The act of L2 reading for pleasure. An action research project with young learners in a Latin American country

Abstract

This study, an action research to promote L2 reading for pleasure (Krashen, 2004) to young learners at primary level, encompasses two action research cycles (Alritcher et al., 2008; Burns,2010). The first of these aimed at exploring the educational context where the study would take place in order to identify the young learners’ reactions towards the exposure of extensive reading to encourage their pleasure to read in L2. The second presents the current action research project conducted. It draws together research from theoretical aspects of L1 reading, L2 reading, L2 motivation, and L2 reading motivation. Drawbacks in regard to the young learners’ L1 reading proficiency were identified during the action research cycles. Three L2 reading methodologies were selected for this study: extensive reading (Day and Bamford, 1998), reading circles (Daniels, 2002; Furr, 2011) and reading aloud (Enever, 2006), in this pedagogical intervention in order to examine the development of both cognitive and affective factors in L2 reading (Alexander, 2012; Schwanenflugel, and Flanagan 2016).
The action research methodology employed classroom observation, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups in order to triangulate the yield data and strength the validity and trustworthiness (Creswell, 2009) of the data collected. Teacher’s diary, field notes and classroom artefacts were other research tools used. It was through thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) that data obtained from primary teachers, participants’ parents and the young learners was examined to answer the research questions of the present study.
Overall, the findings of this study show that promoting L2 reading for pleasure to young learners in a context with deficiencies in both L1 reading and L2 learning is a motivating and meaningful activity. Not only does it have positive effects in their cognitive skills, but also their affective variables are strengthened by reading L2 stories that inspire them the pleasure to read. Further, it provides a suitable and practical L2 reading pedagogy which allows the identification of the advantages and disadvantages of its implementation. The study suggests further gains could be possible if more L2 language teachers were trained properly in developing the practice of reading approaches which promoted the pleasure of reading in their L2 classrooms in order to create more motivating environments to learn L2.

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