Reading to Learn and EFL Students’ Construction of Spoken Biographical Recounts

Abstract

Reading to Learn (R2L) is a genre-based pedagogical model that has been used worldwide for promoting student literacy in L1 and L2 contexts. Despite its increasing popularity, very few studies have reported how R2L can be used to support learners’ spoken communication in foreign language classrooms. This article reports the results of a qualitative study that explored how a rural-school teacher of efl used this model to support ninth graders’ understanding and production of spoken biographical recounts. Findings revealed that learners’ spoken meaningmaking potential increased during the R2L lessons, both in terms of the amount of new content students conveyed throughout the stages and phases of the genre and in connection with the variety of lexico-grammatical resources learners used. Findings also revealed that the teacher’s use of metalanguage, both verbally and represented in a diagram, became a key scaffold in students’ independent construction of biographical recounts. The study underscores the value of this pedagogy for promoting spoken discourse in efl classrooms.

Keywords

• spoken discourse
• systemic functional linguistics
• Reading to Learn
• biographical recounts
• genre-based instruction
• EFL