Describe the symptoms of the problem

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We know that the quantitative analysis approach includes a high level overview of the importance of identifying the problem, developing a model, acquiring input data, developing a solution, testing the solution, analyzing results, and implementation through the DMAIC approach we covered in Module 1. For this discussion, we are focusing specifically on the first phase (defining the problem). Describe a specific business situation where root cause analysis could be conducted to find the problem.  Which tool (fish bone or 5 Whys) would be most effective and why?  Describe the symptoms of the problem. Who are the stakeholders and how would each group of stakeholders define success?

The discussion requirements are to post your initial response by Wednesday and post two follow up responses to other members of your group by Sunday.  Your initial response should be a minimum of 300 words and include citations and references to at least 2 sources (the sources do not count towards your 300 word requirement).  Your follow up responses should be a minimum of 150 words each and include citations and references to at least 1 source (the sources do not count towards your 150 word requirement).

You should not use more than 1 short quote in your initial response, and you should not use any quotes in your follow up responses. You should cite where you find your material, but I am interested in reading your analysis of the topic and the sources that you find rather than direct quotes from your topic. Copying and pasting material from other sources for your discussions is considered plagiarism which is a form of cheating.

An internal conflict

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First:

After reading the two PDF, then answer in 300 words or more: Choose and discuss one particular internal conflict (a person’s experience of opposing forces within oneself) that Cathy shares in the chapter “End of White Innocence.” How does this internal conflict compare and contrast with that of Leny Mendoza Strobel?

Second:

Respond in 200 words or more

An internal conflict that is expressed in Cathy’s passage is the violence that White America imposes on immigrants and people of color, specifically Asian Americans, that is felt and experienced from pre pubescent ages into adulthood. I think the title of the passage, End of White innocence, speaks to the issue that White people have not taken responsibility for there actions and have perpetuated their behavior throughout history to today as she shares in her own personal experiences. This internal conflict also highlights the reaction of Asian Americans because any response to racism or discrimination is deemed an overreaction, or acting out when any human being would respond to protect themselves, family, or people in their community. I think her last example of how far White privilege extends is crucial in understanding how power in politics directly effects members of society, and deeply scar a developing mental capacity. I also think this is the perfect example to contrast the internal conflicts addressed in Mendoza’s writing.

The conflict that stood out to me in Mendoza’s writing was the search of White approval. She mentions growing up in a church and having a relationship with God along side other White church go-ers. She says how even though they both grew up at the church learned the same songs and lessons, she doesn’t feel accepted or welcome even in a mutual space like church. She goes on to explain how she’s even immersed herself in White media like recognizing certain white actors/ actresses, knowing chants and songs like the star spangled banner, and even naming her child after a White actor, but she then highlights that people still look at her like she’s crazy and wonder how it’s possible for an Asian person to know all of these white histories and references.

One similarity between the two writings is that they both portray the reaction process of Asian minorities in America. The biggest differences I found between the two writings were their reactions to Whiteness. In Mendoza’s writing she expresses a longing for white approval and exemplified this in her own life experiences. In Cathy’s writing, she exposes White America for the oppression and racism that’s been codified in todays behavior and even uses her platform as a writer to encourage the new generation to flip the script on the white imaginary and create a world that empowers the minority that is becoming the majority.

THE END OF WHITE INNOCENCE

MUCH OF MY YOUTH WAS spent looking into the menagerie of white children. Sometimes I was allowed inside, by visiting a friend’s house, and I marveled at the harmonious balance of order and play: the parents who spoke to each other in a reasonable tone of voice, the unruly terrier who blustered his way into the home and was given a biscuit. Not at all like my home, which was tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches, and a mother who hung all our laundry outside, and a grandmother who fertilized our garden plot of scallions with a Folgers can of her own urine. Occasionally late at night, I awoke to my name being called, at first faintly, then louder, which I knew was my mother. I rushed out of bed and ran to my parents’ bedroom to break up yet another fight getting out of hand.

At school the next day, I distinctly remember the mild sun and the pomegranate trees, fully fruited in November. I sat there at lunch, my classmates’ laughter far off and watery in my ears clogged by little sleep. If reality was a frieze, everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape. Any affection I had for my youth was isolated to summers in Seoul: my grandmother bandaging my fingernails with balsam flower petals to stain my nails orange; the fan rotating lazily in the wet heat while my aunts, uncles, cousins, and I all slept on the floor in the living room; and the cold shock of water when my aunt washed me while I squatted naked in hard rubber slippers.

—

I am now the mother of a four-year-old daughter. Memories of my own childhood flash for a second as I’m combing my daughter’s hair or when I bathe her at night. What’s odder is that memories don’t come when I expect them summoned. Because my parents never read to me, I first felt a deficit of weight instead of being flooded with nostalgic memories when I began reading to my

 

 

daughter at bedtime. There should be a word for this neurological sensation, this uncanny weightlessness, where a universally beloved ritual tricks your synapses to fire back to the past, but finding no reserve of memories, your mind gropes dumbly, like the feelers of a mollusk groping the empty ocean floor.

Reading to my daughter, I see my own youth drifting away while hers attaches firmly to this country. I am not passing down happy memories of my own so much as I am staging happy memories for her. My parents did the same for me, but their idea of providing was vastly more fundamental: food, shelter, school. When they immigrated here, they didn’t simply travel spatially but through time, traveling three generations into the future. Not that I would be so crude as to equate the West with progress, but after the war, Korea was cratered like the moon, and the West had amenities, like better medical facilities, that Korea lacked. Boys, for instance, didn’t last on my mother’s side. My grandmother lost sons, my aunts lost sons, and my own brother, before I was born, died at six months from a weak heart while my mother was giving him a bath.

—

Rather than look back on childhood, I always looked sideways at childhood. If to look back is tinted with the honeyed cinematography of nostalgia, to look sideways at childhood is tainted with the sicklier haze of envy, an envy that ate at me when I stayed for dinner with my white friend’s family or watched the parade of commercials and TV shows that made it clear what a child should look like and what kind of family they should grow up in.

The scholar Kathryn Bond Stockton writes about how the queer child “grows sideways,” because queer life often defies the linear chronology of marriage and children. Stockton also describes children of color as growing sideways, since their youth is likewise outside the model of the enshrined white child. But for myself, it is more accurate to say that I looked sideways at childhood. Even now, when I look back, the girl hides from my gaze, deflecting my memories to the flickering shadow play of her fantasies.

To look sideways has another connotation: giving “side eyes” telegraphs doubt, suspicion, and even contempt. I came of age being bombarded with coming-of-age novels in school. Unlike the works of William Shakespeare or Nathaniel Hawthorne, which the teacher forced upon us like vitamin-rich vegetables, these novels were supposedly a treat, because we could now identify

 

 

with the protagonists. That meant that not only must I cathect myself to the entitled white protagonist but then mourn for the loss of his precious childhood as if it were my own in overrated classics like Catcher in the Rye.

My ninth-grade teacher told us that we would all fall in love with Catcher in the Rye. The elusive maroon cover added to its mystique. I kept waiting to fall in love with Salinger’s cramped, desultory writing until I was annoyed. Holden Caulfield was just some rich prep school kid who cursed like an old man, spent money like water, and took taxis everywhere. He was an entitled asshole who was as supercilious as the classmates he calls “phony.”

But beyond his privilege, I found Holden’s fixation with childhood even more alien. I wanted to get my childhood over with as quickly as possible. Why didn’t Holden want to grow up? Who were these pure and precocious children who wore roller skates that needed a skate key? What teenage boy had a fantasy of catching children in a field of rye lest they happened to fall off a cliff to adulthood?

—

The alignment of childhood with innocence is an Anglo-American invention that wasn’t popularized until the nineteenth century. Before that in the West, children were treated like little adults who were, if they were raised Calvinist, damned to hell unless they found salvation. William Wordsworth is one of the main architects of childhood as we sentimentalize it today. In his poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth sees the child as full of wonder and wiser than man because in his uncorrupted state the child is closer to God: “I see the heavens laugh with you in your jubilee.” Wordsworth may be one of the main architects of nostalgia as well. By writing the poem from the adult’s perspective, he sees the boy as a surrogated vessel into which the adult, consternated by his failures, pours his reveries.

The legacy of Holden Caulfield’s arrested development has dominated the American culture industry, from the films of Steven Spielberg and Wes Anderson to the fiction of Jonathan Safran Foer. In the mid-aughts, there was even a short- lived movement called New Sincerity, where artists and writers thought that it would be a radical idea to feel. “To feel” entailed regressing to one’s own childhood, when there was no Internet and life was much purer and realer. Though they prized authenticity above all else, they stylized their work in a vaguely repellent faux-naïf aesthetic that dismissed politics for shoe-gazing self-

 

 

interest. Wes Anderson was once classified as a New Sincerity filmmaker. I recently

rewatched his Moonrise Kingdom, which, as one blogger noted, is as pleasurable and light as a macaron. Filtered through aging-postcard lighting, Moonrise Kingdom is as much an exhibition of found nostalgic souvenirs as it is a story, with memorable curios like a sky-blue portable record player and a Wilson tennis ball canister of nickels. Anderson’s fastidious Etsy auteurship is to be admired, but Anderson is a collector, and a collector’s taste is notable for what he leaves out. Sometimes nonwhite characters, mostly quiet Indian actors decked out in the elaborate livery of the help, have appeared in Anderson’s other films. But in the safe insulated palette of Moonrise Kingdom, there is no hint of the Other. The characters are all mid-century white, the scrubbed white of Life magazine ads.

The film is set in 1965 on the fictional island of New Penzance (based on New England), where two twelve-year-olds fall in love and run away together. The boy character, Sam, is an orphan in the whimsical children’s book sense— odd, scrappy, full of mischief—who convinces his marmoreal love interest, Suzy, to escape to a far-off inlet called Moonrise Kingdom. In this paradisiacal inlet, they “play” at being self-sufficient adults: they pitch camp, fish for their own meals, and practice kissing. Suzy’s and Sam’s parents and guardians look for them, and once they’re caught, they run away again because Social Services want to send Sam away to “Juvenile Refuge.” Meanwhile, an incoming hurricane endangers the lives of the two runaways but they are found again in the nick of time. The film ends happily: Suzy and Sam stay together. And adopted by a local policeman, Sam becomes a junior cop just like his kind and rugged guardian.

—

Nineteen sixty-five was a violent, landmark year for the civil rights movement. Black protesters attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery twice, only to be viciously beaten back by Alabaman police before succeeding the third time. Lyndon Johnson finally passed the Voting Rights Act that prohibited discriminatory practices in voting. Malcolm X was assassinated as he was giving a speech at a rally in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom. And in August, Watts erupted into a mass riot, after years of its citizens being frustrated by joblessness, housing discrimination, and police brutality.

Race was the topmost concern of most Americans that year, the majority of whom felt threatened by African Americans demanding basic civil rights. The

 

 

artist Suze Rotolo said, “Pure unadulterated white racism…was splattered all over the media as the violence against the civil rights workers escalated. White people were looking at themselves and what their history has wrought, like a domestic animal having its face shoved into its own urine.”

In 1965, Johnson also approved the Hart-Celler Act, which lifted the racist immigration ban that prevented immigrants coming from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. America’s disgraceful history of barring immigrants based on nationality began with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which expanded to the Immigration Act of 1917 that banned everyone from Asia and the Pacific Islands. Finally, in 1924, using the ugly science of eugenics as their defense, the U.S. government expanded the restriction to every country except for a slim quota of Western and Northern Europeans. All others immigrants were restricted since they were from inferior stock that would “corrupt” the American populace. Johnson downplayed the seismic importance of the Hart-Celler legislation by saying, “The bill we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill.” He had no idea that the law would irrevocably change the face of America. Since 1965, 90 percent of American immigrants have hailed from outside Europe. By 2050, the Pew Research Center predicts, white Americans will become the minority.

Despite the violent turbulence of that year, Anderson, who was born in 1969, imbues his film with a manufactured, blinkered, pastiched nostalgia that the theorist Lauren Berlant defines as “a small-town one that holds close and high a life that never existed, one that provides a screen memory to cover earlier predations of inequality.” It’s revealing that Anderson dates his film to the last year when whites made up 85 percent of this nation. It’s as if the Neverland of New Penzance is the last imperiled island before the incoming storm of minorities floods in.

On its own, Moonrise Kingdom is a relatively harmless film. But for those of us who have been currently shocked by the “unadulterated white racism… splattered all over the media,” we might ask ourselves what has helped fuel our country’s wistfully manufactured “screen memory.” Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is just one of countless contemporary films, works of literature, pieces of music, and lifestyle choices where wishing for innocent times means fetishizing an era when the nation was violently hostile to anyone different. Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America’s racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still “protected” by a

 

 

white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants.

—

Black children were historically “defined out of childhood,” writes the scholar Robin Bernstein in her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. She uses the example of Little Eva, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as the icon of white innocence. With her halo of golden locks and blue eyes, she is virtuous in Uncle Tom’s eyes, whereas Topsy, the enslaved girl, is wicked, perverse, and motherless. It’s not until Eva hugs her and declares her love for Topsy that Topsy is reborn as an innocent child.

If Little Eva is the idealized child, Topsy is the ultimate “pickaninny,” defined by her “juvenile status, dark skin, and, crucially, the state of being comically impervious to pain.” Stowe wanted to prove that Topsy can feel but it takes Little Eva’s touch to convert her into a child. More often, the white child was contrasted with the enslaved girl to emphasize that “only white children were children.” The “pickaninny” is non-innocent, both feral and insentient, and doesn’t need protection nor maternal care, which slave owners used as justification to tear them from their mothers’ arms to be sold as chattel. This perception still persists today. White boys will always be boys but black boys are ten times more likely to be tried as adults and sentenced to life without parole.

—

Innocence is, as Bernstein writes, not just an “absence of knowledge” but “an active state of repelling knowledge,” embroiled in the statement, “Well, I don’t see race” where I eclipses the seeing. Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement. Innocence is not just sexual deflection but a deflection of one’s position in the socioeconomic hierarchy, based on the confidence that one is “unmarked” and “free to be you and me.” The ironic result of this innocence, writes the scholar Charles Mills, is that whites are “unable to understand the world that they themselves have made.” Children are then disqualified from innocence when they are persistently reminded of, and even criminalized for, their place in the racial pecking order. As Richard Pryor jokes:

 

 

“I was a kid until I was eight. Then I became a Negro.”

—

The flip side of innocence is shame. When Adam and Eve lost their innocence, “their eyes were open, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness.” Shame is that sharp, prickling awareness that I am exposed like the inflamed ass of a baboon. It’s a neurotic, self-inflicting wound. Even if the aggressor who caused me shame is no longer in my life, I imagine he is, and I shrink from my shadow that I mistake for him. Shame is a Pavlovian response, its agitated receptor going off for no other reason than I just stepped outside my house. It’s not about losing face. Shame squats over my face and sits.

Shame is often associated with Asianness and the Confucian system of honor alongside its incomprehensible rites of shame, but that is not the shame I’m talking about. My shame is not cultural but political. It is being painfully aware of the power dynamic that pulls at the levers of social interactions and the cringing indignity of where I am in that order either as the afflicted—or as the afflicter. I am a dog cone of shame. I am a urinal cake of shame. This feeling eats away at my identity until my body is hollowed out and I am nothing but pure incinerating shame.

—

I recall my mother rooting through the dryer and extracting a large red T-shirt with a silhouette of a white bunny. In retrospect, I have no idea how we acquired that shirt. I assume it was given as a gift to my father. Anyway, my immigrant mother didn’t know what the logo meant. The next day, she dressed me in that Playboy shirt, and sent me off, at the age of seven, to school. When I was waiting in line after recess to return to our class, a fourth grader pointed to the front of my shirt and asked me if I knew what “that means.” When I said no and I saw her smirk and run to her friends, I knew yet again that something was wrong but I didn’t know what was wrong. Blood rushed to my face. It is this shirt, but why?

The schoolyard was bordered by a chain-link fence and paved in gray tarmac. Like a de Chirico painting, it was an austere open space, with no trees, interrupted only by the stark sundialed shadows cast by the handball board and tetherball poles, which I avoided because the taller kids whipped the untouchable balls high into the air. I didn’t know why the bunny was bad. No one would tell

 

 

me why it was bad. And so the bunny blurred into the encrypted aura of a hex. My temperature rose, my body radiating heat to flush the contaminant, the contaminant that was me, out.

I had that same simmering somatic reaction when I was learning English. Because I didn’t learn the language until I started school, I associated English with everything hard: the chalkboard with diagrammed sentences, the syllables in my mouth like hard slippery marbles. English was not an expression of me but a language that was out to get me, threaded with invisible trip wires that could expose me at the slightest misstep. My first-grade teacher read a book to her attentive class, then turned to me and smiled, and said something in her garbled tongue, which I took to mean “go outside.” I stood up and walked out of the classroom. Suddenly, my teacher was outside too, her face flushed as she scolded me and yanked me back inside.

Shame gives me the ability to split myself into the first and third person. To recognize myself, as Sartre writes, “as the Other sees me.” I now see the humor in my unintended disobedience. The teacher reads to a group of rapt six-year-olds who sit cross-legged in a circle, and then, without warning, the quiet little Asian girl calmly gets up in the middle of her story and walks out of her classroom. The next year, the quiet little Asian girl shows up to school wearing a pornographic T- shirt.

—

One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame. I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.

The indignity of being Asian in this country has been underreported. We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it

 

 

good is so insidious that even now as I write, I’m shadowed by doubt that I didn’t have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical.

Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle. Right after Trump’s election, the media reported on the uptick in hate crimes, tending to focus on the obvious heretical displays of hate: the white high school students parading down the hallways wearing Confederate flag capes and the graffitied swastikas. What’s harder to report is not the incident itself but the stress of its anticipation. The white reign of terror can be invisible and cumulative, chipping away at one’s worth until there’s nothing left but self-loathing.

The poet Bhanu Kapil wrote the following: “If I have to think about what it looks like when the Far Right rises, all I have to do is close my eyes. And remember my childhood.” Friends have echoed the same sentiment: Trump’s presidency has triggered a flashback to childhood. Children are cruel. They will parrot whatever racist shit their parents tell them in private in the bluntest way imaginable. Racism is “out in the open” among kids in the way racism is now “out in the open” under Trump’s administration. But this trigger does not necessarily mean recalling a specific racist incident but a flashback to a feeling: a thrum of fear and shame, a tight animal alertness. Childhood is a state of mind, whether it’s a nostalgic return to innocence or a sudden flashback to unease and dread. If the innocence of childhood is being protected and comforted, the precarity of childhood is when one feels the least protected and comfortable.

—

My grandmother on my mother’s side moved from Seoul and lived with us when my mother needed help caring for my sister and me. She was a refugee during the Korean War who fled with her children from North Korea to reunite with my grandfather, who was already south. My grandmother carried my mother, who was two, on her back during the dangerous journey along the coast when the tide was low. My mother was almost left behind. My grandmother, before she changed her mind, planned to leave my mother with her aunt and then return later to retrieve her. She had no idea that the border between the North and South would be sealed forever; that she would never hear from her parents and siblings in North Korea again; that just like that, her world would vanish.

My grandmother remained a steadfast, tough, and gregarious woman. When

 

 

my grandfather was alive, they were one of the few families in Incheon who owned a house with indoor plumbing. After the war, she ran her home like a soup kitchen, inviting everyone for dinner—the homeless, orphans, widows and widowers—anyone who needed food.

She was lonely living with us in our new white suburban neighborhood. She went on long strolls, occasionally bringing back a coffee urn or a broken lamp she found in someone’s garbage can. During those years, my mother vacuumed every day, sometimes even three times a day, as if she could see the dead skin cells of her family shingle every surface. When my mother went into one of her cleaning frenzies, I kept my grandmother company on her walks.

I was eight when I joined my grandmother for a stroll. She had recently moved in with us. The California sidewalk was pristine and empty. Our neighborhood was silent except for the snicking sprinklers that watered the lawns on our street. My grandmother had just broken off a branch of lemons from someone else’s front yard to take back to our house when we came across a group of white kids who were hanging out on a cul-de-sac. My grandmother, to my alarm, decided to say hello. She waded into that crowd of kids and began shaking their hands because that is what people do in America. The kids were surprised but then began shaking her hand one by one. I could tell they were pumping her hand a little too vigorously. “Hello,” she said. “Herro,” they shot back. One of them mimed nonsensical sign language at her face. Then a tall lean girl with limp brown hair snuck up behind her and kicked my grandmother’s butt as hard as she could. My grandmother fell to the ground. All the kids laughed.

—

My grandmother told my father, who then made a point to look out for that girl when we were all in the car together. Once, we stopped at a stop sign and we saw her. That’s her, we told him. My father unrolled his window and began yelling at her. I’ve never seen him so enraged at another white person, let alone a kid. He demanded she apologize but she refused. She denied ever seeing us.

“How would you like it if I kicked you!” my father shouted. “How would you like that?” He unbuckled his seatbelt and scrambled out of the car. The girl loped easily up the hill and disappeared. He staggered after her a few steps and then stopped when he realized the futility of his efforts. The car was in the middle of the road. The engine was still running and the jaw of the driver’s car door was hinged wide open. I gaped at my father. I was scared of him but also I was scared

 

 

for him. I saw my father’s attempt to defend his family in the way our neighbors might see it—an acting out, an overreaction—and I was deeply afraid he would be punished for his fury.

—

Another time, my younger sister was nine and I was thirteen when we were leaving the mall. A white couple opened the glass doors to enter as we were leaving. I assumed the man was opening the door for us, so we scurried out as he reluctantly held the door wide. Before the door shut behind him, he bellowed, “I don’t open doors for chinks!”

My sister burst into tears. She couldn’t understand why he was so mean. “That’s never happened to me before,” she cried.

I wanted to run back into the mall and kill him. I had failed to protect my younger sister and I was helpless in my murderous rage against a grown man so hateful he was incapable of recognizing us as kids.

—

I only bring up the latter incident to compare it to an experience I had later in life. I was in my early twenties, living in Brooklyn. It was one of those unbearably hot July days that brought out the asshole in all New Yorkers. My friend, her boyfriend, and I walked into the Second Avenue subway station. As I walked down the stairs to the subway platform, a man passed us, and while looking at me, he singsonged, “Ching chong ding dong.” He was a neckless white guy wearing a baseball cap. He looked like a typical Staten Island jock. But then I noticed he was with his black wife and his biracial toddler.

My friends, who were white, didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to make them uncomfortable, so I dismissed it. We boarded the F train and I realized he was in the same car as us. As the train trundled along stop after stop, I became increasingly enraged staring at him. How many times have I let situations like this go? I thought.

“I’m going to say something to him,” I told my friends, and they encouraged me to confront him. I wended my way past everyone in the crowded car until I stood over him. I quietly told him off. I not only called him a racist but I also hissed that he was setting a horrible example for his baby. When I returned to my friends, my head throbbing, I looked back and saw that he had stood up and was

 

 

walking toward us. As he approached us, he pointed to my roommate’s boyfriend and threatened, “He’s lucky that he’s not your boyfriend, because if he was your boyfriend, I’d beat the shit out of him.” Then he walked back and sat down. I was stunned and relieved that it didn’t end in violence or more racial slurs. My roommate’s boyfriend kept saying, “I wish I said something.” Then it was our stop. As we were getting off, the guy shouted at me across the crowded car, “Fucking chink!”

“White trash motherfucker!” I yelled back. When we were on the platform, my friend, who had failed to say much

during the train ride, burst into tears. “That’s never happened to me before,” she wailed. And just like that, I was shoved aside. I was about to comfort her and then I

stopped myself from the absurdity of that impulse. All of my anger and hurt transferred to her, and even now, as I’m writing this, I’m more upset with her than that guy. We walked silently back to our apartment while she cried.

—

Two thousand and sixteen was the year of white tears. Memes circulated around the Internet of a black, brown, or Asian woman taking a long leisurely sip from a white mug embossed with the words “White Tears.” Implied in the meme is that people of color are utterly indifferent to white tears. Not only that, they feel a certain delicious Schadenfreude in response to white tears. Of course, “white tears” does not refer to all pain but to the particular emotional fragility a white person experiences when they find racial stress so intolerable they become hypersensitive and defensive, focusing the stress back to their own bruised ego.

In 2011, academics Samuel R. Sommers and Michael I. Norton conducted a survey in which they found that whenever whites reported a decrease in perceived antiblack bias, they reported an increase in antiwhite bias. It was as if they thought racism was a zero-sum game, encapsulated in the paraphrased comment by former attorney general Jeff Sessions: Less against you means more against me. At the time of the study, white Americans actually thought that antiwhite bias was a bigger societal problem than antiblack bias. They believed this despite the fact that all but one of our presidents have been white, 90 percent of our Congress has been historically white, and the average net worth of whites is ten to thirteen times greater than the net worth of nonwhites. In fact, the income gap

 

 

between races is only becoming greater. Thirty years ago a median black family had $6,800 in assets but now they have just $1,700, whereas a white median family now has $116,800, up from $102,000 over the same period. The hoarding of resources has been so disproportionate, writes scholar Linda Martín Alcoff, that the racial project of whiteness is, in effect, an oligarchy.

And yet their false sense of persecution has only worsened, as in the case of Abigail Fisher (known as “Becky with the Bad Grades”), who in 2016 took her lawsuit to the Supreme Court, claiming that she was denied admission to University of Texas–Austin because of her race, when in fact it was because of her scores. Their delusion is also tacit in the commonly heard defensive retort to Black Lives Matter that “all lives matter.” Rather than being inclusive, “all” is a walled-off pronoun, a defensive measure to “not make it about race” so that the invisible hegemony of whiteness can continue unchallenged.

—

In 2018, I saw an installation by the artist Carmen Winant, who covered two walls at the Museum of Modern Art with two thousand photographs of women in the process of giving birth. She taped up pictures, clipped from books and magazines that spanned three decades, of women squatting, or on all fours, or in a birthing pool, or with legs splayed out in stirrups—all of them in the abject throes of labor. Some photos feature newborns crowning, the dark rinds of their heads splitting open their mothers’ ursine vaginas. One picture offers the back of a mother on all fours, with her gown hitched up to her armpits, while her newborn’s squinched face pokes out near her anus. Emotions are exposed in their raw glory: joy, anguish, adoration, and relief.

The photographs are almost all of white women. When I look at the photos individually, I’m moved by the mothers’ exhaustion and joy, but when I step back, I can’t unsee the wall of whiteness. Winant taped up every photo of realistic childbirth she could find in used bookstores, an exhaustive process that only insists on the sameness of these images. Reviewers described the installation as “universal” and “mind blowing.” And yet, rather than the visceral “radical exposure” of birth, all I see is its whiteness. In Winant’s obsessive efforts to evoke the “all,” I feel walled off.

I can argue that I’m able to see whiteness as opposed to these white reviewers who are unable to perceive whiteness as a racial category. But lately, I’ve been questioning if my habit of noticing white spaces impairs me from enjoying

 

 

anything else. I’ve become a scold, constantly pointing out what is, or should be, obvious. In José Saramago’s novel Blindness, when the characters go blind, their vision doesn’t go dark but turns white as if they “plunged with open eyes into the milky sea.” I see whiteness everywhere I go. I sense its machinations. I see that even my mind is stained by whiteness, as if it’s been dyed with the radiopaque ink used for X-rays. This stain makes me incessantly analogize my life to other lives. I no longer think my life comes up short. But even in opposition, I still see my life in relation to whiteness.

Recently, I read a tweet by the poet Natalie Diaz, who asked, Why must writers of color always have to talk about whiteness? Why center it in our work when it’s centered everywhere else? On the train ride back home from the museum, I thought of my grandmother who lost three children before they reached eighteen. If I tell her story, will it just be denatured into a sad story, a story to tape up on that wall to accent its whiteness?

I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn’t “come up,” which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we’ve been granted due to our racial identity. These Asians are my cousins; my ex-boyfriend; these Asians are myself, cocooned in Brooklyn, caught unawares on a nice warm day, thinking I don’t have to be affected by race; I only choose to think about it. I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country’s neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us. To varying degrees, all Asians who have grown up in the United States know intimately the shame I have described; have felt its oily flame.

—

Two thousand and sixteen was the year when whiteness became visible due to several factors: the looming demographic shift in which white Americans will soon be a minority; the shrinkage of fixed employment that has caused some whites to feel disempowered and lash out at immigrants; and the media attention to black and brown activists who since Ferguson have protested racial inequities in sectors ranging from the judicial system to education to culture. White

 

 

Americans, if they hadn’t before, now felt marked for their skin color, and their reaction for being exposed as such was to feel—shame.

Shame is an inward, intolerable feeling but it can lead to productive outcomes because of the self-scrutiny shame requires. This has been the case for white progressives who have been evaluating how privilege governs their life. Years ago, whenever a conversation about race came up, my white students were awkwardly silent. But now, many of them are eager to listen and process the complexities of race relations and their roles in it, which gives me hope. Alcoff calls this self-examination “white double-consciousness,” which involves seeing “themselves through both the dominant and the nondominant lens, and recognizing the latter as a critical corrective truth.”

But while shame can lead to productive self-scrutiny, it can also lead to contempt. In Affect Imagery Consciousness, the psychoanalyst Silvan Tomkins clarifies the distinction between contempt and shame in a society:

Contempt will be used sparingly in a democratic society lest it undermine solidarity, whereas it will be used frequently and with approbation in a hierarchically organized society in order to maintain distance between individuals, classes, and nations. In a democratic society, contempt will often be replaced by empathic shame, in which the critic hangs his head in shame at what the other has done; or by distress, in which the critic expresses his suffering at what the other has done; or by anger, in which the critic seeks redress for the wrongs committed by the other.

It’s also human nature to repel shame by penalizing and refusing continued engagement with the source of their shame. Most white Americans live in segregated environments, which, as Alcoff writes, “protects and insulates them from race-based stress.” As a result, any proximity to minorities—seeing Latinx families move into their town, watching news clips of black protesters chanting “I can’t breathe” in Grand Central Station—sparks intolerable discomfort. Suddenly Americans feel self-conscious of their white identity and this self-consciousness misleads them into thinking their identity is under threat. In feeling wrong, they feel wronged. In being asked to be made aware of racial oppression, they feel oppressed. While we laugh at white tears, white tears can turn dangerous. White tears, as Damon Young explains in The Root, are why defeated Southerners refused to accept the freedom of black slaves and formed the Ku Klux Klan. And

 

 

white tears are why 63 percent of white men and 53 percent of white women elected a malignant man-child as their leader. For to be aware of history, they would be forced to be held accountable, and rather than face that shame, they’d rather, by any means necessary, maintain their innocence.

—

On February 1, 2017, a five-year-old Iranian child was handcuffed and held at Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., for five hours because he was “identified as a possible threat” despite his minor status. This happened as a direct result of Trump’s executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the nation. Never mind that the boy was an American citizen from Maryland. The press secretary said, “To assume that just because of someone’s age and gender that they don’t pose a threat would be misguided and wrong.” The outrage against the administration was still fresh and bright that day. Thousands of New Yorkers rushed to JFK Airport to protest the ban. When the boy was finally reunited with his mother, a crowd of protesters cheered as they embraced. Watching the news clip, I took solace in their reunion. But how will that day shape him as he grows?

—

Whether our families come from Guatemala, Afghanistan, or South Korea, the immigrants since 1965 have shared histories that extend beyond this nation, to our countries of origin, where our lineage has been decimated by Western imperialism, war, and dictatorships orchestrated or supported by the United States. In our efforts to belong in America, we act grateful, as if we’ve been given a second chance at life. But our shared root is not the opportunity this nation has given us but how the capitalist accumulation of white supremacy has enriched itself off the blood of our countries. We cannot forget this.

As a writer, I am determined to help overturn the solipsism of white innocence so that our national consciousness will closer resemble the minds of children like that Iranian American boy. His is an unprotected consciousness that already knows, even before literacy, the violence this nation is capable of, and it is this knowingness that must eclipse the white imaginary, as his consciousness, haunted by history, will one day hold the majority.

Text structure instruction

/in /by

Vol.:(0123456789)

Reading and Writing (2018) 31:1923–1935 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-018-9909-7

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Text structure instruction: the research is moving forward

Joanna P. Williams1

Published online: 22 September 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018

No one disputes the importance of reading comprehension. It is an absolute req- uisite for success in school and in life. Thus, it is strange that instruction in com- prehension has only recently become a high priority within the reading curriculum. Throughout most of American history, reading instruction has been focused on word recognition, either through some type of phonics training, more or less explicit, or else through an inductive, indirect approach. Attention to comprehension has been minimal, provided mainly via vocabulary instruction. Years ago, grammar instruc- tion was also common, often accomplished through sentence-diagramming exer- cises. This instruction touched on aspects of comprehension as we understand the term today. However, the focus on grammar died out.

It was not until Dolores Durkin’s influential paper appeared, in which she described the dearth of genuine reading instruction in our schools (Durkin, 1978–1979) that we acknowledged that children were being grossly short-changed. Even though most children were learning to “break the code” and could read at least somewhat fluently, a substantial proportion of them did not understand what they read. Now, a few decades later, the amount of research on comprehension has skyrocketed, and we have new models of reading comprehension that have heav- ily influenced educators. The prominence of comprehension instruction in today’s schools reflects our greatly changed view of the importance of this topic.

One thing that we have realized is how important text genre can be. Narrative text, which is generally easier to understand, is usually the genre of choice for begin- ning instruction. Before they start school, children are exposed to a great deal of nar- ration, through watching TV and movies, and through listening to bedtime stories as well as to adults’ conversations (Williams & Pao, 2011). The content of these narratives is likely to be relatively familiar, which helps understanding. And nar- rative tends to follow a single structure, in which plot events are sequenced along a causal-temporal line.

But early exposure to expository text is also essential (Duke & Bennett-Armi- stead, 2003). Reading expository text increases domain knowledge, which in turn leads to increased vocabulary, fluency, and motivation (Guthrie, Anderson, Alao,

* Joanna P. Williams jpw15@columbia.edu

1 Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

 

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11145-018-9909-7&domain=pdf

 

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& Rinehart, 1999). However, understanding expository text is often a challenge, especially for children with language and other learning difficulties. Children who do not receive sufficient early exposure to, and instruction about, expository text are likely to have more and more difficulty with reading as they proceed through the grades (Kucan & Beck, 1997). By the time they reach the sixth grade, the majority of children’s school reading assignments are expository texts, and these children encounter serious problems in meeting academic demands.

Lack of exposure is only one of the reasons for the relative difficulty of exposi- tory text. In addition, exposition often tends to deal with more challenging con- tent; the ideas are less familiar and often more complex than those in narrative text (Kucan & Beck, 1997). Moreover, expository text is not structured as sim- ply as is narrative text; there are several basic expository structures (Calfee & Chambliss, 1988; Meyer, 1985).

Unfortunately, some teachers spend very little time in their classrooms on expository text (Williams & Pao, 2011). And sometimes those who do focus on such text are burdened by textbooks that are badly organized and poorly written. Teachers often respond by reading the texts aloud to their students instead of try- ing to teach them to read and understand the texts by themselves. Obviously this is not a good solution—it takes away opportunities for students to learn. Moreo- ver, while teachers who read to their class may side-step difficulties due to decod- ing problems, the students are often still getting their information from disorgan- ized texts.

In the late 1990s, when the National Reading Panel (NRP) was convened to exam- ine the existing research literature and to synthesize our knowledge about beginning instruction, the new thinking about comprehension had only recently been intro- duced. The NRP Report (2000) on comprehension included a chapter on vocabulary, of course; vocabulary is always a prominent topic in a reading program no matter what the current educational focus. The Report also focused on cognitive strategies, a new approach in which comprehension instruction is conceptualized as the teach- ing of ways in which a student can consciously and deliberately approach a text in order to uncover its meaning. One such strategy (that had generated a substantial amount of research before the NRP panel reviewed the literature) is to use back- ground knowledge. That is, students who are about to read a text are told to consider what they already know about the topic. Information that they activate from their store of knowledge, when incorporated with the new information presented in the text, will aid in their comprehension. Another commonly taught cognitive strategy is self-monitoring, that is, stopping occasionally while reading, in order to reflect on whether one is fully understanding what one is reading, and, if one is not, to reread the text. The NRP Report was very influential and ensured that the cognitive strat- egy approach was solidly entrenched as the way to teach reading comprehension.

Text structure was another item in NRP’s rather lengthy list of cognitive strat- egies. Since the Report was published, however, text structure has emerged as a topic in its own right. Arguably, text structure did not belong in the list of cognitive strategies in the first place. The classic notion of cognitive strategy implies either that readers are monitoring their own reading activity to evalu- ate its effectiveness or that they are performing some additional activity while

 

 

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reading, such as trying to remember previously acquired information that might help them understand the text in front of them.

It is true that readers consciously attend to text structure when they decide to read titles and paragraph headings in order to get an overview of a text. In that sense one might consider the use of text structure as a cognitive strategy. However, there are structural cues of all sorts within text, some easy to identify and some rather subtle. Most of the research on text structure deals with normal reading, in which the instruction is geared toward getting the reader to respond to such textual cues without paying undue attention to them. This instruction is straightforward, similar to phonics instruction. We teach beginners letter- sound correspondences and a method of combining the sounds represented by the letters into words. But we expect that fluent readers will be able to recognize words automatically without consciously attending to their phonics skills. In the same way that I would not consider that fluent readers typically use their phon- ics skills as a strategy (though they might do so when reading scientific text or Russian novels), I would not consider that fluent readers typically use their text structure skills as a cognitive strategy. Of course, faced with a stumbling-block in the text, the fluent reader can quite deliberately go back to using text structure skills to work through the difficulty and reach a good level of understanding.

The seminal work on expository text structure was done by Meyer (1975). She posited that readers understand a text more readily if they recognize the specific structure according to which the writer has organized the text. They will then be able to use the writer’s structure to create their own mental representa- tion of the text. The five basic structures identified by Meyer are description, sequence, comparison, cause-effect, and problem–solution. These structures are really representations of rhetorical structures. Fundamental concepts such as causality and comparison arise initially through perception and action during the first year of life (Saxe, Tzelnic, & Carey, 2007). As these primitive understand- ings mature and language develops, discourse patterns basic to both oral and written language that express these concepts appear (Williams et al., 2016). It is the ability to transfer what is known about these structures in oral language to written language that is the goal of teaching text structure.

Meyer’s analysis fits in well with Kintsch’s (1998, 2004) more comprehensive construction-integration model of reading comprehension. In this model, text information activates readers’ background knowledge, and then this activated knowledge is integrated with the information presented in the text. Signals in the text, including order of mention, repetition, clue words, etc., indicate relation- ships among pieces of information and affect the amount of activation given to certain pieces. In this way, the reader is guided to identify the macrostructure of the text (the important information) and to organize it into a coherent mental representation. When the text is not well structured, readers must expend cog- nitive resources on creating their own organization, which may or may not be effective in deriving the writer’s purpose and argument.

 

 

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Close analysis of texts with structure (CATS)

I was asked to contribute to this special issue by writing an introduction that would include some discussion of my own work on the topic. When I started thinking about using text structure as the focal point of an intervention, it was not the popular topic of research that it has now become. Meyer had made substan- tial contributions (as she is continuing to do), but not many investigators had yet followed suit. Meyer was working with adults and students at the middle school level (fourth and fifth-graders). I became interested in what one might do in the way of using text structure as the focus of instruction with younger children. I decided to work at the second-grade level, because I wanted to make sure that students had sufficient reading skill to be able to focus on structure.

My program combined explicit instruction in reading comprehension and con- tent-area instruction. I specified as its goals (a) ensuring that children could use their knowledge of basic rhetorical structures in reading as they already could use them in listening, and (b) laying the foundation for further development of their comprehension of these structures in both reading and listening.

I call the intervention Close Analysis of Texts with Structure (CATS). I first described it in a 2004 paper (Williams, Hall, & Lauer, 2004). The intervention is designed to serve as supplemental instruction for general education class- rooms, especially for struggling readers in those classrooms. With adaptations it can be differentiated for use with students who have learning disabilities. The instructional model includes both direct and strategic instruction (Kame’enui & Carnine, 1998; Pressley, 1998), which when used together, produce the largest effect sizes for at risk learners (Swanson & Hoskyn, 1998). The instruction is structured, explicit, scaffolded, and intensive. It proceeds systematically from the simple to the complex, and it provides substantial practice at each step. The tasks are meaningful and interesting; they include specially-designed training materials (texts) that provide simple, clear templates that exhibit instructional points (Wil- liams et  al., 2014). My graduate students, cohort after cohort, have participated fully in all stages of the development of the intervention and its evaluation.

The core of the instruction consists of the close analysis of short paragraphs of well-structured text that embody each of the five basic text structures. I believe that a deep and extensive study of a series of clear examples of a given structure will help students become familiar with the way in which these basic patterns are manifested in print and will lead to a strengthening of their mental represen- tations of the structures. The instruction guides students through an analysis of well-structured paragraphs, and they become familiar with basic structure pat- terns. To aid in this analysis, we teach children to use three well-documented strategies in their analysis of text: clue words (e.g., next; unlike; because), tar- geted questions, and graphic organizers. Goldman and Rakestraw (2000) have presented ample evidence that each of these three strategies is effective in help- ing readers identify global discourse structure and establish local coherence. The analysis of prototypical texts, accomplished with the help of these three strate- gies, comprises the core of the CATS program. The lessons also include common

 

 

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instructional components: trade book reading by the teacher followed by discus- sion, vocabulary, and a heavy dose of writing, so that the instructional setting is well within the context of a typical elementary-level lesson in the language arts.

The content of our intervention covers a typical second-grade social studies cur- riculum. Units focus on five historical communities in the United States: Native Americans, colonists, pioneers, immigrants, and urban residents. Students learn about the homes, schools, jobs, and other features of these communities.

We developed the procedures for the text analysis and the strategies for each indi- vidual text structure through an iterative series of develop-tryout-test cycles with small groups of children. We did small-scale randomized clinical trials, each one on a single text structure (Williams et al., 2005, 2007, 2009, 2014). Then we developed our year-long comprehensive intervention (Williams et al., 2016), which included all five text structures.

We evaluated our complete intervention in second-grade classrooms drawn from NYC elementary schools (Williams et  al., 2016). Classrooms were randomly assigned to three conditions, all of which received the school’s regular reading instruction; the intervention was a twice-a-week supplement. Students in one condi- tion (CATS) received the text structure intervention. In another condition (No Inter- vention) there was no intervention. The third condition provided a much more strin- gent control. Classrooms in this group used a version of our intervention that was the same as the CATS intervention in all respects except one. That is, it included the same content and the same materials (books, tasks, tests), and the number of lessons and mean amount of time spent on them did not differ. However, students in this latter condition received no text structure training. We called this the Content condi- tion, because it essentially focused on the social studies content—information about the five U.S. communities.

Students in classrooms that received the CATS intervention scored significantly higher than those in the No Intervention classrooms on the comprehension post- test, as assessed by their written summaries of five novel paragraphs, one of each structure. Specifically, they were better able to report the main idea as well as the important information about the main idea, and better able to identify the particular structure of the paragraphs. These measures, most of which were derived from the paragraph summaries, comprised our basic reading comprehension measures.

The CATS students were also superior on measures of transfer, i.e., on measures based on comprehension tasks other than those that were featured in the instruc- tion. These included a measure based on a sentence completion task involving social studies content and two measures based on written summaries of natural text taken from authentic reading materials (children’s trade books), which, as is characteristic of such material, were not well structured. All three transfer measures showed sig- nificant differences in favor of the CATS condition. The test items that were based on natural text represented a level of transfer that is difficult to achieve; here, the effect sizes were smaller than the effect sizes on the other measures (though they were still significant). If I were to extend this intervention for use in higher grades, I would include explicit instruction that uses exemplars of the various text structures as they appear in natural prose. Our instructional paragraphs did get progressively longer and more complex as instruction continued, but they did not include text as

 

 

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ill-structured as we sometimes see in books and magazines. However, I would still make certain that the students were given initial instruction based on well-struc- tured paragraphs; I believe that this was an important factor in the success of the intervention.

More interesting was the fact that we found that the superiority of the CATS stu- dents on these comprehension measures also occurred in comparisons with students in the Content classrooms. In fact, the Content classrooms and the No Intervention classrooms did not differ on any of these measures. This suggests that explicit and systematic instruction about text structure is necessary. We cannot rely simply on providing exposure to structured texts if we want to make an impact on children’s understanding.

In contrast, on measures assessing the amount of social studies content that was learned, the CATS classrooms and the Content classrooms did not differ, and stu- dents in both of these conditions scored higher than students in the No Intervention classrooms. Thus we can embed text structure training in content-area instruction without sacrificing acquisition of the academic content. This is important; it would be less than optimal if it turned out that we could improve reading comprehension only at the expense of the content-area instruction.

We were fortunate to be able to go through multiple development-try out-test cycles on each individual text structure before producing the final complete inter- vention (which also involved multiple iterations). As we worked, we made many modifications that improved the instruction in one way or another. Most were small changes, but we also made some changes that were rather important from a design point of view. First, it became clear very early in our pilot work that the instruction typically given to older students in which students used clue words as the initial identifiers of a text’s structure (e.g., Wijekumar et  al., 2014), was not appropriate for our younger students. Second-graders do not have sufficient reading skill to be able to scan text in order to pick out clue words. So we began each paragraph with a topic (main idea) sentence that indicated its structure type. Later, perhaps in third grade, students would probably have sufficient reading skill to identify clue words easily and would be able to work with paragraphs that do not begin with a main idea sentence.

Second, we did not introduce the five structures in the same order as many other investigators had introduced them. Description, as defined by Meyer and Freedle (1984), is a type of association in which some elements are subordinate to another (the topic). In most of the second grade classrooms we were working in, teachers were already teaching children this type of simple descriptive structure, which they called the information web. A web does not represent structured text at the level of the other four structures. In our intervention, the Description structure is more chal- lenging: it reflects the idea of an information hierarchy. We taught Description as the fourth in the series of five structures.

We also discovered that it would be best to vary the ways in which we mapped the complete structure across the paragraph, and this led to our third modification. We organized the Sequence sentences across the entire paragraph. That is, each sen- tence in the paragraph represented one step in the sequence. However, in the cau- sation paragraphs, the entire structure appeared in individual sentences, i.e., each

 

 

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sentence contained both cause and effect, plus a suitable clue word. Our compari- son paragraphs were also structured at an individual-sentence level. In the other two text structures, Description and Problem/Solution, the complete structure was repre- sented in sentence pairs. We found justification for these mappings in several studies that have found that organizing instructional tasks at the sentence level is appropri- ate for primary-grade children (Berninger, Nagy, & Beers, 2011; Crosson, Lesaux, & Martiniello, 2008).

Across the several studies we conducted, our posttests included both oral and written responses on a variety of tasks not used in the intervention. We have found that our text structure instruction helps young students comprehend text and acquire new vocabulary. Instructional effects transfer to novel text about topics both simi- lar to and different from those used in the intervention. We also found that training on one structure (compare-contrast) improves the ability to learn a similar structure (pro-con). And we have found a little evidence that the intervention makes it easier for children to comprehend authentic, ill-structured texts. This of course is the ulti- mate goal of text structure instruction—that a reader be able to mentally re-organ- ize poorly written text and thereby better comprehend and remember it. Of course, reaching this goal would involve instruction and/or practice over years of school- ing—well beyond the scope of our intervention project.

In summary, our work demonstrates the effectiveness of explicit reading compre- hension instruction for primary-grade students. It also demonstrates that text struc- ture is a useful focus for training. It should be kept in mind, however, that CATS is a supplemental program, not a full reading comprehension program. The latter would be much more comprehensive. But on the basis of this work as well as that of the other researchers who have contributed to the research base, I am prepared to say that text structure instruction should be included as a prominent part of a complete reading comprehension curriculum.

I have described the work I have done as an example of what might be considered the first generation of text structure research, in which text structure has been shown to be useful knowledge for a young reader to acquire, and also that it can be taught successfully. Systematic reviews of text structure research (e.g., Ray & Meyer, 2011) have collated the substantial amount of literature relevant to the constructing of an intervention to teach text structure. In addition, two recent meta-analyses of text structure interventions across the grades have been published, and it is clear from these that this type of instruction is feasible to do, that it is effective, and that it can provide a strong foundation for later progress in reading comprehension (Hebert, Bohaty, Nelson, & Lambert, 2016; Pyle et al., 2017).

The articles in this issue

Now that we have enough documentation about the importance of text structure instruction and its effectiveness, we are ready to move ahead. The papers that com- prise this issue indicate that there is indeed a flourishing second generation of rel- evant research. The authors have tackled important questions that build on the exist- ing evidence of the importance of text structure instruction.

 

 

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I am going to begin my comments on the individual articles with the study by Meyer, Wijekumar, and Lei. Bonnie Meyer is the doyenne of text structure research, the one who introduced the topic (Meyer, 1975) and who conducted the earliest stud- ies that showed the effectiveness of the text structure strategy. Meyer developed an intervention for middle-school students that later she turned into a computer-based program, ITSS, which was first introduced in 2002 (Meyer et al., 2002) and which has been evaluated extensively in many variations. Over the years a great many stu- dents ranging from fourth-graders to retirees have profited from this instructional program. A substantial amount of data has been collected—a wonderful resource for further study. The article in this issue reports on a close examination of the effects of signal words, one of the most salient textual cues as to structure. Using data sets from evaluations of the ITSS intervention that yielded data from over 7000 students, the authors analyzed a pretest and posttest of generative signaling that had been administered across studies. Differences as a function of type of signal word, gender, and grade level (grades 4–8) were examined. In addition to providing insights about signal words, this study demonstrates the value of designing intervention evalua- tions in such a way that they address targeted questions concerning specific aspects of the intervention as well as provide an overall evaluation of the intervention.

Another paper authored by the same research team (Wijekumar, Meyer, Lei, Her- nandez, and August) describes SWELL, Spanish instruction on the Web for Eng- lish Learners. This intervention provides one-on-one instruction. It responds to the challenges that children face when they are learning in a non-dominant language. SWELL contains special adaptations, which include vocabulary instruction, contex- tual cues, and on-line translations of unfamiliar and difficult words and sentences. The authors report on the evaluation of the intervention, which was conducted in grades 4 and 5 classrooms in high poverty schools. Results were positive: Students who received the intervention showed better performance than students who did not receive it on both researcher-developed measures and a standardized test of reading comprehension. The authors also examined the effect of moderating factors like ini- tial reading level and gender.

The articles in this issue reflect the fact that the field has devoted most of its atten- tion to students in middle school and above. Only a couple of these papers focus on the primary grades. They are most welcome! Al Otaiba, Connor, and Crowe present three brief interventions, each on a single text structure, and they look at kindergar- ten, first and second grade effects. This work is a pilot study for a larger intervention study now in progress. The authors use what they call a pattern exploration design, carefully thought through to allow evaluation of explicit training on each of the three taught structures along with transfer to each of four structures (the three that were taught plus one other). The authors’ choice of instructional routines, e.g., reliance on clue words and graphic organizers, reflects the consensus in the field about how to approach the teaching of text structure. They also included practices less often used in text structure research, such as manipulatives to scaffold retells, which appear to be particularly useful with young students. Preliminary results from their initial work are promising in terms of promoting both acquisition and transfer.

Van den Broek, Kraal, Koornneef, and Saab also study primary-grade children, but their work is of a different nature. They do not conduct an intervention, prepare

 

 

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to do one, or examine aspects of a completed intervention. Rather, they ask a more fundamental question about how second-graders process text; the answer to this question should be of help to future interventionists. They ask whether the same intervention is likely to be optimal for all students. An analysis of think-aloud proto- cols collected during the reading of both narrative and expository texts indicates that children fall into one of two categories. There are those whose mental representation of a text tends to conform to the textual information (paraphrasers), and those whose processing is more elaborative, which leads to a broader, more wide-ranging repre- sentation (elaborators). Also, these two types of readers respond in different ways to expository and narrative text. The authors suggest that different types of question- ing during instruction might be appropriate for paraphrasers and elaborators. What might these findings mean for the instructional model that is the basis for most cur- rent text structure interventions?

A classic question of second-generation research has to do with context. Beer- winkle, Wijekumar, Walpole, and Agius consider the context in which text structure instruction appears, or, as they put it, the ecological component within a componen- tial model of reading. They examine the extent of knowledge that fourth and fifth- grade teachers have about text structure, and they also look at the way children’s textbooks cover the topic. In addition, they describe their observation of classrooms as teachers delivered text structure instruction. Their work indicates that there is considerable room for improvement on all counts. Beerwinkle and her colleagues are persuasive on the point that research to improve text structure instruction should continue, but that we need to extend our efforts beyond simply developing excellent instructional materials. We must also ameliorate the context in which the instruction occurs.

How does the ability to deal with text structure, a rather specific and circum- scribed aspect of reading comprehension, fit into a comprehensive reading com- prehension model? Welie, Schoonen, and Kuiken administered a battery of tests to eighth-graders, including tests of expository text comprehension, sentence reading fluency, linguistic knowledge (general vocabulary and connectives), metacogni- tive knowledge (knowledge of reading strategies), and text structure inference skill. The participants included both monolingual students, who spoke only Dutch, and bilingual students who spoke a minority language at home. Two important factors emerged from a series of hierarchical regression analyses: knowledge of connectives and metacognitive knowledge. The authors conclude that interventions focused on text structure should include instruction on both of these topics. The authors also examined their data to determine whether there were differences as a function of students’ language background or level of reading proficiency.

The article by Ji, Beerwinkle, Wijekumar, Lei, Joshi, and Zhang offers an alternative method of analyzing intervention effects. In Latent Transition Analy- sis (LTA), students are classified on the basis of their scores on a set of pretest measures, such that the score profiles of the classes are distinct from one another. After the intervention has been completed, the posttest is examined to determine the probability of the students in any given class transitioning to the score profile of another class. In the study reported here, which was based on almost 2000 seventh-graders, an LTA identified four classes of students who exhibited various

 

 

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patterns of performance on a pretest of text structure comprehension. Transitional probabilities from pretest to posttest indicated that progress toward proficiency differed among the classes. This new approach to modeling intervention effects allows one to track the stability of each class of students over time. It also pro- vides more specific information that can guide the design of instruction, perhaps leading to a decision to modify an intervention in different ways for different classes of students.

We are all used to reading in reports of intervention evaluations that a useful next step in the research would be to analyze the components of that intervention in order to determine which ones were the effective ones. Answering that question would help us develop not only effective, but efficient interventions. However, we rarely come across an actual study that undertakes such an analysis, probably because it appears to be a rather daunting endeavor. Hebert, Bohaty, Nelson, and Lambert take an unconventional approach to determining how much each individual component of an intervention contributes to its ultimate effectiveness. What they have decided to do is to attempt to answer this question even as they construct their intervention. That is, they are building an intervention one component at a time. In the present study the authors evaluate instruction on the component of identification/discrimina- tion for fourth and fifth-grade struggling readers. They plan to collect data on each of several intervention components. It is interesting to contemplate how the results of this approach might differ from those of the decomposition strategy that is typi- cally considered the way to approach the question.

Incorporating writing tasks as part of reading comprehension instruction is acknowledged to be a powerful instructional strategy. However, there is little research on the use of writing as a means of improving text structure knowledge. Turcotte, Berthiaume and Caron have examined how well French-speaking students in grade 6 of Canadian schools deal with text structure in both reading and writing tasks. The students had no specific training in text structure prior to the study. Path analysis indicated that knowledge of text structure and ability to identify main ideas influenced reading comprehension, which in turn influenced writing proficiency. The attention directed in this study to what students with no formal instruction can and cannot do is unusual. Interventions might sometimes be substantially improved if there were a deeper understanding of students’ abilities at the point at which they were introduced to the intervention. (This observation is certainly not limited to interventions that incorporate writing instruction.)

The article by Hebert, Bohaty, Nelson, and Roehling focuses specifically on writing instruction. These authors want to help struggling readers learn to organ- ize text in order to improve their writing. Their idea is to free up students’ cogni- tive resources by including in their instruction only what is essential for teaching planning and organizing–in other words, executive function. In their intervention students do not have to be concerned about what to write about, which is a compli- cating factor in most writing instruction. The authors provide students with short information “frames”, which eliminate the need to generate content; students learn to organize the frames according to the several text structures. Further work on this project will culminate in a longer, more comprehensive writing intervention and perhaps also more theorizing about the nature of executive function.

 

 

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Text structure instruction: the research is moving forward

Arfe, Mason, and Fajardo discuss another way, in addition to direct instruction, that we might address the comprehension difficulties of struggling readers. Problematic text could be modified to make it more accessible. Arfe et al. present their recent work on text simplification. They show how cognitive models of discourse comprehension can guide us to construct texts that will cue readers to form sound mental representations and accurate understandings. They describe one such system, currently under develop- ment, in which texts are rewritten to improve both global and local coherence and to decrease linguistic complexity (both vocabulary and syntax). They discuss the value of having a system that provides texts that are graded in difficulty, both for instruction and for practice.

Summary

The articles that appear in the present issue address many of the issues raised in the review by Ray and Meyer (2011) and the two meta-analyses (Hebert et al., 2016; Pyle et  al., 2017) that I cited earlier. These articles are indeed very heterogeneous—much too varied for me to draw any general conclusions about any specific issue. However, one observation worth making is that it appears that much of the research included in the two meta-analyses was based on English-speaking students and texts written in English. In contrast, the present issue includes participants who speak Dutch, Spanish, and French as well as English. While this hardly qualifies as a representative sample of world languages, it is a start to being able to generalize the results of text structure instruction beyond the English-speaking world.

I will also note that one of the most frequent second-generation research questions has to do with moderating variables. The papers in this collection that look for mod- erators come up rather surprisingly short of expectation. There are not a lot of data here that suggest, for example, that level of reading proficiency or grade level interacts importantly with text structure instruction. One interesting finding is the distinction between paraphrasers and elaborators that van den Broek and his colleagues have iden- tified. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to study the performance of these two types of reader on texts of the kind that are typically used in a text structure intervention.

All in all, this is a provocative set of studies that expands the horizons of text struc- ture research. It is clear that the field is continuing to move forward and that current and future findings will further inform all those involved in the quest for optimal instruc- tion. I look forward to reading further studies by the researchers who have contributed to this volume as they continue to pursue their particular questions. All of them are on the path to better understanding of what has rightly come to be considered an important part of reading comprehension instruction.

References

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Crosson, A. C., Lesaux, N. K., & Martiniello, M. (2008). Factors that influence comprehension of connectives among language minority children from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. Applied Psycholinguistics, 29, 603–625. https ://doi.org/10.1017/S0142 71640 80802 60.

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Durkin, D. (1978–1979). What classroom observations reveal about reading comprehension instruc- tion. Reading Research Quarterly, 14, 481–533.

Goldman, S. R., & Rakestraw, J. A. (2000). Structural aspects of constructing meaning from text. In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (Vol. 3, pp. 311–335). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Guthrie, J. T., Anderson, E., Alao, S., & Rinehard, J. (1999). Influences of concept-oriented reading instruction on strategy use and conceptual leading from text. Elementary School Journal, 99, 343–366.

Hebert, M., Bohaty, J. J., Nelson, J. R., & Brown, J. (2016). The effects of text structure instruction on expository reading comprehension: A meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(5), 609.

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Meyer, B. J. (1975). The organization of prose and its effects on memory. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co.

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Meyer, B. J., Middlemiss, W., Theodorou, E., Brezinski, K. L., McDougall, J., & Bartlett, B. J. (2002). Effects of structure strategy instruction delivered to fifth-grade children using the internet with and without the aid of older adult tutors. Journal of Educational Psychology, 94(3), 486.

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Pyle, N., Vasquez, A. C., Gillam, S. L., Reutzel, D., Olszewski, A., Segura, H., et al. (2017). Effects of expository text structure interventions on comprehension: A meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 52(4), 469–501.

Ray, M. N., & Meyer, B. J. F. (2011). Individual differences in children’s knowledge of expository text structures: A review of the literature. International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education, 4, 67–82.

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Wijekumar, K., Meyer, B. J. F., Lei, P.-W., Lin, Y. C., Johnson, L. A., Spielvogel, J. A., et al. (2014). Mul- tisite randomized controlled trial examining intelligent tutoring of structure strategy for fifth-grade readers. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness., 7, 331–357.

Williams, J. P., Hall, K. M., & Lauer, K. (2004). Teaching expository text structure to young at-risk learners: Building basics of comprehension instruction. Exceptionality, 12, 129–144. https ://doi. org/10.1207/s1532 7035e x1203 _2.

Williams, J. P., Hall, K. M., Lauer, K. D., Stafford, K. B., DeSisto, L. A., & de Cani, J. S. (2005). Exposi- tory text comprehension in the primary grade classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 538–550.

Williams, J. P., Kao, J. C., Pao, L. S., Ordynans, J. G., Atkins, J. G., Cheng, R., & DeBonis, D. (2016). Close analysis of texts with structure (CATS): An intervention to teach reading comprehension to at-risk second graders. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108, 1061–1077.

Williams, J. P., Nubla-Kung, A. M., Pollini, S., Stafford, K. B., Garcia, A., & Snyder, A. E. (2007). Teaching cause-effect text structure through social studies content to at-risk second graders. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 40, 111–120. https ://doi.org/10.1177/00222 19407 04000 20201 .

Williams, J. P., & Pao, L. S. (2011). Teaching narrative and expository text structure to improve com- prehension. In R. E. O’Conner & P. F. Vadasy (Eds.), Handbook of reading interventions (pp. 254– 278). New York: Guilford Press.

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  • Text structure instruction: the research is moving forward
    • Close analysis of texts with structure (CATS)
    • The articles in this issue
    • Summary
    • References

Mastering Business in Asia – Supply Chain Management .

/in /by

Introduction:

In this case study, ReignCom faces the market changes in MP3 Players with a new business strategy and supply chain. The Student will have the opportunity to consider the effects of these policy decisions on the supply chain and their eventual outcomes.

Tasks:

· Read the case: “ReignCom’s Global Outsourcing” in from Bowon Kim: Mastering Business in Asia – Supply Chain Management .

· Identify the situation that this business is facing.

· Consider and evaluate how this business should manage their supply chain in the future. As part of your analysis, answer these questions:

· Can the old strategy continue to work in the future?

· How should they cope with the challenges in China ?

· Construct a final decision (proposal) utilizing elements of supply chain management and business strategy. Comment on the strengths and weaknesses of your decision and the probability of success.

Deliverables and Format: Submit your answer in a Microsoft Word document in 800-1000 words. Font: Arial; 12 point Line Spacing: Double

CASE STUDY: ReignCom’s Global Outsourcing3

How a small Korean company has become a global leader in MP3P

On the first day of September 2003, Deok-Joon Yang, CEO of ReignCom, called a meeting with his management team. Founded in 1999, ReignCom (www.iriver.com) was a maker of MP3 players (see Figure 1.19). Although it had been a relatively small company in Korea, by 2003 it became one of the leading companies in the global MP3 Player (MP3P) industry, enjoying a market share of 52% in Korea and 25% worldwide (see Figure 1.20).

Figure 1.19 ReignCom’s flagship MP3P–iriver iFP series

Figure 1.20 Milestones of ReignCom

Mr Yang was concerned about the future of his company. He knew that the most imminent decision he had to face was about how to meet the challenges in China. But he was well aware that in order to come up with a successful strategy, he had to analyze the history of his company in grueling detail, from the very beginning up until now. He firmly believed that understanding how ReignCom had made it to the current state would lead him to find out how to accomplish his goals in the future. At least, he hoped that such an analysis would enable his management team to find an answer as to whether ReignCom should build its own plant to meet the increasing demand for MP3P in China or look for another outsourcing partner. Another option would be to expand the relationship with its current outsourcing partner, AV Chaseway in Shenzhen, China.

The early MP3P industry

The MP3P (MP3 Player) is an audio device designed to carry compressed digital music files in a flash memory or on hard disk. Since, in terms of mobility and convenience, it is superior to other music playing devices, such as CD (compact disc) and MD (mini disk) players, the MP3P market is growing rapidly, replacing existing audio players (see Table 1.1). In addition, it has more value-added; for example, making an MP3P on average takes about one-third of the time required to produce an MD player. Since making an MP3P has this kind of added economics and perhaps doesn’t require an extremely high level of technological capability at least for the generic market, there are many small and large companies producing the MP3Ps worldwide.

Downloaded from the Internet, an MP3 file is created on the PC and played by the MP3P. Therefore, the explosive growth of the number of Internet users also contributed to the growth of the MP3P market. This is especially true in Korea, where the penetration rate of broadband Internet services increased rapidly from around 2000, which pushed the MP3P market to grow significantly. However, since other industrialized countries lagged behind Korea in gaining access to broadband Internet, there was a significant growth potential in the global MP3P market (see Figure 1.21).

Table 1.1 Comparison of MP3P and other portable audio players

MP3 player

MD player

CD player

Cassette player

Recording

possible

possible

impossible

possible

Type of contents

digital

digital

digital

analog

Portability

very good

good

bad

good

Quality of sound

good

very good

good

bad

Size

very small

small

ordinary

ordinary

Price

various

high

low

low

Creating contents

*secs per music

same as playback

impossible

same as playback

Storage

flash memory/HD

**Midi disc

CD

magnetic tape

Source: Goodmorning Shinhan Securities, Korea

* Seconds

** Hard disk

Figure 1.21 The broadband market and the global MP3P market growth

(a) Broadband penetration

(b) Global PMP3P (portable MP3P) shipment trends and forecasts

Moreover, P2P (peer-to-peer) file exchange made it possible for individual Internet users to exchange their MP3 files with each other directly via the Net. As a result, web sites sharing MP3 music files such as “Soribada” (meaning sea of sound) in Korea and “Winmax” in the United States became popular: the increasing number of P2P sites fueled the growth of the online music exchange.

In 1997, a Korean company developed the first MP3P, named “MPman.” Since then, Korean companies have dominated the global MP3P industry. From a technological perspective, the entry barrier to the MP3P industry was relatively low. For instance, an industry analyst said that anyone with assembly technique and technical knowledge about how to play MP3 music files could make an MP3P. Because of this low entry barrier, the MP3P industry was soon flooded with manufacturers. By 1998, there were more than 100 manufacturers of MP3P in Korea alone. Out of these 100 companies, only 60 remained by early 2003.

Although it was still in an infant stage, the MP3P market had been growing quite rapidly. As the MP3P market grew, customers requested more add-on features in addition to the original function of playing music on their MP3Ps; for example, voice recording, electronic dictionaries, radio, heart rate checking, and so forth, were added to the new versions of MP3Ps. It forced MP3P manufacturers to continuously look for new ways to improve their existing products, many focusing on R&D in order to differentiate themselves from their competitors. This continuous quest for improving MP3Ps caused fierce competition in the market, which in turn shortened the product life cycle (PLC) of the MP3P even further. It was estimated that the average PLC of an MP3P was only about six months.

Thus as we can infer, in order to stay competitive, ReignCom had to find ways to maximize customer satisfaction by identifying the trendy customer tastes and introducing new products specifically tailored to such desires. The company had to have not only scale economies to make the MP3Ps economically and brand power to excel in the consumer’s mind, but also flexibility to respond to the constantly changing market in a timely manner. Although more companies would enter the MP3P industry, only those with these capabilities could have a chance to win in this competitive market.

ReignCom, Co. Ltd.

A brief review of ReignCom’s history

In January 1999, seven employees of Samsung Electronics (SEC) left the company and founded ReignCom Co. Ltd. in Korea. The seven included Deok-Joon Yang, CEO, and Rae-Hwan Lee, Vice-President of ReignCom. At first, ReignCom sold technology solutions for semiconductor production, but soon the top managers recognized the potential of the MP3P industry and jumped into it despite the risks involved in the manufacturing industry. The first MP3 product ReignCom made was an MP3 CDP, which used a regular CD player to play MP3 music. Another possible choice was a flash memory-type MP3P that had a relatively low technical entry barrier, but ReignCom chose the MP3 CDP because it could fully capitalize on its R&D capability for this type of product.

Since the company didn’t have any distribution channel at that time, it took its first step into the US market with the famous brand “Rio,” through an ODM4 contract with Sonic Blue in August 2000. However, the catch was that ReignCom had to make delivery within just three months. ReignCom had to find a production line. Since some of the top managers at ReignCom had worked with AV Chaseway in Hong Kong while they were at SEC, the company first contacted AV Chaseway. Unfortunately, the overall condition at AV Chaseway was substandard and ReignCom visited several other Chinese contract manufacturers. Although some of the other manufacturers seemed qualified, they would not give ReignCom full authority over the production process. ReignCom believed that in order to guarantee the product quality, it had to have complete control over the entire production process, and thus decided to choose AV Chaseway. Once the contract was signed with them, ReignCom dispatched its entire production department to AV Chaseway. ReignCom’s production managers renovated the production line and educated workers at AV Chaseway. After a six-week education program, these workers were able to make the products in 10 days. Finally, ReignCom succeeded in meeting the deadline on January 1, 2001, set by Sonic Blue.

The market favorably accepted ReignCom’s MP3 players with the Rio brand. Thus, ReignCom always had to maintain sufficient amounts of raw materials to meet the increasing demand. However, ReignCom was frustrated by Sonic Blue’s payment delinquency, amounting to more than $6 million by June 2001. When ReignCom introduced a new product, the company demanded to amend the contract with Sonic Blue so that the maximum amount of delayed payment could not go over $4 million and ReignCom would be allowed to sell the products in its own brand “iriver” if the sales volume through Sonic Blue fell below a certain level. However, the contract was short-lived.

Like in its manufacturing, ReignCom outsourced the external design of MP3P to INNO Design, an industrial design company in Silicon Valley, recognizing that the product design should be an essential point in winning the customers’ choice. With the new partner, ReignCom started developing new models. With the enhanced design capability, ReignCom introduced its third model “SlimX” in late 2001, and succeeded in entering the Korean MP3 market with its own brand iriver. It’s “Sorry Sony” advertisement made it an instant hit in the market. Buoyed by the series of successes, ReignCom called off its contract with Sonic Blue and tried to enter the US market with its own brand.

However, that was not an easy task. The sales through Sonic Blue accounted for about 75% of ReignCom’s total sales. After breaking up with Sonic Blue, ReignCom couldn’t find a distribution channel that was willing to shelf the company’s iriver MP3 players, even though the products were exactly the same as those sold in the Sonic Blue’s Rio brand. Due to the sharp decrease in demand, ReignCom had to shut down its production at AV Chaseway for several months. Despite its production shutdown, ReignCom had to pay AV Chaseway the promised amount according to the contract clause that forced ReignCom to guarantee a certain level of profitability for AV Chaseway in return for the company’s full control over the production process. Thus the situation faced by ReignCom was really dire. Amid these difficult times, ReingCom learned that Best Buy was interested in the flash memory type MP3P, which the company succeeded in developing for the first time in the world in April 2002.

Valuing ReignCom’s technology and its outstanding design, in June 2002, one of the largest distributors in the US, Best Buy, considered having ReignCom as a supplier. However, there was another string attached. Best Buy demanded that if ReignCom could supply the flash memory type MP3 players in the amount sufficient to stock 500 Best Buy stores in the US in three months, the company would accept ReignCom as a supplier for the entire product line including CDP MP3.

ReignCom had to work frantically. The company worked with INNO Design and eventually came up with a novel “prism-shaped” external design. ReignCom’s own R&D personnel designed a “double-board” structure, which could be safely put inside the prism-shaped case, for the new iFP-100 series. It was the MP3P based on the flash memory, the world’s first “firmware upgrade” MP3P, which enabled customers to constantly upgrade the hardware defects of their old models through the Internet.

Then, ReignCom started mass-producing the products using the production lines at AV Chaseway and met the deadline set by Best Buy by supplying the 500 Best Buy stores with the MP3 players exactly on September 20, 2002.

Thanks to the success of the iFP-100 series, which highlighted a good combination of outsourcing strategy and R&D ability, ReignCom recorded about $35 million in sales in 2002, the first full year of business,. Since then, ReignCom has been continuously successful with its own brand iriver. As a result, in 2002, it was ranked first in the division of portable digital devices by Best Buy. As of 2003, thanks to a series of successful new products, ReignCom enjoyed 52% market share in Korea and 25% worldwide, recording over $200 million in sales and $50 million in operating profits.

ReignCom’s operations strategy

Manufacturing outsourcing strategy–ReignCom had no manufacturing base of its own and therefore had to adopt an outsourcing strategy. AV Chaseway in Shenzhen, China, was the outsourcing partner and manufactured all of ReignCom’s MP3P products. But, it was not an ordinary outsourcing relationship. Unlike a typical outsourcing relationship, ReignCom was fully in charge of operations at AV Chaseway, from production line design, production management, quality control, to resource purchasing. AV Chaseway was responsible for recruiting and managing human resources, as well as managing the relationship between ReignCom and the Chinese government. In return, ReignCom guaranteed AV Chaseway a fixed amount of revenue per production line, amounting to $20,000 per production line in 2003. Eight ReignCom staff members were stationed at the Shenzhen factory, and supervised the plant’s operations and were in charge of some areas of administration. AV Chaseway’s facilities used for ReignCom’s MP3P products were listed in the ReignCom’s 2004 financial statements as an asset (see Figures 1.22 and Table 1.2). One of the ReignCom workers said that ReignCom employees called the Shenzhen AV Chaseway’s factory as “our factory” because ReignCom was able to decide the production volume and conduct quality control without waiting for AV Chaseway’s permission (see Figure 1.23).

Figure 1.22 ReignCom’s organization structure as of September 2003

(a) Company

(b) R&D division

(c) Number of workers

Design outsourcing strategy–ReignCom had never had a formal design department. Instead, a new product planning team took care of work related to design. Generally, this team suggested the concepts for the new MP3P models, and outside professional design companies designed the outer shapes of the new models. This system resulted from the CEO’s philosophy that a design team inside the company could easily fall victim to

Table 1.2 ReignCom’s financial statements

Figure 1.23 Process flow of “XXX-0000” model

“mannerism” and lose freshness unless there existed a truly tough mechanism to control its activity. The first three models were designed by a small domestic design company, and the other subsequent models were designed by a professional industrial design company, INNO Design.

When ReignCom was trying to find a suitable design company, Mr Yang recalled that he was impressed by a book about the importance of innovative designs written by Young-se Kim, CEO of INNO, an international design consultancy in Palo Alto, California. He decided to contact the company. At the meeting with INNO, keeping in mind that ReignCom’s bargaining power at that time was much weaker than INNO’s, the CEO of ReignCom offered them a contract containing the “running guarantee,” under which INNO would receive royalties continuously as long as ReignCom’s MP3 players were sold in the market. This kind of contract was quite unusual in the industry. The CEO of INNO, in turn, was impressed by the enthusiasm and compassion shown by Mr Yang and decided to take the risk by betting on the relationship, which was then untested. This new relationship based on mutual trust eventually paid off–both ReignCom and INNO were handsomely compensated by the huge sales of iriver. Such an amicable relationship between the two companies continues even to today. But, the relationship is not a rigid one; while cooperating with each other, each company is always aware that the relationship cannot be sustainable unless both participate in dynamic innovation.

In the new product development and customization processes, INNO and ReignCom worked together as if they were a single company. For effective coordination, ReignCom decided to change its CAD system so that it became compatible with INNO’s. However, at first, most of the ReignCom engineers objected to the idea, fearing they could lose their flexibility and autonomy. But, soon they realized that the new system could enhance the effectiveness of their cooperation with INNO significantly and accepted the new system. As a result, ReignCom was able to shorten the time for the entire design process.

Joon-hee Cho, an assistant manager at the product marketing department, said, “INNO is our design team. We have never considered INNO as a different company ever since we started working together.”

ReignCom just gave INNO basic technical information about a new model. Once INNO completed the outer shape design in conformance with the technical specifications, ReignCom’s own R&D team started to develop inner circuits that would be fit into the outer shape as designed by INNO. It was a creative process. Usually, the outer shape design was developed after the inner circuits were developed. However, ReignCom broke away from this traditional process and developed the outer design first and then the inner circuits. It was clear that this nontraditional process put an extra burden on the new product development speed. Nevertheless, it reflected ReignCom’s commitment to making MP3Ps attractive to customers–they not only considered functionality, but also aesthetics. It was a shrewd strategy. Since the “technological entry barrier” to the MP3P industry was not high, the product design was a key differentiating point for an MP3P.

According to Mr Yang:

In the competitive MP3P market, where the technological barrier is relatively low, it is critical to develop a product very attractive to young people. A sophisticated design should be critical! Given our present competencies, it seems obvious that we can’t make such a design fast enough to give us an edge in the global market. We have to approach this issue from a very different perspective.

There was an unexpected benefit as well: since the nontraditional process challenged ReignCom’s own R&D team, its competence in developing the inner circuits itself had been improved as their experience accumulated. Thanks to this unconventional design process, ReignCom had been able to develop a world-class, unique R&D capability in both designing and manufacturing sleek MP3Ps.

Building ReignCom’s own original brand–Initially, ReignCom had tried to sell its products under other companies’ brand names, such as Sonic Blue’s Rio. But soon it realized that relying on an ODM contract was not a good strategy–it could not provide ReignCom with enough revenues and profits. Therefore, as long as ReignCom was dependent on other companies’ brand power, the CEO thought that there would be no possibility that ReignCom could grow continuously in this extremely competitive market. Mr Yang decided to have ReignCom’s own brand! But, ReignCom didn’t seem a good brand name that appealed to young people. He needed something that sounded fancy, modern, and energetic. After grueling search efforts, he finally created a new name, “iriver” as the ReignCom’s brand name. But, making the new name known to customers was not easy. When ReignCom got the supply contract with Best Buy, using their own brand name iriver in the US market, their brand was met with resistance. Despite this difficulty, however, ReignCom stood by its newly created name. As the outer design became more attractive and ReignCom introduced better MP3Ps to the market, sticking with its own brand eventually paid off. ReignCom had successfully made iriver a prestigious brand in the MP3P market, and even was able to enjoy a 10% price premium over its competitors.

ReignCom’s R&D–ReignCom’s R&D capability was the company’s core competence. When it was established in 1999, all of the founding members were engineers working for one of the world’s most admired electronics companies, Samsung Electronics. Each of them had specialized in an R&D area. For example, three out of six got the Jang Young Sil prize, which was one of the highest awards given to engineers or scientists for their creative R&D activities in Korea. One of them also received the Korean President’s medal for his R&D excellence. In short, the company was founded by engineers and scientists of great caliber. It established a sort of tradition of the company. Even to this day, ReignCom puts an enormous emphasis on R&D excellence (see Figure 1.22). More than 50% of its employees were working at the R&D department and they continuously developed world firsts such as Multi-Codec CDP,5 slim-type MP3 CDP, digital camera built-in MP3P, and so on.

Competitive dynamics of the MP3P market

Trends of MP3P

The early models of MP3P were similar to CD players. Around mid-2002, flash memory began to be used as the storage media for MP3Ps. The flash memory type MP3P was smaller in size and more durable against external shocks than a CDP-type MP3P. These features made it easy to carry and play music. Moreover, its storage ability reached up to one gigabyte because of the technological innovation that has been pushing the memory price down (see Table 1.3). Thus, the flash memory-type MP3P gradually became popular in the market.

There was another type available, which used a hard disk drive (HDD) as the storage media. The HDD-type MP3P market was expected to grow much faster from 2003 (see Figure 1.24). The latest technological innovations addressed some of the critical problems associated with the HDD-type MP3P–it had been much heavier and much weaker against external shocks than the flashy memory-type MP3P. Therefore, the HDD-type MP3P was also becoming popular in America, Europe, and Japan. Since the HDD-type MP3P was able to store several gigabytes of data, the MP3P could become a more advanced multimedia player that would be able to handle complex multimedia functions. Apple was leading in the HDD-type MP3P market with its launch of the iPOD, a HDD-type MP3P with 20–40 gigabytes storage space, in 2001. Apple announced that in 2004, it would launch a 4-gigabyte iPOD mini and keep the iPOD boom going. In Korea, the iPOD mini was on the shelf in July 2004 and was already gaining attention.

Table 1.3 Comparison of the different types of MP3P

Advantages

Disadvantages

Market condition

CD-based

–CD-RW is cheaper

–Pretty large

–Higher entry barriers

–MP3 and Audio

–No direct saving of

–High-performance with slim

CD player

data (possible with CD-RW)

design and low voltage

combined

Flash

–Small size and

–No permanent storage

–Low entry barriers

memory-

light weight

–Highly dependent on

–Current market trend

based

–Diverse prices due

the memory price

–Mature stage in PLC

to various storage

–Korean companies

mediums from

taking the lead

32 Mb to 1 Giga

HDD-

–Huge storage,

–Weak against external

–Introduction stage in PLC

based

medium to 40G

shock

–Apple taking the lead

–Utilized as a PC

–High storage space,

support storage

high price

Source: ReignCom data and Hana Securities Research Center

Figure 1.24 Estimated sales (in units) of each MP3P type

Unforeseen competition–Digital convergence and the MP3 Mobile Phones

Digital convergence, caused by an unprecedented innovation in digital technology, has meant the collapse of the barriers between electronic industries, which were previously divided into three worlds: PC, mobile communications, and household appliances. More advanced technology brought about more intelligent digital devices such as video phones, camera phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), GPS (global positioning system) built-in car audios, and the like. The MP3 playing technology, created by the household appliances industry, was now applied in various fields. For example, there were MP3P built-in mobile phones and MP3P built-in PDAs (see Figure 1.25). The MP3P producers were adding new functions as well; for example, digital camera function, moving picture playing capability, and so on (see Figure 1.26 and Figure 1.27).

Mobile phone manufacturers were also trying to capitalize on the MP3P popularity. Recently, some mobile phones were made to play MP3 songs, and there were two different groups of experts having opinions about these MP3 mobile phones. The first group believed that the MP3 mobile phone was a huge threat to the “pure” MP3P. On the contrary, the second group thought the MP3 mobile phone and the MP3P would complement each other and one could have a positive effect on the other’s demand. The first group of experts argued that with a high penetration rate and portability, the mobile phones already had advantages in the digital convergence era. They also predicted that in the near future, the mobile phones would be equipped with the full MP3P function.

Figure 1.25 Roadmaps of the MP3 player, handset, and PDA

Figure 1.26 Global film and digital camera sales (in units)

Figure 1.27 Digital camera and DiCa-phone sales (in units)

There was another opinion apart from the two groups. At a recent interview with financial analysts, Mr Yang commented, “There would be no perfect convergence product.” His reasoning was as follows: As more and more functions are installed in the mobile phone, its size and weight will increase. Eventually, it will not be a very “mobile” mobile phone, and, in fact, not much different from a PDA, PMP (portable media player), or PMC (personal media center). It could take longer than five years to make these mobile phones small and light enough to really compete. In those five years, the MP3P would be able to find new ways to survive, or a totally new technology could emerge. As such, the future of the mobile phone would be different from that of the MP3P, which would still remain the dominant player in the portable music player market. Mr Yang further pointed out the case of the digital camera and the digital camera mobile phone. At first, the digital camera mobile phones seemed to affect the sales of digital cameras. However, eventually both products’ sales had increased.

Growing Chinese MP3P market

In China, the number of Internet users had been growing rapidly since 1997, and in 2003 about 60 million Internet users were expected to use the Internet for work or entertainment. Among them, five million would be DSL6 line users (see Figure 1.28). Because of the Internet boom, free MP3 downloading sites had become popular in China.

When the MP3P was first introduced to the Chinese in 2000, the MP3P market was just at its beginning stage. According to a market research firm, in 2001, 2.2% of all the money spent on digital consumer products in China went to MP3P: 71.4% to CD players, 20.8% to PDAs, and 5.6% to digital cameras. However, the growth now seems to be finally accelerating. Another market survey company predicted that the Chinese MP3P market would grow by 125.6% in 2003 and 86% in 2004, compared with the previous year’s sales respectively. In 2005, the number of MP3P units sold would reach more than 4 million.

Figure 1.28 Number of Internet users in China

As of late 2003, there were more than 100 MP3P companies, which were churning out more than 300 different models in China. Apple, Sony, and the other major electronics companies were all competing against the Chinese domestic companies such as Aiguazer () and Lenshian (). In particular, the two companies Aiguazer and Lenshian were the two top brands, enjoying over 70% of the Chinese MP3P market. These two companies had solid distribution channels in China and therefore were able to retain cost-competitiveness over their competitors. But, these Chinese companies were dominating only the low-end market. Most Chinese MP3Ps were OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) products, except for a few produced by Chinese conglomerates. Although the technological entry barrier to the MP3P market was relatively low, the overall technological capability of the Chinese MP3P producers was weaker than that of their foreign counterparts. Even worse, only a few Chinese companies invested resources in developing new products. Many analysts, therefore, expected that it would take a longer time for the Chinese companies to compete in the high-end MP3P market (see Figure 1.29).

High tariffs in China seem to be the most compelling explanation for Chinese companies’ domination in the low-end MP3P market. In 2003, all imported products were charged a 17% tariff. What’s more, this is a reduction from the 30% tariff that was levied before China joined the WTO. Most foreign companies, including the Korean MP3P makers, faced stiff competition vis-à-vis their Chinese counterparts. In order to avoid the high tariffs, foreign companies had to get a license, which was the permit from the Chinese government to allow them to sell their products in the domestic market. To obtain this license, a foreign company had to have a manufacturing facility in China and the product had to be produced in that facility.

Global competition of the MP3P market

Figure 1.29 Favorite MP3P brands among Chinese teenagers

Competition in the Korean MP3P market was also becoming more intense after Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics decided to aggressively increase their market shares in the domestic market. Samsung Electronics, the biggest company in Korea, increased marketing expenses and started a gigantic commercial campaign to promote its flagship model Yepp, featuring popular rock group Donbangsingi, whose members were among the most admired idols in Asia. LG Electronics declared a stop to selling its OEM models and started developing their own. Apple, the top maker in the global MP3P market, also launched iPOD mini in July 2004, and expressed its intention to expand its market share in the Korean MP3P market.

Likewise, the global competition was getting hotter. Sony, one of the most powerful players in the consumer electronics industry, chose to enter the MP3P market, where big household names such as Apple, RCA, Sonic Blue, Philips, and Samsung were already competing against each other. Replicating their Walkman’s great success in the portable audio market, Sony vowed to dominate the MP3P market with its new MP3P, Network-Walkman. According to AWSJ (Asian Wall Street Journal), Sony’s Network Walkman was superior to other competitors’ MP3Ps in terms of weight and performance. Therefore, Sony’s entry into the MP3P market would cause a big shakeup in the world MP3P market, where Apple, RCA, Sonic Blue, and ReignCom were presently dominating.

Call for a New Outsourcing Strategy

ReignCom has recently faced many changes, both internal and external. Thanks to the success of the company’s iFP-100 series, the demand for ReignCom’s MP3Ps in Korea and North America increased by 130% from 2002. Many analysts forecasted that China’s Internet boom would continue and the market for MP3Ps would soon explode. In the meantime, the Chinese government continued to charge high tariffs to the products that were not produced by a manufacturing facility in China. Mr Yang knew that ReignCom couldn’t afford to forego the Chinese market. But, he murmured, “Then what should we do?”

The September Meeting

At the beginning of the meeting on September 1, the CEO said that he would like to have a discussion that helped him analyze the various options available to the company. He said: “Our first decision should be on whether we want to be a strong player in the Chinese market or just ignore it. As you probably guess, ignoring the world’s fastest growing market is not an option if we indeed strive to become a global company in the MP3P market. The next question is whether we want to sell the products under our own brand iriver, give other companies the license to use our brand, or stay as an ODM contractor. The first option requires us to build a new plant, otherwise we have to pay the high tariff; that is, it is our status quo. Under the second option, we are able to use our brand, but I am not quite sure about the profitability. Finally, the last option is that we sell our products in China under the brands of other Chinese companies. Of course, if we want to increase our sales in China, we probably need to either increase the capacity at AV Chaseway or find another outsourcing partner. The more serious concern I have is about whether it contradicts our core strategy to promote our own brand as well as to maintain high profitability. Which option should we take? I somehow believe that the answer depends on the condition of the Chinese market in the future, say, for the next five years. How should we make the decision? What do you think about it?”

Moon, chief production executive, sparked the discussion, saying: “If we look at the fact that the global demand for MP3P is expected to reach over 30 million units per annum in a few years and we have a 20% share in the world market, we should have capacity enough to produce 6 million units every year. However, we are now able to produce only 3 million units. The best option I can think of is to construct a new plant in China. Considering our cash flow, we can afford it. Without our own plant in China, we would have to pay a 17% tariff, which puts an enormous burden on our cost structure.”

Lee, vice-president, interjected: “It will be very risky to build a new plant, when we are not sure about the market in the future. It will cost a lot. What if the demand decreases or our market share shrinks dramatically in three years? Our business model was based on a small and agile organization. I believe that it would be better to add more lines at the plant of our partner, AV Chaseway.

Moon threw up his hands, replying, “Listen, we don’t have an unlimited capacity with AV Chaseway! According to the data, we can increase the capacity up to 1.8 million at best. Considering the velocity of the MP3P market growth in China, it’s not a good alternative. Moreover, depending too much on the company can be problematic. For one thing, our production will be dependent on AV Chaseway completely. We should also consider that we could lose our bargaining power. At the beginning, we had to outsource our production to AV Chaseway since we simply didn’t have enough expertise and experience to manage human resources in China. But now I believe that we have acquired essential skills, as well as know-how in managing human resources in China and maintaining a good relationship with the Chinese government.”

Cho, chief marketing executive, suggested another alternative. “Why don’t we look for another company in China? It won’t be so difficult to build another outsourcing partnership and thus have enough bargaining power. We can export the products from AV Chaseway to the US and/or Europe and sell MP3Ps from this new partnership to China. Furthermore, we can expect some cost savings by bringing them into competition.”

Moon expressed some concerns. “It will be very difficult to find another outsourcing partner willing to give us the right to control the whole process like AV Chaseway. Also, even if we find a partnership, managing two outsourcing relationships simultaneously will be another problem.”

Park, the system engineer, asked, “Why don’t we think about ODM/OEM contract? Why does everyone stick to the ‘control’ issue?”

According to Moon, “It’s because our brand power is not strong enough to make them produce high-quality MP3Ps without our controlling their process. As you all recall, we decided to outsource manufacturing only if we were able to control every process at our outsourcing partner’s plant.”

Another Yang, chief financial officer, estimated that “by the end of 2003, our asset will be over $150 million and our net cash flow over $8 million. And I think we will have enough resources to build a new plant, if we want. I also collected some data that can help us financially analyze the various options in the handouts” (see Table 1.4).

Lee had the last words before a break: “I am still concerned about the uncertainty not only in the Chinese market, but also in the global MP3P market. It is because of several environmental, as well as technological, changes such as new developments in the HDD-based MP3P and the move to charge for MP3 files on the Internet. Of course, the competition will continue to be fierce. Considering all these, I must say building a new plant is too risky.”

While looking out of the conference room windows as the sun set over the Han River in Seoul, the CEO recalled how ReignCom had been surviving. The key, he thought, was a combination of its technological excellence and its shrewd outsourcing strategy. Can the old strategy continue to work in the future? How should we cope with challenges in China? The CEO was watching his colleagues enter the conference room and sit around the table after the coffee break. He then called the meeting back to order. It was time to make a decision.

Table 1.4 ReignCom’s market and production data

Note that the above data are derived from the authors’ estimates for the purpose of case discussion and don’t reflect the company’s forecasts and/or strategies.

ENDNOTES

1 See Kim, B. (1996), “Learning-induced control model to allocate managerial resources for production technology development,” International Journal of Production Economics, 43 (2–3), 267–82; Kim, B. (1997), “An empirical study on the learning-updating strategy to allocate managerial resources for operations improvement,” Management Decision, 35 (5–6), 436–46; Kim, B. (1998), “Manufacturing learning propensity in operations improvement,” Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing, 8 (1), 79–104.

2 See Upton, D. M. and B. Kim (1994), “Daewoo shipbuilding and heavy machinery,” Harvard Business School Case No. 695–001; Upton, D. M. and B. Kim (1995), “Samsung heavy industries: The Koje shipyard,” Harvard Business School Case No. 695–032; Upton, D. M. and B. Kim (1998), “Alternative methods of learning and process improvement in manufacturing,” Journal of Operations Management, 16 (1), 1–20.

3 Copyright © 2004 KAIST Graduate School of Management. All rights reserved. This case was written by Professor Bowon Kim, Mr Seung Oh Park, Ms Sun Min Oh, Mr Jin Seok Park (MS students), and Mr Soo Hong Chon (an MBA student) at KGSM. Professor Kim would like to thank Professor Michael Roberts at KGSM for his valuable comments on the case. Some of the information is disguised to protect confidentiality of the company and its employees.

4 ODM (original development/design manufacturing)

5 By the Multi-Codec method, CD-DA, MP3, WMA, AAC, ASF-type files become readable.

6 Digital Subscriber Line is a technology that brings high-bandwidth information to homes and small businesses over ordinary copper telephone lines.

(Kim, Bowon. Supply Chain Management in the Mastering Business in Asia series. John Wiley & Sons (P&T), 10/21/05. p. 40).

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