The DRTA strategy is simple: while going through a text, the teacher pauses continually at various pre-selected points of the text to ask students to share their impressions, to predict what happens next, and to confirm or refute their prior predictions. This strategy is valued in Lang Arts/literacy contexts because it prompts students to engage actively with the texts they encounter, and to assess and revise their assumptions about those texts as they proceed through it.
However, why not extend the DRTA strategy outright to a full-blown Literature context? Literature teachers shouldn't underestimate the value of such a strategy:
1) It helps both teachers and students to continually assess and ensure the latter's own comprehension of the text. When students predict what might happen next, teachers can also assess correspondingly their grasp of genre conventions.
2) It can foster in students a live sense of how they actively create meaning in the text even as it unfolds before them. This strategy can thus serve to disrupt the falsely unified New Critical approach to interpreting literary texts, which asks students to step back and grasp the text as a whole before they can "truly" analyse its meaning. Students are thus compelled to assess what they are continually learning about the text beyond the confines of the Literature exam's "holistic" angle to textual interpretation.
3) By using the DRTA in both English and Literature classrooms, teachers can also bridge the disciplinary divide that has been maintained in Singapore between the two subjects, despite their technical merger since the 1970s. Students will hence be given an opportunity to rethink how English and Literature are related and relevant to themselves.
Hi Colin, using DRTA in the Literature classroom sounds like an excellent idea. At first I thought that DRTA (especially with picture books) would be more suited for resistant readers rather than students of literature, but I think you’re right -- it’s a promising approach to encourage our students to explore texts in digestible chunks, and to cultivate their patience and persistence when grappling with difficult texts. The emphasis on prediction also helps to prompt students’ thoughts about elements of plot / structure / diction. One caveat, I think, concerns text selection. For classes with experienced readers, DRTA would work best not with popularly known texts (since ‘prediction’ would be futile when students know what’s coming next) but with lesser known works or even unseen poetry. The teacher can then facilitate a discussion that pulls diverse elements covered (e.g. mood, signs, symbols, language etc.) together effectively.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion Colin. To add on to Wai Kit's comment, DRTA can be useful for the Lit classroom, and reading visuals is a good way to begin to teach students to read texts as well. It is a form of scaffolding - and as with all all scaffolding, my question is, at which point do we expect students not to need it anymore?
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