Comedia Himenea

Although the results as described in 5.3.2 seem to show that the intervention had a positive effect on the strategy knowledge of learners in the experimental group, the data do not necessarily tell the whole story, and I would like to posit that the positive effect of the intervention on the experimental group could have been even greater. Although such a discussion touches on issues that are more qualitative than quantitative in a section dedicated to the discussion of quantitative data, I feel it should be discussed as part of the Strategy Transfer Test data because these data were gathered after completion of the intervention, and because the control group, by not receiving the intervention, were largely excluded from the discussion of qualitative data in 5.1.

In terms of striking a balance in allocating scores for the STT, it did not seem fair to penalise learners from the control group unnecessarily because they had not been exposed to the intervention. During the scoring of responses control group learners

were, therefore, given the benefit of the doubt when the ‗weakness‘ in their answers was due to lack of exposure to the intervention. Final scores were based on my own scoring and that of two additional raters (one of which was a Grade 5 teacher from another school) who performed a separate, independent scoring of the STT responses based on the STT scoring rubric (see 4.5.1.4 for interrater reliability results).

To level the playing field between the learners in the control group and experimental group, question marks were disregarded. However, where control group answers clearly showed that learners did not know the answer, such answers were scored as incorrect. An example of this was the response to the question ―Is this text fiction or non-fiction?‖; many learners from the control group answered ―text fiction‖ instead of merely ―fiction‖ because they were (1) not used to referring to the ―story‖ as a ―text‖, and (2) clearly not familiar with identifying the text type. Therefore they interpreted the question as having to distinguish ―text fiction‖ from ―non-fiction‖ instead of ―fiction‖ from ―non-fiction‖. Not a single learner from the experimental group made this mistake because they had become accustomed to identifying the text type before reading the text, and were used to referring to any piece of writing as a text.

Another example includes the scoring of the Questioning strategy (Q measurement). A question, however poorly phrased, was accepted and scored as a question. This means that learners in the control group who had not received instruction in questioning techniques but were able to provide a question (albeit poorly phrased) sometimes scored virtually the same as learners in the experimental group who provided a well-phrased text-based question. An example of this is found in the responses of a learner from the control group (5C) and experimental group (5E) respectively:

5C L86 – How was the story for you [?]

5E L76 – Why didn‟t Luther miss playing basketball?

In terms of the STT rubric (see Table 4), the question from L86 cannot be rejected as ―Not completely relevant to the text‖ because the control group learners had not been taught to ask specific questions, nor can it altogether be scored as ―Question relevant and text-based only‖ because it is too non-specific and not a text-based question (as taught during the intervention) since it does not refer to anything contained in the text. Refining the rubric‘s scores even further to accommodate the control group learners was not an option because the focus of the scoring was

specific, namely knowledge of specific strategies as taught during the intervention. The Questioning strategy, for example, focused more on teaching learners how to ask questions about the text for improving comprehension, than teaching them how to phrase questions properly (which, ideally, would have to be included in Questioning strategy instruction in the long run).

In addition to similar scores for questions of differing quality, the control group learners‘ general knowledge of terminology used during the intervention was different from the experimental group‘s learners. It was clear that through lack of exposure to the intervention, they had not gained the strategy instruction discourse that the experimental group learners had. For example, the control group learners generally did not know what the terms ―text type‖ or ―summarise‖ meant; as learners encountered these terms during the administration of the STT, they started asking me to explain the term. I explained the terms to a few learners before realising that their lack of knowledge of these terms was the result of not being exposed to the intervention and that their scores needed to reflect this.

Overall the results of the analysis of the STT (and for that matter, the ET) indicate that the research intervention seemed to have a positive effect on the experimental group learners‘ knowledge of the measured strategies. While normally it would not be logical to state that a control group did worse in a test because they were not taught the specifics of what was being tested, it is possible to allege that the intervention did make a difference, since the comparison of ET and STT results for the experimental group shows that the learners improved relative to themselves.

The STT results further provide evidence of measurable strategy knowledge transfer during the intervention, as per research question 3 (see 4.1.3). It should be reiterated that the purpose of the measurements was in the first instance to provide measurable and tangible evidence of the effect of the intervention in order to encourage its continued use by teachers and strengthen any recommendation regarding a framework for strategy instruction that may result from this research. Even though the results seem positive, they are intended to provide evidence of learners‘ strategy knowledge after the intervention as opposed to an increase in learners‘ reading comprehension. An increase in reading comprehension would, however, be the ultimate goal of the continued use of strategy instruction and its continued measurement.

This concludes the discussion and analysis of the quantitative data gathered for this study. The following chapter will deal with the discussion and analysis of the qualitative data; these data formed the main focus of this study and are accordingly analysed in more detail than the quantitative data.