick and his parents’ help using the method of colour coding. The rewritten version helped students focused on the key messages without being confused by additional ideas. This made it easier for students to understand the key message “parents’ love can help one overcome obstacles in life” presented in the text before they moved on to comprehend the more difficult version in the textbook. Teachers commented that even the less able students, being able to grasp the key ideas and key message, were able to understand the difficult version of the text in the textbook and could focus on developing other reading skills like vocabulary inferencing.

As for the reading comprehension questions, teachers reflected that having questions that required more basic reading skills like identifying specific information in the text would help students to warm up and build confidence. It would also help teachers to check students’ understanding before students move on to attempt questions that require analytical ability and inference skills.