The implementation of the Reading to Learn pedagogy in a foreign language

Villa María

Jornada; V Jornadas Nacionales de ELT; 2019

Universidad Nacional de Villa María

The difficulties to understand and produce genres in subjects such as English Language at university level are motive for generalized concern. These limitations impact on academic performance and progress. Based on these difficulties and taking into account the aspects mentioned, we have carried out an action research project, applying a specific pedagogy, during the Introductory Course for the English Teaching and Translating programs at Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. The main objective is to analyze if this methodology is effective at improving the academic performance of the students participating in the research. The theoretical framework supporting this work is Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1975, 1978, 1985), genre-based pedagogy (Martin & Rose, 2005, 2008) and the Reading to Learn program (Rose & Acevedo, 2006; Rose & Martin, 2012.) As language teachers, we understand that this approach to literacy can be successful in dealing with any academic text. This is because this approach aims to provide students with the necessary scaffold so as to understand the content and make it theirs by internalizing the disciplinary genres (rhetorical structures and prototypical linguistic choices). We worked with 21 students who were taking the Introductory Course in English Language. In order to check if these students could understand and learn the topics proposed by different classroom texts, we applied a reading pretest before the teacher?s intervention, and a posttest afterwards. The teacher and researchers were trained in the implementation of the Reading to Learn pedagogy, in all the steps that make it up: pre-reading strategies, detailed reading, note-taking, and joint construction. The results are promising, since they were mainly positive and they reveal that this methodology to approach classroom texts results in the students? academic improvement.