Using a Reading to Learn (R2L) adaptation to support students’ language learning in the production of spoken daily routines

Abstract

The study reported in this thesis is an action research project which investigates the teaching of oral production in English at a tertiary education institution. The study is concerned with establishing an effective pedagogy to support students’ English language learning. This action research project draws on the Reading to Learn (R2L) pedagogy informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The R2L pedagogy is concerned with providing systematic and strategic support for students’ English language development, specifically about the oral production of a genre named here as daily routine. Three phases of an adaptation of the R2L pedagogy are conducted in this intervention. Teaching this genre enables students to develop language skills to talk about both a personal daily routine and another person’s daily routine. The intervention draws on several scaffolding tools in the pedagogical design. These include pedagogical activities informed by R2L, classroom interactions with translanguaging, and multimodal teaching materials. The results of the intervention program indicate three important outcomes. First, the conduction of the pedagogical activities informed by R2L successfully helps students better produce spoken daily routines. Second, the use of L1 (Spanish) is effective in learning L2 (English) when the reduction of L1 is carefully planned. Third, the employment of multimodal resources in the teaching materials facilitates students’ language comprehension and production. The study is innovative for two reasons. It provides an effective adaptation of the R2L pedagogy to improve oral production. And it provides an active intervention for supporting students’ English language learning in an online environment.