Developing reading achievement in primary learners of French: inferencing strategies versus exposure to ‘graded readers’

Abstract

All primary school children in England are to be entitled to learn a foreign language by 2010, based on the belief that an early start is beneficial for language learning in the long run. However, the evidence of the benefits of an early start is inconclusive, and it is also unclear what type of curriculum and pedagogy would be most appropriate for these young-beginner learners. This pilot study of Year 6 (ages 10–11) children learning French aimed to provide some initial evidence that a literacy-based component has a place in a primary language learning curriculum. A group of learners were given an intervention comprising some special materials designed to develop their ‘inferencing strategies’ when confronted with new or unfamiliar French words in short texts. This group was compared with a group of learners who were simply exposed to a diet of ‘graded French readers’ without any strategy instruction. Both groups were, in turn, compared with a control group which continued with their normal learning experience. Both the inferencing strategies group and the graded readers group made significant advances in their reading comprehension, but, further, the inferencing strategies group outperformed the graded readers group in inferencing ability and in the learning of function words. The findings suggest a need to pursue this area of enquiry further with a larger and more controlled study.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 27 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.