The purpose of the present study is to investigate the content and the nature of group discussions after reading a book together in the World Café style. We have adopted the World Café since participants talk about a
shared topic while writing down their thoughts on a large piece of paper in this discussion format, which allows us to analyze the results of group discussion through written records. Two groups, a novice group and an expert group, participated in this activity after reading a post-modern picture book entitled
Voices in the Park and exchanged their thoughts on the story as well as the illustration in groups. The analysis revealed that this interactional post-reading activity helped readers to access intellectually challenging and meaningful discoveries from the text; The records showed how participants made connections between their own ideas and other people’s inputs, thereby reaching a deeper level of understanding. We also found that a post-modern picture book worked well for book discussion since it allowed readers a wide range of interpretations. Furthermore, the study found that the novice group relied greatly on visuals compared to the expert group possibly in order to compensate for their linguistic limitations. It would thus benefit the learners if teachers could explain certain linguistics features (such as dialectal differences or subtle nuances that some expressions may carry) which may otherwise be left unnoticed.
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