An exploration of cognitive and affective benefits in participating in a book club in a Chinese higher educational context

Abstract

This research explores the possible cognitive and affective benefits to university science and engineering students who participated in an L2 book club in a Chinese higher educational context. It makes use of mainly cognitive theories and affective theories in reader response, and conversation analysis with some empirically oriented studies. It adopts a qualitative methodology to answer these research questions: Can these science and engineering students gain cognitive and affective benefits from participating in a book club in a Chinese higher educational context? If yes, how do these cognitive and affective benefits happen when they discuss the books with others? What seem to be the cognitive benefits, if any? What seem to be the affective benefits, if any?
Given the research context, I recruited the participants from my own classes (science and engineering major). 14 participants joined in this book club. 8 out of 14 participants stayed until the last book talk meeting and were interviewed independently at the end of the data collection period. The data of book discussion meetings is based on 12 participants, because 2 participants withdrew after the pilot. A questionnaire was designed to investigate students’ reading interests and habits in the beginning of this project. All the book discussion meetings and independent interviews were audio-recorded. This research employs detailed textual analysis of the transcripts from the participants’ book discussion meetings and interviews.
Through analysing the data from book discussion meetings, I found evidence for students’ cognitive engagement when they exchanged their interpretations of the stories with others and students’ affective engagement with the texts and fictional characters. The overall conclusion is that these students can gain some cognitive benefits, such as higher-level cognitive engagement, transportation into the story world, simulation, character identification, cognitive transformation, and critical thinking, and affective benefits, to be more specific, cognitive empathy, affective empathy and sympathy in participating in this book club, albeit to varying degrees. Moreover, Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) states clearly in 2007 that the requirements for teaching English at university level are divided into three levels, from average to high requirements and advocates College English teaching (CET) reforms. The book club model in English could be a possible way of achieving one of the aims of CET reforms, which is to help students develop their individual learning methods and independent learning abilities in the context of the call of Chinese MoE for implementing and deepening CET reforms and development of liberal arts (2007; 2020).

Date of Award	Nov 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Geoff Hall (Supervisor) & Derek Irwin (Supervisor)