Reading to Learn an EFL classrooom experience

Villa María, Córdoba

Jornada; V Jornadas Nacionales de ELT. Innovations and Challenges in the 21st century; 2019

Universidad Nacional de Villa María

University applicants at Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC), are often unprepared to understand and produce the text types that are typically required in the final written examination instances at the Introductory Course. This is of great concern to professors because this situation causes many students to fail their entrance exam. Furthermore, not only do university applicants at Facultad de Lenguas, UNC, need to understand and produce a number of texts of specific genres, but also they have to do so in a foreign language.Sydney School researchers have designed a pedagogy in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 2004), known as the Reading to Learn (R2L) program, (Martin & Rose 2005, Martin & Rose 2008; Rose & Martin, 2012) which aims at providing access for all students to the linguistic resources required for educational success. The R2L program enables every student to read and write texts that are well beyond their independent competence through a carefully-designed teaching sequence which involves pre-reading strategies, detailed reading, note-taking, and joint-writing. Using this pedagogical approach, teachers can take advantage of the students? prior knowledge and encourage them to read and write in an effective way by giving them concrete tools to overcome problems related to the skills of reading and writing.In this presentation, we share a classroom experience to show how the Pre-Reading and Detailed Reading phases of the R2L program were implemented with a group of EFL students of intermediate level who were taking the Introductory Course in the English Language course of studies.