UNIVERSITI UTARA MALAYSIA
MASTER OF EDUCATION
(ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING)
ARTICLE REVIEW ON
Young learners’ Interactive
Behaviors in Jigsaw Reading
By Chingya Chiu & Nuowei Lee
LECTURER’S NAME : MADAM NOOR AIDA BINTI MAHMOR
GROUP MEMBERS : FAWWAZ RAMADONA BIN CHE WIL
MATRIX NO. : 821291
ARTICLE REVIEW
Young learners’ Interactive Behaviors in Jigsaw Reading
Chingya Chiu, University of Kang Ning, Taiwan
Nuowei Lee, University of Kang Ning, Taiwan
2011
1. Issues raised by the researchers
In this article, the researchers found that many teachers avoid an activity
involving group discussion. This kind of activity seems reluctant to interact with their
classmates. Cooperative learning attempts to address this problem by providing
students with opportunities for active communication and positive interdependence in
class. This researcher felt that jigsaw reading activity is a popular activity to promote
cooperative learning activity. This study aimed to investigate whether the employment
of jigsaw reading could enhance learners’ interactive behavior. In addition, the effect
of the use of jigsaw reading on learners’ in English assessment was also being explored.
According to Brooks and Warren (1979), the information acquired through reading
texts offers various life experiences to enrich their knowledge and solve their
difficulties in life. Consequently, there is one problem that the students will encounter
in comprehension that is too much spending time decoding words. They have to
enhance their word recognition ability and reading comprehension ability in order to
understand well the context. The reading materials nowadays also came in various
characters. The integration of technology like e-books, online library, and electronic
storybooks, and so on had increased the access of reading material at anytime and
anywhere. The usages of the technology extend to the pedagogical purpose like an aid
to the students when learning for the sake of imagination. For example in storytelling,
the teacher can use animation to explain the story to the students.
In this paper, the researchers investigate the cooperative learning method in
teaching. Cooperative learning methods derived from the social constructivist theory.
This theory promote the team work, discussions and grouping in teaching and learning.
Cooperative learning provides more opportunities for language development and
integrating language with content from increased active communication and use of
language for academic and social functions. According to Deen (1991), cooperative
learning is focused on student-centered learning. By doing the cooperative learning,
students will work together to upsize their understanding by their own idea or other
idea. They provide their opinions to accomplish their common goal. Cooperative
learning contains many methods, one of which is known as the jigsaw method. Jigsaw
reading consists of several forms of grouping, including whole class, expert team, and
original base group. In whole class, each student is assigned a section of text to read.
After they complete their task in expert teams, each member from a different group
shares their information to finish the entire text in the original base group. The statement
made by Folye and Lyman (1989), they have a task in each kind of grouping, and they
are responsible for their material and for different parts of other members’ material.
This method not only makes use of reading but also provides a student-centered
interactive learning environment. Therefore, to enhance students’ reading achievement
and interactive behavior in English Language and Teaching (ELT), it may be interesting
to integrate cooperative learning, with jigsaw reading in English instruction.
During this study had done, it has the independent and dependent variables.
The dependent variable is something that changes during the research and independent
is something that won’t change during the study. The independent variables are twenty-
five fifth graders in elementary school, 16-week jigsaw reading program and seven
instruments used. While the dependent variables are their achievement, interactions,
and attitudes towards the activities had been created. All the data being analyzed and
transform into the table and graph. The researchers could see the result by looking the
table and graph and interpret it well.
The main purpose of this study was to know either the usage of jigsaw reading
is suitable or not. Then, the researchers also want to indentify that the usage of jigsaw
reading can increase the learners’ interactive behavior. The effectiveness of using the
jigsaw reading towards achievement and attitudes was also explored. This study also
tried to investigate several things that related to this research questions. Firstly, they
want to know the type of interactive behavior shown when implementing jigsaw
reading. Secondly, they want to know the effectiveness of jigsaw reading in improving
students’ achievement in word recognition ability and reading comprehension ability.
And then, they want to identify what attitudes the students show toward the cooperative
learning and electronic storybooks.
2. Methodologies utilized
The participants for this research were twenty five elementary students. There
were fifteen male and ten females fifth grader in a suburban elementary school in
Tainan, Taiwan. They had learned English for three years and got an English class two
times per week. In addition, these students do not attend any extra classes to learn
English. They learned English only from school. The instruments used in this study
consist of seven set of steps before held the result and did the finding.
First instrument is reading material. The reading materials were comprised of
four electronic storybooks. “The Biggest Jobs of All”, “Little Pea”, “Toilet Tales”, and
“Round Is a Moon cake” were selected from the Tumble Books website
([Link]
sp). All these materials were suit with their level of English proficiency. Second
instrument is Observation scale of interactive behavior checklist proposed by Hertz-
Lazrowitz (1984) in evaluating the interactive behavior of students towards the activity.
It clearly describes six behavior categories including noninteraction, interaction, on-
task and off-task. In Chiu’s (2006) study, she further divided students’ interactive
behaviors into behavior types and definitions. Therefore, based on Chiu’s study, a
revised checklist of interactive behaviors was established to collect data in this study.
Third instrument is Word recognition test. A word recognition test was given to the
participants in order to explore their word recognition level. Vocabulary items were
selected from the 1200 English word list of the Ministry of Education on the Grade 1-
9 Curriculum website ([Link] The
validity of this test was confirmed by three experienced English experts revised and
confirmed that these questions corresponded with the standard level of English
competence for fifth graders.
Fourth instrument is reading comprehension test. The purpose of the reading
comprehension test was to examine students’ reading comprehension level. The
participants were required to read two stories and answer ten true or false questions
within 15 minutes. The first story, “Birthday Story,” was selected from the mouse club
website ([Link]). The second story, “Trees,” was chosen from the
Kiz club website (www. [Link]/[Link]). The two stories were selected based
on the participants’ current reading proficiency level and were verified as suitable by
their English teachers. Fifth instrument was conducted the quizzes among the students.
Four quizzes were used to check students’ word recognition and reading comprehension
level after the participants finished the story text of each electronic storybook. These
quizzes were remodeled from the TumbleBooks website
([Link]).
Then, the sixth instrument was a questionnaire on cooperative learning. The
Questionnaire on Cooperative Learning (QCL) was intended to investigate the students’
attitudes toward jigsaw reading in English learning. The questionnaire was revised from
Lin (2008), Liu (2006), Huang (2007), and Huang (2006) respectively. There are twenty
questions classified into four sections in the QCL: cooperative learning; expert The
Third Asian Conference on Education 2011 Official Proceedings Osaka, Japan 362
teams in jigsaw reading. Original base groups in jigsaw reading; and the use of
electronic storybooks in jigsaw reading. Three experts examined the questionnaire for
its validity. All of these experts had taught English for many years and specialized in
classroom management, educational psychology, and foreign language teaching
respectively. After validity testing, the questionnaire was used in a pilot study to
examine its reliability. Last but not least is the seventh instrument which is interview
with the students. The interviewers encouraged the respondents to express their
opinions and feelings in relation to this program. Twelve students participated in this
interview: six males and six females. The interview questions involved two parts:
questions about jigsaw reading and questions about electronic storybooks. Two
experienced experts revised and confirmed the questions as being suitable for the
participants.
Data collection and data analysis from this study being compiled and put in the
table and graph. This study mixes the data collection using quantitative method for
behavior of the students and did the qualitative method when conducting an interview
with the students. The data also recorded in the video and analyzed. A paired samples
T-test was employed to test students’ English reading achievement in order to explore
whether there was a significant difference; the responses to the four quizzes, QCL, and
interactive behaviors of students are reported with descriptive statistics.
3. Finding and Discussion
The researchers answer the following research questions systematically. For the first
question that connected with the interactive behavior of the students when
implementing jigsaw reading, the result shows the positive result. It is because the result
from the observation scale of interactive behavior shows that interactive on task
behavior employed fifty percent of the interactive event observed. From the scale, if the
students show the interactive on task category, the behavior types would be discussing,
asking questions, helping, making agreement, arguing and checking. Other half percent
distributed to the interactive off-task and non- interactive off-task. For interactive on
task behavior, the first ranked is discussion. The student discusses with their members
about learning issue and holds a certain viewpoint. For non interactive off task the
behavior is not paying attention. It shows that the student does not participate in any
learning activities for 15 seconds. While the interactive off task behavior shows that
chatting behavior is the most for that issue. It means that the student talks to members
about non related learning activity. From this study, the behaviors of discussion was
always the most frequent form of interaction, showing that jigsaw reading can urge the
participations of the students.
The second objective of this study is to aim the jigsaw reading effectiveness in
improving students’ achievement. Based on the data held by the researchers, they did
the T-test among the three activities that they had done. The T-tests were for word
recognition tests, reading comprehension tests and quizzes. The overall results in
reading achievement showed that there was a significant improvement in the aspects of
word recognition and reading comprehension after the application of jigsaw reading. It
is likely that mutual discussion and the electronic storybooks enhanced students’
reading achievement, and there are two possible explanations for this. One possible
explanation is that the participants’ mutual discussion of the content of electronic
storybook in cooperative learning helped them to understand the meaning of new words
and content more clearly. Students engaged in jigsaw reading attempted to discuss the
questions and offered answers to their group members in order to accomplish their task.
In the expert teams, they tried to become expert in their own part as professionals, so
they were responsible for sharing their knowledge with their group members. In the
original base groups, they also had to bring their own part to connect each part to
complete the story by discussion. The findings corresponded with those of Ceolho
(1992), who found that jigsaw reading provided an excellent learning environment for
students to produce purposeful talk in class. Students not only had to be accountable
for their own task, but also needed to master the entire content. Therefore, the findings
showed the participants in the jigsaw reading could improve their reading achievement
more effectively through interpersonal discussion. Another possible explanation for the
findings is that the electronic storybooks served as a clue helping students to associate
pictures with the meanings of new words and to comprehend the content more closely.
The pictures in the electronic storybook attracted the participants’ attention and
presented the setting and characters, thus helping the students to comprehend the
content. The sound and animation also helped them to guess and imagine the meanings
of new words. Therefore, they could relate to the words and pictures through the
functions of the electronic storybooks. Electronic storybooks provide sound and
animation to support students’ imagination. Students can read electronic storybooks by
paying attention to both textual and non-textual data to improve their reading, so their
reading achievement showed a significant improvement. It is likely that the electronic
storybook used in this treatment was a little difficult for students to comprehend, as it
contained many unknown words and verb phrases such as right off, get off, and so on.
In this case, students had difficulty understanding the verb phrases, for which the
electronic storybook did not show any animation, so it was difficult for them to
understand the meaning of the story.
The results of this study revealed that students had positive attitudes toward
cooperative learning and electronic storybooks. This study will dig on the reason why
the participants were able to change their attitudes in four domains. With regard to
cooperative learning, students thought jigsaw reading could increase their overall
reading ability, including the improvement of their reading assessment grade and the
promotion of interaction among their group members. They show good peer
connections and able to do the task well. They became more active in sharing
information, listening to each other and expressing their own opinions and thoughts. If
it compared in the normal traditional classroom, there was little interaction when
students engaged in the task with their classmates. They received knowledge passively
and partially, and did not have many chances to exchange information and discuss the
content with their classmates in class. In the other hand, once they had the opportunity
to give their own ideas and discuss the content of readings in their group, they felt
excited about this jigsaw reading activity. They were more willing to use discussion to
generate integrated information to construct the topic. They became increasingly active
and expressing their own ideas, and interacted more with their peers. In the quantitative
analysis in this paper show that the students agreed that the jigsaw reading could help
their understanding in lesson. The process of cooperative learning involved discussing
the content, providing knowledge, asking questions, and sharing information with their
group members in the groups. They had a positive attitude toward cooperative learning
and interpersonal discussion.
As for electronic storybooks, the participants agreed that the electronic
storybooks could facilitate their reading by improving their reading achievement and
promoting positive attitudes toward learning. The students liked to read electronic
storybooks because they provided cues to facilitate their comprehension of the content
more clearly and quickly. Although they did not know the meaning of unknown words,
they were able to look at the pictures and animations to imagine the roles and guess
what they were doing to comprehend the content. According to Adam, (1997) proved
that the sound, animation, words, and text of the electronic storybooks can assist
students to understand the meaning of unknown words. The visual aids may influence
students’ reading, and the cues provided by the multiple-functions supported their
comprehension of the content of the electronic storybooks. In addition, this was the first
time students had read the material in these electronic storybooks, and they felt curious.
They were motivated to read repeatedly and discuss the content with their group
members in order to comprehend the content. Therefore, the electronic storybook
served to enhance their learning motivation and improve their reading. They had
positive attitudes toward the discussion of the content of the electronic storybooks and
positive interaction with their group members.
As an overall conclusion to this research paper, it found that the jigsaw reading
activity can increase the interactive behavior and initiate the cooperative learning
among their friends. By using the jigsaw reading can create 21st century learning in the
classroom. The usage of electronic storybook also promotes positive attitudes towards
cooperative learning. This activity also gave two pedagogical implications for English
teacher and school administrators. As for English teacher, of course they can use it in
the classroom. During the reading activity, teacher can employ this activity to their
students. The teacher also can divide their pupils in mixed ability group. In this division
the high ability students could help the low ability students. For instance, jigsaw reading
provides a student-centered learning environment to make students accomplish a
common goal. Students show their positive attitudes toward cooperative learning and
become more actively interactive by means of interdependent discussion. This will not
only enhance students’ learning motivation but also decrease their anxiety in class.
Also, teachers can play the role of facilitator and observer when conducting the task.
