Communicative literacy pedagogy: engaging EAL students in reading comprehension

In culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms reading comprehension is essential for students to access all areas of the curriculum. For English as an Additional Language (EAL) students, research has identified the need to combine literacy strategies with second language principles to scaffold students comprehension of text. To illustrate this approach, this article analyses classroom discourse in one Year 8 English lesson using a newspaper report as text. The paper first presents the context and aims of the study, followed by its conceptual approach. Research on both reading comprehension and communicative language teaching is used to generate aspects of subject English pedagogy that scaffold students engagement with text. The analysis demonstrates a communicative pedagogy involving substantive interactions around text, as well as insight into the complexity of vocabulary and comprehension teaching as part of reading development in English classes.