PROJECT PROFILES

Bridging Novice and Expert Thinking: ". . .Theresa Cha's Dictee: an interactive reading guide"

by Michael Coventry and Susannah McGowan

Hoping to "get students thinking about the text before they arrive in class," Professor Viet Nguyen of the University of Southern California has created an interactive reading guide to Theresa Cha's book, Dictée. Nguyen, Assistant Professor of English and a VKP Core Campus Coordinator, created the site to help students "unpack" the important, but challenging, postmodern text for his spring semester course in Asian-American Literature.

Below is an image of the first page of Viet's site. To read the other pages of this article, click on the link below the image AAAA.

On each page of the site, Nguyen provides an electronic image of a page from the text highlighting key phrases. When students mouse over the highlighted text, Nguyen's comments and questions appear. On each page students will also find one or two broader questions that tie together different elements of the page. These broader questions require students to post a written response to a Blackboard discussion board.

To read the other pages of this article, click on the link below the images.

When students roll over a highlighted selection of text, Viet's comments and a thought-provoking question come up in this area.

For this word, "diseuse," Viet's comments provide an English translation from the French as well as a question about the word's possible connotation in English.

Viet's questions and comments move student thinking outward, from the words on the page, helping them draw connections between the text and knowledge they have from other places. "Some of the questions ask students to reflect upon what contexts and histories might be relevant here," Nguyen says. "In particular, some students have brought in historical/contextual knowledge that the professor and the rest of the class did not have."

To read the other pages of this article, click on the link below the images.

Viet's comments and questions take students outward from this quote (about speech causing pain) to the concept as a recurring theme in Asian-American
literatures (the topic of his course).

Viet's comments and questions move students outward from the course to broader themes of nationality and gender.

In the final exercise on each page, Viet asks overall questions that tie together the concepts illustrated on that page. Students post their responses to a Blackboard discussion space.

The dictée site models one teaching strategy to tie a single text into "the basic themes of text/context and literature/history that structure the entire course." For VKP participants, Nguyen's site models ways both to make expert thinking visible and to provide scaffolding and resources to guide novice thinking.

VKP Glossary Concepts at Work in Viet's Site (click on a link to learn more):

View Viet's site at: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~vnguyen/dictee/
dicteeindex.htm

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995)

May 2001

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