Reading to learn cycle : writing narrative texts in the EFL Chilean context
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Date
2022
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Abstract
Throughout life, reading and writing are fundamental skills in our learning process. They help us to communicate, create relationships, and describe the world around us. In this context, the EFL classroom represents its own challenges and opportunities. The current educational model in Chile has caused a deep segregation in terms of access to education, so English proficiency has been recognized as a social-economic indicator. Marginalized Spanish-speaking groups avoid reading and writing due to their complexity. The Reading to Learn model proposes that there is a systematic cycle that could help EFL learners to explicitly construct their own texts, unveiling the historically hidden conventions when it comes to writing. The following action research study aims to evaluate the effects of Reading to Learn methodology to help high school students to improve their writing of narrative texts by recognizing genre and the infinite combinations to express meaning that the system offers to language users. This research was carried out in virtual learning and the pedagogical intervention was designed considering quantitative and qualitative data. It consisted of initial surveys for teachers and students, a pre-test, seven action-research cycles, a post-test, and a final survey for participants. The main qualitative findings suggest that the Reading to Learn methodology helps to improve writing in terms of lexicogrammatical choices that convey attitude and refer the participation of people and things in discourse. Similarly, the main quantitative findings indicate that participants enhanced their genre-knowledge including more phases and structures of the narrative genre after the interventions.
Keywords. Reading to Learn, narrative text, writing, action-research, EFL.
Description
Tesis (Magíster en Lingüística Aplicada al Inglés como Lengua Extranjera)--Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2022
Keywords
Reading to learn, Narrative text, Writing, Action-research, EFL