An investigation into how vocabulary is being taught to year 4-6 students in Samoan and Tongan bilingual classrooms

Abstract

Vocabulary knowledge has a significant influence in reading achievement. In primary schools in New Zealand, a large number of Pacific students have weak vocabulary knowledge which eventually leads to poor reading comprehension and vocabulary development. This study examined how vocabulary is being taught to year 4 to 6 students by teachers in Samoan and Tongan bilingual classrooms in two low decile schools, one in South Auckland, the other in Central Auckland. In addition, to examine how students acquire new words for understanding, classroom observations of vocabulary instruction and teacher interviews were conducted. As a non-Pacific researcher conducting study on Pacific students, ‘Nyaya’, a familiar Zimbabwean methodology was used to make connections with the unfamiliar Pacific methodology of ‘Talanoa’ as part of grounded theory mixed method approach to collect and analyse the data. The results suggest that while teachers were committed to the teaching of vocabulary, they need to explicitly teach and explain words to students in order for students to build up the necessary skills needed in their vocabulary development, vocabulary learning and vocabulary acquisition. Additionally, although teachers are knowledgeable about effective vocabulary strategies, they need to be strategically selective of strategies deemed effective for students to know and understand words in context while reading. It was evident that theoretically, teachers had lots of ideas on strategies to use, but implementing them was somewhat problematic. These findings suggest that effective links from vocabulary instruction to reading and reading comprehension must be made more explicit but it depends on teacher judgement and knowledge about strategy selection, application and implementation.