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Abstract
Language learning strategy research has focused on the actions of the individual language learner and investigated the links between successful learning and the strategies that such learners use. At the same time, researchers studying beginner bilingual pupils learning English and learning to read in English in UK schools have also been interested in the strategies that such pupils employ in order to be successful learners and readers in their new language. This article reports on some of the findings from a study of the experiences of a small group of bilingual Bangladeshi pupils that took as its initial focus the strategies that the pupils called on in order to engage with learning to read in English (their L2) in their classroom. What emerged during the course of the study was that the strategies the pupils were employing could not be considered separately from the contexts in which the children were learning, and that the strategies children used were not simply strategies for learning to read or to learn English but were bound up with issues of identity and assimilation. The data thus challenge research that focuses exclusively on the individual learner or that treats context as simply another variable. The paper argues for a sociocultural approach to research and pedagogy in relation to language learning and for the use of ethnographic methods.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support of the ESRC who provided the studentship that allowed me to complete the research study reported on here.
Notes
1. Although the focus of the research was on bilingual pupils learning to read in their L2 whilst learning English at the same time, I included reading sessions with six monolingual pupils in each classroom as a way of exposing myself to a range of monolingual readers so that I did not jump to any conclusions about what the bilingual pupils were doing as readers as necessarily being different or unusual. The data used in this paper is only that which pertains to the bilingual pupils and the strategies that they used. However, the argument that the classroom context is key in determining learning opportunities and that strategies cannot be separated out from context holds for all learners, bilingual or monolingual.
2. Gu et al.'s (Citation2005) reading activity assumed that the children already knew that they should comprehend a story when reading it.
3. All names have been anonymized.
4. In another section of the interview Salima revealed that later in the school year that she was describing to me, she learnt some phonic strategies and onset and rhyme strategies from watching Sesame Street at home but she never really caught up with the reading level of her classmates and was thus always behind at school.
5. This is what Tumi's teachers thought, but it was not the case. Tumi read to her older sister regularly at home but her teachers did not know this.
6. In this way, the three children referred to in this paper had a ‘strategy’, or practice (which they could call on in order to present themselves as good readers, and hide their reading difficulties) that their monolingual peers did not have.
7. Similar accounts of learning in community settings are provided in Rashid and Gregory (Citation1997).
8. Norton Peirce (Citation1995) has also argued for the importance of identity in SLA research.
9. For example, Macaro's pilot study on learner strategies conducted in four UK secondary schools in 1996, found that ‘girls, almost across the board, were claiming to use strategies more than boys’ (Macaro, Citation2005, p. 1). A focus on identity and identity work may direct us to consider whether the boys' failure to claim that they used strategies arose from more than simply not knowing or using strategies but as a resistance to an identity position they did not wish to occupy. Perhaps their claim to use fewer strategies than girls was a refusal to be seen as a certain kind of feminised pupil? If the strategies listed and claimed by the girls were how successful girls behaved in the classroom then the boys may well have wanted to distance themselves from such behaviours/strategies.
