Ten high-school students of English as a second language (ESL) intensively studied the modified version of The Cay (retold by Strange, 1997). During their study the teacher asked questions designed to elicit students’ comprehension and understanding of racism and prejudice as the main themes of The Cay. Analysis of classroom discourse data indicated that none of the students independently identified these themes. This article shows the results of a comparative analysis of extracts from the original version of The Cay (Taylor, 1994) with the modified The Cay (Strange, 1997) in order to provide an explanation for ESL students’ inability to identify the themes of racism and prejudice in The Cay. An example from classroom discourse data is used to illustrate students’ difficulty in answering the teacher’s theme-related questions. This article also outlines several pedagogical implications and suggestions for using modified fiction texts in ESL classrooms.
description.provenance:
Made available in DSpace on 2020-05-22T02:04:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1
19_1_10125_66618_marianne.pdf: 42483 bytes, checksum: a8b8a17c70d77c1430694a0f3c7feebf (MD5)
Previous issue date: 2007-04
endingpage:
68
identifier.doi:
10125/66618
identifier.issn:
1539-0578
identifier.uri:
http://hdl.handle.net/10125/66618
number:
1
publisher:
University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center Center for Language & Technology
rfl.topic:
Graded Readers
site_url:
/rfl/item/137
startingpage:
56
subject:
graded readers simplification interpretation intensive reading The Cay
title:
A comparative analysis of racism in the original and modified texts of The Cay
Works published here are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.