Action-Oriented Approach and Academic Reading: Creating Tools to Guide Learner Development

Recently, there has been a renewed interest towards the Action-oriented Approach (e.g., O’Dwyer & Runnels, 2014; Piccardo & North, 2019), which particularly intensified with the appearance of the Companion Volume to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR/CV) (COE, 2020). This chapter reports on the outcomes of two cycles of an action research project, informed by the CARM model (Birch et al., 2021), whose goal was to design tools to guide the development of the learners’ critical reading skills. Using backward design, we worked from specific reading comprehension and mediation competence descriptors of the Companion Volume to create two tools. The first was the Group Leader Discussion Question tool, a step-by-step scale designed to guide learners in creating comprehension and critical reading questions. The goal of the questions was to enable peers’ reflection and understanding of the text as a coherent whole and its connection to larger societal issues, as well as recognising the author’s intentionality. The second was the Group Leader Discussion Checklist based on mediation descriptors (COE, 2020). Its goal was, namely, developing learners’ mediation competence while they guided their peers’ understanding of the text using the questions created, informed by the first tool. The study was inspired by the desire to move away from the product-orientedness of the academic reading course towards focusing on learning as a contingent cycle (O’Dwyer & Runnels, 2014). The data come from two iterations of a first-year academic reading course in spring and autumn 2021, its learner participants being the subjects. The data were collected from the learners’ performance, video recordings of learner interactions, learner interviews and questionnaires, and the instructor’s (first author’s) reflective notes. The tools were refined between the two course iterations, the collected data allowing for both identifying areas for development of the tools and establishing the successfulness of the tools in guiding the development of learners’ critical reading competence.