Abstract
This article discusses the effectiveness of using an approach based on a virtual learning environment (VLE) to enhance the close-reading skills of first-year English undergraduates. The first two sections explore the practical and theoretical issues involved in adopting such an approach; the third describes the design and functions of a VLE close-reading resource designed for this purpose; and the fourth and fifth elucidate the methodology and findings of a two-year research project which aimed to evaluate the resource’s effectiveness. Analysis of the findings shows: first, that student usage of the resource is significantly enhanced by tutor recommendation; second, that student usage strategies are highly instrumental (i.e. that students disproportionately choose texts likely to feature in the end-of-year exam); and third, that the expansion of the number of particular kinds of worked examples would increase the usefulness of the resource. The implications of these findings for use of the VLE resource are discussed.
Introduction
Close reading – also sometimes known as ‘practical criticism’ or ‘critical analysis’ – has long been regarded as a foundational skill within English studies. Yet as several recent studies (as well as anecdotal evidence) have suggested, students’ ability to excel in the demanding discipline of close reading now seems to be in decline. In this article, we describe our own experience of planning, producing and operating a resource, Close Reading Exercises (CRE), based on a virtual learning environment (VLE), as a means of helping students to develop skills as close readers of literary texts. We explain our reasons for opting for a VLE-based resource, rather than a more traditional approach, describe the resource itself in detail, and discuss the data – both qualitative and quantitative – for students’ use of the resource over the first two years. In the final section, we explore the significance of our findings for the future use and development of CRE and for institutional VLE-based resources more generally.
Close Reading Exercises: Background and rationale
Close reading may be defined as the detailed and sustained interpretation of a brief passage of text. The origins of close reading as a critical method can be traced to a series of teaching experiments undertaken in Cambridge in the 1920s by I. A. Richards (Richards, 1929). By stripping texts of contextual information, Richards sought to encourage students to concentrate wholly on the verbal form, style, and content of a poem or piece of prose, rather than be influenced by preconceived ideas about historical periods, aesthetic worth, or canonicity. The ‘hands-on’ skills fostered by close reading – e.g. applied attention to language, imagery, form and genre – appealed to many teachers of English, and by the mid twentieth century, literary studies at both school and university level were dominated by Richards-style practical criticism and/or the very similar techniques of American New Criticism. In the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of approaches such as New Historicism and Cultural Materialism led to a brief decline in the popularity of close reading, which was seen by some as less intellectually challenging than theory-based methods, and was also sometimes dismissed as theoretically problematic or critically naïve. In more recent years, however, the balance has shifted again, and close reading has regained popularity as a foundational practice within English studies. Seen as complementing and facilitating, rather than undermining, more theoretical approaches to literature, it is now a required component of many undergraduate degree programmes.
Close reading has also been endorsed in recent pedagogical scholarship as a means of developing students’ skills and self-confidence as independent learners. Gibson and Knights, for example, find that when close reading is taught from the beginning of a degree programme, and across an entire curriculum, students are better equipped to develop analytical skills such as critical thinking and reading (Gibson and Knights, 2008: 23). Comparably, Bass and Linkon place particular emphasis on the role of close reading in raising student awareness of the core interpretative practices used in literary criticism. By engaging in close reading themselves, students are more likely to reflect on their own analytical process, and thus to move from a surface to a deep approach to learning (Bass and Linkon, 2008: 246, 259–60). Other studies have shown the important role played by the teaching of close reading in helping students to make the difficult transition from school to university (Ellis, 2008; Goddard and Beard, 2007; Green, 2005).
The difficulty for university teachers of English is that increasing numbers of undergraduate students now seem to struggle with the practice of close reading. This may, for many UK students, be due in part to the current structure of A level English literature, which in recent years has lacked a substantial close reading component (Bleiman and Webster, 2006: 11–12). Other factors may include lack of training in close reading methods among GCSE and A level teachers of English (perhaps as a belated trickle-down consequence of the late twentieth-century emphasis on theory), the decline in sustained reading practices in the post-internet generation (Chambers and Gregory, 2006), or the naïve use of internet sources, such as Google and Wikipedia, which is sometimes thought to encourage surface and instrumental learning (see e.g. Kiili et al., 2008). Whatever the reason, students’ poor performance in close-reading assessments creates a potential problem within the many undergraduate programmes which continue to prioritize the practice of close reading, especially in first-year modules. This problem is in turn exacerbated by the parallel issue of high student numbers and rising staff–student ratios. Whereas in the past, university teachers could have attempted to improve students’ close-reading skills through extensive use of formative essays, pressure of numbers means that currently this remedy is, within many institutions, no longer available. If the importance of close reading within the discipline of English is to be sustained, a new and more feasible solution needs to be found.
In our own academic department (Department of English, University of Birmingham), close reading is a highly valued skill and has in recent years formed a key part of student assessment in years 1 and 2 of the undergraduate degree programme. Between 2003 and 2010, for instance, a three-hour Close Reading exam comprised 50% of the assessment for our students’ principal first-year literature module, Literature Foundation. However, results for the Literature Foundation Close Reading paper over the first few years were consistently disappointing and, tutors felt, did not accurately reflect students’ true levels of commitment and ability. Attempts were made to improve students’ performance in the Close Reading exam through lecture and seminar support, but to little effect. We concluded that focusing on teaching delivery, though important, was not enough. A means of encouraging and enhancing students’ active learning was also required.
In summer 2008, following an end-of-year module review meeting, we began developing a VLE-based resource named Close Reading Exercises (CRE). The aim of CRE was twofold: to help students to understand the aims and methods of close reading and to practise their own critical skills. In planning CRE, we drew partial inspiration from the ‘Virtual Classroom’ of the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. The ‘Virtual Classroom’ models practical criticism of Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ and the opening section of Chaucer’s ‘Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales (http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/vclass/class2/index.htm). Our own resource, however, was thoroughly reconceived both to take advantage of the most up-to-date technological innovations and to reflect distinctive aspects of our own departmental practice and assessment of close reading. As we will show, a key objective in our development of the resource was that it should relate as closely as possible to the summative assessments our students were required to undertake.
VLEs have, to date, enjoyed a mixed reception within educational literature. Some studies have argued that VLEs promote active learning through encouraging students to navigate their way through a series of screens (Rogers, 2004; Silverman, 1996); others, however, have questioned how deeply students engage with the learning resource during this process (Ellis et al., 2006; Machemer and Crawford, 2007). Case and Marshall (2004) suggest that ‘procedural surface learning’ can often result from such unsupervised, self-directed learning, in which students focus more on the successful achievement of the task at hand, and less on understanding the concepts or issues behind the task (Knight, 2010: 68). Most recently, Jasper Knight has built on earlier studies to demonstrate a correlation between learning strategies, use of VLEs and student performance. His findings suggest that students who adopt a deep learning approach, in which online resources are accessed consistently throughout a module, perform markedly better in assessed work than surface learners who concentrate their online activity only at the beginning or end of a module’s duration (Knight, 2010: 67, 74). Our aim in developing CRE as a VLE-based resource was to take advantage of the opportunity thus offered to inculcate habits of regular and reflective critical practice among our students. By developing such habits, students should be encouraged both to take more responsibility for their own learning and also to achieve a deeper understanding of the activity of close reading.
Close Reading Exercises: Context and content
Context
As the preceding discussion indicates, CRE was devised as a support resource for a first-year literature module, Literature Foundation. 1 Literature Foundation is a compulsory two-semester module, delivered by means of two weekly lectures and one weekly seminar. Between 2003 and 2010, the module was assessed by means of two three-hour exams, both held during the summer term. The three-part Close Reading exam thus formed 50% of the assessment for the module.
The following summary describes CRE and Literature Foundation as they existed in academic years 2008–9 and 2009–10. Subsequent developments in the resource are briefly discussed in the concluding section of this article.
Content
Close Reading Exercises can be accessed by English students enrolled in the WebCT section for Literature Foundation. Clicking on the CRE icon leads to an entry page and on to the CRE homepage (Figure 1).
Close Reading Exercises – homepage.
On the homepage, clicking on ‘Introduction and basic guidelines’ leads to a short definition of close reading and suggestions for how best to use the resource. Clicking on any of the three author portrait icons leads to the ‘intellectual contents’ of the resource: namely, worked examples of close reading. The three extracted texts – from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foulys had all previously been included in the same (2008) Literature Foundation examination paper. One reason for choosing these three texts was to provide a range of materials from different periods and genres. Another was to offer students targeted guidance relevant to each of the three sections of the Close Reading paper: ‘Unseen’, ‘Focal Authors’ and ‘Focal Texts’. Students taking Literature Foundation in 2008 would have studied Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foulys; they would have studied another play by Jonson (Volpone) but not The Alchemist; they would not have studied Isherwood at all.
Two example pages from CRE, showing extracts from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foulys and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, are reproduced as Figures 2 and 3. In each case, the primary text is fixed on the left-hand side of the screen, while the student is able to scroll down and advance page-by-page through the commentary on the right-hand side of the screen. Each close reading occupies approximately ten brief pages of text, building from introductory remarks, through detailed questions and comments on the literary qualities of the text (including attention to form, style, content and context), to ‘one possible answer’ and a section of ‘further work/reading’. In the examples below, students are guided to consider the importance of language and their own critical vocabulary (in the Chaucer) or of the use of dialogue and proper names (in the Jonson). Hyperlinks to external information sources (such as the Oxford English Dictionary and The Middle English Dictionary), or to pop-up glosses on difficult words or concepts, are embedded throughout the commentary.
Example page from commentary on The Parlement of Foulys. Example page from commentary on The Alchemist.
Students can also supplement their reading by listening to podcasts. The resource offers audio-file readings of the three texts, available either by downloading mp3 files, or by listening online via the ‘Podcasts’ icon on the homepage (see Figure 1). Users can also provide online feedback via the ‘Feedback’ link on the homepage, which connects directly to a questionnaire in Google docs. The responses to the questionnaire are then collated and stored in a spreadsheet within Google docs (accessible by the resource designer). Lastly, navigation through the resource is via the use of a ‘Next/Previous Page’ link, or drop-down menu at the foot of each page.
Data collection: Methodology
Following the launch of CRE in November 2008, we embarked on a process of data collection – quantitative and qualitative – in order to measure student usage of the resource. Statistical data – recording frequency, duration and types of use – were collected from two sources: the VLE tracking facility and student questionnaires. The same questionnaires also yielded attitudinal data, which were richly supplemented by the transcripts of student focus groups. For the purpose of year-on-year comparison, we conducted the same data collection process in the same November–May period of the following academic year (2009–10). In both 2008–9 and 2009–10, CRE was supported by equivalent levels and types of publicity, thereby making comparisons possible across the two years. Students were alerted to the resource in both years by a lecture announcement early in the autumn semester, supported by tutor recommendations, an email reminder and poster publicity. The relative effectiveness of these different means of raising awareness is discussed below. While every attempt has been made to build a meaningful bank of statistical evidence, it must be acknowledged that it is not always easy to capture in numbers the full range of interactions and effects involved in learning and teaching. Student responses to questionnaires and focus groups must also be interpreted with care given that such responses often attempt to second-guess or please the questioner, rather than express the reality. The reliability and/or limitations of the statistical and qualitative findings below, therefore, are fully acknowledged and discussed wherever relevant.
Findings
Usage
Number of visits to Close Reading Exercises.
Source: WebCT tracking data.
Average duration per visit to Close Reading Exercises.
Source: WebCT tracking data.
The figures for the average duration of each visit to CRE, shown in Table 2, are subject to the same limitations as the absolute number of visits shown in Table 1. WebCT tracking data shows that the average length of a visit to CRE in 2009–10 was 8.9 minutes, down marginally from the previous year. By contrast, the average duration of a visit to the Literature Foundation WebCT section more generally was just 4.5 minutes in 2009–10. Owing to the time-out problem mentioned above, it is likely that WebCT tracking data under-reports the average duration of visits both to CRE and the whole module. Nevertheless, the 2:1 ratio recorded by the WebCT tracking facility – between the duration of a visit to CRE and a visit to the whole module – is more statistically sound, and corroborated by qualitative feedback provided by students themselves. Students in focus groups reported spending between 20 minutes and one hour per visit to CRE.
there’s really only a finite amount of times you can use it, because once you’ve gone over one of them in great detail, unless you’re trying to reinforce it in your memory, there’s not much point in doing it again because you know the response that’s on there.
Frequency of use.
Source: Questionnaire data.
Notes: *Response rate: 134/292 = 46% of cohort.
Response rate: 99/265 = 37% of cohort.
This suggests that the average number of visits per CRE per student is, in reality, somewhat lower than the 3.5 visits estimated by WebCT. What can be said for certain, however, is that almost 30% of students in the cohort in 2009–10 had never used CRE at all. The most effective means of raising awareness of the resource and encouraging student usage are therefore analysed below.
As Figure 4 shows, two means of publicity – lecture announcement and tutor recommendation – rated significantly higher than others in response to the question, ‘How did you hear about Close Reading Exercises?’ In 2009–10, 50% of all respondents said that they had heard of CRE via a lecture announcement, and over 40% claimed to have heard of CRE through tutor recommendation. Tutor recommendation proved a significantly more effective way of raising student awareness of CRE in 2009–10 than in the previous year as tutors themselves became more aware of the resource. Less immediate means of publicity – such as email reminder, posters, and other (word-of-mouth, casual browsing of WebCT) – proved to be far less effective in raising student awareness of CRE than direct referral by lecturers and tutors. Students in focus groups also suggested that announcements about CRE should be made throughout the academic year, and not just at the beginning: I’d recommend that people mention it more frequently because you get all of this information at the very beginning [of term] and then you … gradually … forget about things.
Most effective means of publicity.
Figure 5 shows the overwhelming popularity of Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foulys among users of CRE in both 2008–9 and 2009–10. There are two main reasons why students so frequently opted to consult this worked example rather than those for Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist or Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. In focus groups, a number of students commented that the Chaucer example is the most useful because the text itself – The Parlement of Foulys – is the most difficult for students to understand. Few students encounter Middle English texts at A level, and the language and world in which the text was written are far removed from contemporary experience. The second, more instrumental reason for the popularity of the Chaucer text is that, at the time this research was carried out, The Parlement of Foulys was one of seven ‘focal texts’ on the Literature Foundation module (i.e. a text that is certain to appear on the summer exam paper). As one student in a focus group put it: ‘Chaucer was useful when we started Parlement of Foulys … I probably wouldn’t look at a close reading exercise that didn’t relate to something on my course.’ Student preference for the Chaucer text also extended to the podcasts, where the reading of The Parlement of Foulys was by far the most popular of the three available: Yes, I listened to [the podcasts], especially with something like Chaucer where it’s quite hard to … assimilate and speak in that kind of dialect – it’s really useful having someone that’s experienced to read it to you and then to read it through how you would after that.
Which text used?.
Benefits of CRE for student performance?
Exam results: Literature Foundation, Paper 1, mean and standard deviation.
Source: School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies Marks Database.
In what ways was Close Reading Exercises most beneficial?
Source: questionnaire data.
Note: Figures sum to >100% because more than one answer was permissible per respondent.
Statements made by students in focus groups corroborate and add detail to the picture that emerges from the questionnaire data. A number of students stated in particular that CRE was effective in preparing them to answer close reading questions in the exam: ‘it’s … useful because it develops the kind of skills that you’re expected to know with the close reading exams, like what to go through, what stages to do it in, form, content, and style’. Students also felt that CRE helped them with time-management in exams: ‘I found it very useful in gauging how long it would take me to do the questions … so I was more conscious of time and how to better organise my answer’. Students in focus groups also discussed how useful they found CRE for refreshing their memories as part of exam revision. Significantly, they also felt that CRE helped them to make the difficult transition from expectations of close reading at A level, to expectations at degree level: Obviously … assessment objectives change … at A level and university, so, where you may have been looking at completely different things at A level to close read on, or things may have been weighted in a special way so that you may refer to context more than style, for example, … you know [due to CRE], kind of how to go about it at university to maximise your marks.
Perhaps most importantly, students in focus groups also acknowledged that CRE had fired their enthusiasm to read more widely and deeply in texts previously unfamiliar to them, such as Chaucer’s Parlement of Foulys. This suggests that teaching close reading skills via a VLE may benefit students in ways that are not purely instrumental. By stimulating student curiosity, and engaging them in the highly active processes of observation, interpretation, and composition of a close reading, CRE appears to have made a genuine impact on student understanding and enjoyment of reading.
Conclusions: Theory and practice
Understanding the strategies that students adopt when they use a VLE-hosted resource such as Close Reading Exercises is important because such strategies are closely associated with surface and deep learning approaches (Knight, 2010: 74). While linking use of VLE resources such as CRE to specific assignments certainly encourages usage, it may not, on its own, foster the more curiosity-driven, exploratory and enquiry-based approach associated with deep, active learning (Ellis et al., 2005). As the findings in Section 4 show, a significant portion of student usage of CRE appears to be narrowly instrumental in its motivation (i.e. ‘learning-to-the-test’). This kind of learning strategy is often closely associated with surface rather than deep learning approaches. It is crucial, therefore, that future amendments to the design and use of CRE incorporate those elements that encourage deep rather than surface learning. This imperative is consistent with the twofold aim of CRE and its ongoing development overall: to improve student understanding of the nature of the task at hand, and to hone and strengthen student ability in the skills of close reading and textual interpretation, skills that are foundational to English studies and the humanities more generally.
Increasing the duration of each student visit to CRE is an essential first step in encouraging students to adopt a deep approach to learning. Time spent working through each sample close reading, from start to finish, is far more likely to result in active, critical engagement than rapid, superficial browsing of the same pages. Accordingly, tutors in the most recent academic session, 2010–11, were encouraged to tie usage of CRE to a formative writing assignment. Students themselves, in focus groups and in response to the questionnaires, supported this tie-in, acknowledging that assessment motivates usage. Moreover, anecdotal reports from tutors and markers of formative work suggest that the tie-in proved successful in increasing student usage of CRE. Proposals to make use of CRE compulsory within the assessment of first-year literature modules are under discussion, but are subject to the University’s code of practice on assessment.
In the light of Section 4’s findings, we also sought to increase and enhance usage by expanding the number and type of worked examples available on CRE. In July 2010 CRE was awarded additional funds from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for study skills support, enabling the project to employ a postgraduate student for 30 hours to expand CRE content. The result was the addition of a sample close reading, and podcast reading, of an extract from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale. In 2010–11, this text replaced The Parlement of Foulys as the medieval focal text in the Literature Foundation module. The addition of The Reeve’s Tale close reading was also undertaken in response to student feedback, which called for more sample close readings of Middle English texts. Should funds be made available, we intend to add further worked examples – across a range of historical periods and literary genres – in the future. The use of quizzes to stimulate student interest and enhance learning is also under consideration.
We also responded to student feedback by enhancing the design of CRE’s layout. Most importantly, the link to ‘Introduction and basic guidelines’ was moved to a more prominent position on the CRE homepage. The focus groups revealed that students had not previously been aware that such a link even existed. It is hoped, and expected, that students’ understanding of the principles of close reading, as well as its practice, will be enhanced by reading the introductory material. The redesign also deleted the entry page from the site, allowing students to reach the homepage in a single click instead of two. Further user-friendly enhancements are planned for future editions of the site, including: (a) the provision of a text-only version, for off-campus use; (b) the inclusion of a progress-indicator, positioned at the top of each webpage, so that a user can monitor his/her progress through each commentary; (c) the addition of multiple-choice-question quizzes at the end of each close reading.
We also aim to share CRE with the larger academic community. At present, CRE is a restricted-use resource, accessible only to students of the University of Birmingham. In the longer term, however, we are planning for CRE to be hosted on the outward-facing platform of the University’s website. This will make a valuable learning tool available to a wide range of potential users, including staff and students in both higher and secondary education. No doubt the relative merits of e-learning will continue to be debated for many years to come. To e-learning detractors, resources such as CRE, made available on the internet, may seem to replace the educator with content, and to epitomize an instructivist approach to learning. To e-learning enthusiasts, making CRE available on the web is likely to be viewed more positively, as an encouragement to assisted learning, and ‘learning by doing’, representing a constructivist approach to learning (Weller, 2007: 6–7). In fact, a blended approach that integrates asynchronous use of CRE by students with synchronous, face-to-face discussion in seminars and classes (Littlejohn and Pegler, 2007: 101–3) combines both these elements, instructivist and constructivist. It is by integrating these approaches to learning that CRE is able to stimulate users to improve their close reading skills.