Text-based discussions enable students to employ constructivism in two important ways: (1) by recognizing the meaning(s) authors/creators make in their work and (2) by enabling students to create meaning(s) on their own. These constructivist functions are realized by diving deeply into texts to uncover how meaning is performed in them; how texts are organized, their message(s), and how, when, where, and why they were produced all add to texts meaning.
To be sure, texts in this sense aren’t just written texts. As Jack Richards discusses, a text is a coherent unit of meaning making/language. A text could be short like a Tweet or long like an essay; spoke like a speech, written like a letter, or performed like a ballet dance number. Because texts have such a broad definition here, text-based discussions are especially effective within disciplinary courses, not as some “reading lesson” to be done outside of the “real content work” of a course.
In fact, thinking about how texts in our disciplines both express meaning and how meaning made from them is important for our students to understand our discipline and succeed in their studies. Recently, a Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) illustrated that 4th grade reading scores were on the rise, bucking a trend towards the “4th Grade Slump.” Although I argue that the PIRLS is not as strong a measure of reading achievement than the PISA (and shouldn’t be made too big a deal of here), what was interesting about the PIRLS data was that there was little change in 8th grade scores. Historically, US students who have fallen into the 4th Grade Slump,” meaning that they are not proficient readers at that age, fall off the “8th Grade Cliff,” meaning that they rarely catch back up to their same-age peers in reading proficiency. One reason for this issue is that the middle school years begin students’ journey into complex narrative and expository texts—the texts that are most used in our disciplines. Authentically teaching students how to access these texts is critical to their success in school and in the world.
When discussing texts with students, we need to develop questions that (1) get at the heart of the text, forcing students to draw out the meaning from the text and make meaning on their own and (2) encourage students to reconcile inconsistencies in the language and logic of texts, enabling them to see how language and images work to create certain meanings. Watch how this teacher attempts to get her students to think about the former; she asks questions that push the students back into the text, making connections between events and facts.
Encouraging students to reconcile inconsistencies may be more difficult but just as important. Creating these questions requires the teacher to have a firm understanding of the genres within his/her discipline; in other words, the teacher must have strong “disciplinary literacy” skills that enable him/her to explore how meaning is created with the students. The way that we reason, investigate, and communication about our subjects comprises our disciplinary literacy. Although these processes are various (as are the texts that embody them), there are a few linguistic relationships that might help you see texts in a more disciplinary way as you work with your students to do the same.