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Research article
First published April 1992

Teaching Writers to Anticipate Readers' Needs: A Classroom-Evaluated Pedagogy

KAREN A. SCHRIVERView all authors and affiliations
Volume 9, Issue 2
https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088392009002001

Abstract

This study evaluated a method for teaching writers to anticipate readers' comprehension needs. The method, called reader-protocol teaching, involves asking writers to predict readers' problems with a text and then providing them with detailed readers' responses (in the form of think-aloud protocol transcripts) to illustrate how readers construct an understanding of the text. Writers in five experimental classes critiqued a set of ten poorly written instructional texts and then analyzed the protocol transcripts of readers struggling to comprehend these texts. Writers in five control classes were taught to anticipate the reader's needs through a variety of audience-analysis heuristics and collaborative peer-response methods. Pretests and posttests were used to assess improvements in experimental and control writers' ability to anticipate and diagnose readers' comprehension problems. Pretest and posttest materials were expository science texts. Writers taught with the reader-protocol teaching method improved significantly more than did writers in control classes in the number of readers' problems they accurately predicted. In addition, in contrast to writers in control classes, writers taught with the reader-protocol method significantly increased in their ability to (a) diagnose readers' problems caused by textual omissions, (b) characterize problems from the reader's perspective, and (c) attend to global-text problems. Moreover, writers' knowledge of audience acquired in one domain (instructional text) transferred to another (expository science text).

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1. If English majors had been included in the analysis, the difference between experimental and control groups would have been larger than that reported here. English majors in the experimental classes gained an average of 5.84 problems per text at posttest. English majors in the control classes gained on the average .25 problems per text at posttest. The difference between English majors in experimental and control classes was 5.59, nearly twice as large as the difference observed for the non-English majors, which was 3.33. These data support previous educational research that shows that students who often benefit most from instruction are those who have relevant prior experiences.

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Volume 9, Issue 2
Pages: 179 - 208
Article first published: April 1992
Issue published: April 1992

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KAREN A. SCHRIVER
Carnegie Mellon University
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