Effect of Paideia Seminar

What is it about?

This article reports the results of an experimental study on the relative effectiveness of the Paideia Seminar in improving the comprehension of poetry and decreasing reading anxiety. The participants (n = 50) were English as a foreign language (EFL) ninth grade learners enrolled in classrooms at a public school in Lebanon. The study employed a pre-test – post-test control group design whereby two intact classes were randomly assigned to control and experimental conditions. The results indicated the effectiveness of Paideia Seminar in improving reading comprehension achievement of the experimental group participants and in decreasing reading anxiety. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

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Why is it important?

The theoretical underpinnings of the study relate to the sociocognitive and the socio-cultural theories of teaching and learning that emphasize the role of the readers’ construction of meaning in reading through discussion and interaction with others. As such, reading is perceived in the context of this study as an active-constructive process in which readers use background knowledge to actively construct meaning in the social setting of the classroom. The socio-cognitive and socio-cultural theories invoked in the study explain the role of discussion in promoting of students’ reading comprehension based on Vygotsky’s conceptualization (1978) of reading and writing as socially constructed higher-order thinking processes. Within such a perspective, children develop reading skills and abilities through active participation in an environment where talk is a vital feature of the social– constructivist pedagogy (Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003). The study is also framed within the theories of active learning which assert that learning communities have a vital impact on making learning meaningful (Vygotsky, 1978) based on the assumption that through involvement in activities that require cognitive and communicative functions, children scaffold and learn together. In addition, the interactive models of the reading process (e.g., Anderson, 2002; Anderson & Pearson, 1988; Kintsch & Dijk, 1978; Just & Carpenter, 1992; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1981; Stanovich, 1980) were adopted as the theoretical lens of the reading process in the context of the present study. These models stipulate that comprehension results from the interaction of as number of reader related and text-related factors that impact of comprehension. Consequently, the pedagogical implications of these models focus on teaching text-recognition and vocabulary learning strategies, text structure awareness, background knowledge, and reading cognitive and meta-cognitive strategies such as prediction, guessing meaning from context, employing schematic knowledge and monitoring of own comprehension of what is read.

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