Productive teaching: strategies and outcomes

Language

Culturally-Based Cognitive Apprenticeship

(Teaching African-American High School Students Skills in Literary Interpretation) by Carol D. Lee

The author observes that there is a distinct need for implementation of special strategies pertaining to reading comprehension skills in schools populated by students of African-American or other ethnic minority groups. Cultural orientation plays a crucial role in understanding and interpreting literature alongside general reading and task specific strategies. This automatically implies that the differences in cultural background and home language are important considerations that affect the comprehensive skills of the students in the study of literary texts. Researchers also vary widely in their opinion as to the kind of reading strategies that must be emphasized in view of the disparities in the community. For example 'signifying', use of double extendre and metaphoric statements are important aspects specific to African-American english. The author opines that since interpretations are largely based on the cultural context of the text, prior knowledge (culture specific) plays a crucial role in gaining meaningful insight into the works.

It is a certain fact that culture has much significance in the interpretation and inference of literature. Various researches (Collins et al., Paznik, etc.) have confirmed this relation between culture and comprehension skills of the students. In order for the ethnically diverse students to get better insight in to the complex literary works it is essential that the teaching methodologies employed are based on a culture specific model. The task that remains to be addressed is in identifying the differing attitudes towards language and in devising new instructional methodologies that take these considerations into account. Cultural foundation has important connotations in the perception of literary works and hence designing cognitive models that support an extension of this culture specific interpretation into other literary domains is the ultimate goal of any new teaching methodology.