The Readingcast: An Effective Tool to Raise Awareness of Reading Strategies

Guy Stieglitz

This paper discusses how readingcasts were used in the introductory Reading and Writing course of the Bachelor of Education Program at Fujairah Womens College, Higher Colleges of Technology. Readingcasts are a simple, effective tool that can be used to promote metacognitive awareness of reading strategies. The importance of screencasting and the relevance of reading strategies is discussed, followed by the implementation process, and the benefits of readingcasts.

Key words: EFL, reading strategies, metacognition, screencasting

Introduction
Importance of Screencasting Screencasters, or Software Animated Devices, are one of the most powerful educational technologies today because they give teachers the ability to create highly visual, interactive tutorials that can be shared with a simple URL. Once the video has a URL, it can be integrated into course management systems or shared via the plethora of social media outlets, making learning available on demand. A quick tour of YouTube, for example, exemplifies the volume of tutorials in the EFL field designed to teach English, from phonics to essay genres. The ease of creating and sharing tutorials with screencasting technology has even led to an instructional shift in the way some teachers structure learning. The concept of Flipping the Classroom, fueled by popular websites like the Khan Academy, has gained popularity in many schools in the United States, for example. When a classroom is flipped, the student is expected to watch tutorials outside the classroom while applying the content in the classroom with support activities that foster a deeper understanding. One of the strongest benefits of using the flipped classroom model, however, is that it helps teachers meet the needs of struggling students because they can access the videos as often as necessary to ensure mastery (Bergmann & Sams, 2012). Although flipping the classroom has its detractors, screencasting technology has had a major impact on the educational landscape.

The importance of reading strategies According to Gardener, reading strategies are defined as generally deliberate, planful activities undertaken by active learners, many times to remedy perceived cognitive failure (as cited in Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002, p. 225). In other words, active readers think about what they are reading and take the necessary steps to comprehend the text, and this process is very important to EFL students (Huang & Nisbet, 2012). There are a range of reading strategies in the research literature; however, the basic reading strategies the students covered in this project included recalling background information, making predictions about the text, performing frequent comprehension checks, re-reading the text, guessing words in context, confirming predictions, discriminating between important and unimportant ideas, and summarizing the text.

From the research literature, it is clear that there is a specific interest in the area of metacognitive awareness of reading strategies (Iwai, 2009). One recent example is from Alsheikh and Mokhtari (2011) who studied how native Arabic-speaking college students used reading strategies when reading English. They concluded that raising the awareness of reading strategies through explicit teaching is useful. This interest in the metacognitive awareness of reading strategies has led to different methods to achieve this goal. One such method is the MARSI (Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory) created by Mokhtari and Reichard (Mokhtari & Reichard, 2002). Another important measuring tool, the SORS (Survey of Reading Strategies) was specifically designed to be accessible for middle school, high school, and ESL students (Mokhtari & Sheorey, 2002). For both instruments, students answer a series of questions to help them understand the extent they use reading strategies, which can promote reflection and a deeper understanding of how the students implement them. This article, in the spirit of MARSI and SORS, will discuss how readingcasts were used with year one Bachelor of Education students at Fujairah Womens College to raise metacognitive awareness of reading strategies.

The Readingcast What is a readingcast? I define the readingcast as a students demonstration of reading processes via screencasting technology to show how meaning is constructed. This means that a student places a text on the screen and presses the record button narrating the reading process for the teacher to observe the construction of meaning: this can provide an illuminating view of the readers use of reading strategies.

Figure 1: Screenshot of a student readingcast

The readingcast serves two important functions. Firstly, by making the student an active participant in the creation of the readingcast, it facilitates a higher awareness of the reading strategies: the student must actively think and purposely implement reading strategies to successfully complete the readingcast. Secondly, and more importantly, the cast itself can enable reflection as the student plays it back to analyze what strategies were used and how effective they were for her.

Discussion
The learning context The Bachelor of Education Division at Fujairah Womens College runs the English Language Teaching in Schools program (ELTS), which trains Emirate female students to be teachers in the UAE public schools. The students who successfully navigate the program will be qualified to teach K-12 English, which includes reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In the first year of the program, students enter with low reading scores, ranging from band 4.5 to 5.5 on the IELTS exam, and limited understanding of the reading strategies. As students enter the first year

Academic Reading and Writing course, they need to develop the reading strategies to not only be successful academic readers, but also to have a deeper understanding how the process works.

Preparing for success After spending sufficient time drawing attention to the importance of reading strategies, an example readingcast was created for students. The students watched the teacher-created video and answered a series of questions designed (see table 1 below) to draw attention to the different strategies used in the video.
Table 1: The questions used to engage students in the analysis of the teacher-created screencast. Did the reader use the title and images to recall background information? Did the reader make a prediction? Did the reader continuously check comprehension? Did the reader paraphrase information to facilitate comprehension? Did the reader reread as necessary? How did the reader figure out the unknown words? Were the vocabulary guesses correct? What information did the reader skip over? Do you agree that the information was not critical for comprehension? Did the reader breakdown complex sentences effectively? Did the reader check his predictions against the content of the text?

After the students watched the readingcast, they worked in groups to discuss their answers and identify where in the video these basic reading strategies were performed. This group activity was followed by a teacher-led discussion to confirm their findings and offer insight as needed. Because students were not familiar with the concept of a readingcast and generally have only a rudimentary understanding of reading strategies, this priming stage of observing the teachercreated readingcast and the subsequent discussion was critical for success when they created their own videos.

Introducing the students to the technology The next step in creating a readingcast was to familiarize the students with the technology to complete the task. At the Higher Colleges of Technology, students have Camtasia installed on their laptops. Although Camtasia possesses a variety of features, the technological knowledge required to complete the readingcast is as simple as pressing full screen, record, and save.

Figure 2: A screenshot of the Full Screen function of Camtasia

Figure 3: A screenshot of the save feature of Camtasia

Figure 4: Screenshot of the .avi save feature of Camtasia

If the Camtasia program is not available, Screen-O-Matic, a free, web-based program, is available on the internet and simple to use.

Figure 5: Screenshot of Screen-O-Matic website.

Screencasts can be created by pressing the Start Recording button and saved to the desktop, uploaded to YouTube, or saved on the Screen-O-matic website, which automatically creates a link to share the video with the teacher. The website possesses a simple design with clear instructions. Another possibility for sharing is the use of YouTube. Students can upload the videos to their personal account, which makes it very easy for the instructor to view the readingcasts. During the semester, the students used the tool of their choice, some using Camtasia and others using Screen-O-Matic.

Figure 6: Example of different ways to save the video

Creating the text Once the students understand the reading strategies and how to use the screencasting software, the teacher needs to choose an appropriate text. It is important to choose a text that can be read in approximately ten minutes as this will make it feasible for the teacher to watch the videos. The length of the article chosen depends considerably on the reading level of the students. For first semester bachelor students, I chose two articles with a total length of approximately 500 words. I wanted to give them two texts that were interesting, manageable, and connected to their background knowledge. The first article was Eco-friendly mosque to come up in Dubai by 2013 (260 words), published in the Khaleej Times. The second article was Watch your water consumption (268 words), also published in Khaleej Times. These two articles were placed on one Microsoft Word document using 20 pt. font to make the words highly visible when the readingcast was played.

Creating the Readingcast On the day the students create the readingcast, they downloaded the teacher-created text from their email, opened it so it was displayed on their screens, and found a place in the college where they could read. Some students read in the library while others found empty classrooms. They

were free to choose any spot that was reasonably quiet and comfortable. The students were given ten minutes to read the text, five minutes for saving the Camtasia file in avi format, and five minutes to make their way back to the classroom, a total of fifteen minutes. Giving specific time frames is very important for this project because the students read live, which means that they engage the article for the first time after they press the record button: all aspects from recalling background knowledge to summarizing the text are captured on the screen. When they came back to the classroom, the students saved the video files on the teachers external drive.

Reflecting on the strategies The next step was for the students to reflect on what strategies they implemented. This began with a simple class discussion with open-ended questions like How do you feel about your reading? and Did you enjoy the articles?. This dovetailed into more specific questions like What strategies did you use? and Did you find them useful?. The next step in the reflection process required the students to write a reflection essay about their use of reading strategies. To do this task, they were required to watch their readingcast and think about what strategies they felt were implemented successfully and what strategies were not. Although this type of reflection task was a challenge for them, they did make some important connections. For example, one student showed her awareness of choosing important information. I skipped some words such as names of people like Reda Askar and companies names like German quality assurance company SKZ, because I didnt think it will help me to understand the text (Student reflection, January, 2012). Another student also showed some good reflection in regard to her preferences for certain strategies: Truthfully, I didnt use all of the strategies because I thought that some of them arent helpful. For me the most useful aspects were pre- reading strategies and avoiding some unimportant words or sentences. Following this two strategies helped me a lot through reading the text, for my own experience I noticed that when I guess what the text will be about, I read the text more carefully to see if my guess were correct or not (Student reflection, January, 2012).

I also think another student showed awareness of predicting when she wrote: To start with my reading I have bad beginning when I guess that the article is about a Mosque will be built and during 2013 and this mosque will be the largest mosque in Dubai. My guess was wrong, where the subject was that this mosque will be built in a way from which to maintain the consumption of water (Student reflection, January, 2012).

Conclusion Having students create readingcasts has been an enjoyable and illuminating experience for me as a reading teacher. Hearing the students narrate their reading live gave me insight into how they approach reading strategies. For example, I learned that when guessing a word in context the weaker students try to guess the unknown word but do not look at the text that came before and after the word in question, nor do they consider the text as a whole to help them. In addition to the way they use reading strategies, I observed other reading issues that impede comprehension. For example, I found that some students had difficulties dealing with inverted complex sentences. At times students would stop after the initial clause in the sentence and then start the next clause like it was a new sentence. Insights like these, facilitated by the readingcasts, will certainly impact my instructional decisions.

About the Author

Guy Stieglitz has been a member of the Education Division at Fujairah Womens College since 2008. He is interested in effective reading instruction, educational technology and brain-based learning. gstieglitz@hct.ac.ae

References
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