Ua malie toa ua malie tau = student with silver tongues whip the tail: enhanced teaching and learning of reading comprehension in Samoan bilingual classes

Abstract

The achievement of Samoan students in English reading comprehension has been identified as a major challenge for the education in New Zealand. This study examined the effectiveness of reading comprehension instruction in the context of six Samoan bilingual classrooms in two schools in South Auckland. The quasi-experimental intervention involved two phases over three years. One was the development of an inter-school standardised process of administering and scoring assessments to identify student weaknesses and strengths. The other involved 10 professional development sessions over the year built around the profiles of teaching and learning collected in the first year. Systematic observations of teacher instruction were carried out in both phases. In addition to the English reading comprehension measures, there were specially designed assessments of students’ oral language and reading comprehension in Samoan. These assessements enabled relationships to be examined between students’ Samoan oral language and reading comprehension and their English achievement. In addition, teachers were interviewed about their ideas of reading comprehension from a cultural perspective. Three approaches were used to judge the effectiveness of teaching. These showed that teaching became more effective generally when examined for students in a longitudinal cohort, but also for new cohorts in Year 1 and Year 2. In addition, the results showed that students in the bilingual classrooms had initially lower levels in reading comprehension in English but made more rapid gains with the intervention and reached comparable levels earlier. These gains are linked to specific changes in the teachers’ instruction. Analyses showed that the focus of instruction, for example, instruction which increased general awareness was prominent in raising reading comprehension levels. Three teachers who attended professional development consistently showed more gains at the end of the study than the other three teachers who inconsistently attended. However, despite the gains achievement of bilingual students were still below national norms. At a general level, no relationships were found between Samoan oral language and reading comprehension and English reading comprehension but the presence of relationships between Samoan reading comprehension and English reading comprehension and between Samoan reading comprehension and English reading comprehension vocabulary at year 6 suggests a transitional effect particularly at the level of word knowledge. This effect might explain the lagging behind of achievement in English from year 4 and year 5 and a catching up at year 6. Teachers’ placing more emphasis on vocabulary instruction evidenced in the observations suggests that this is an urgent need. While there was great variability in reading comprehension instruction, teacher ideas also add to the complexity given teachers’ understanding of what comprehension is from the Samoan concepts of ‘iloa’ (know) and ‘malamalama’ (understand). Teachers differed in their understanding of these two terms. These findings suggest that low achievement in English reading comprehension can be changed, but there is more research that needs to be done to expand our knowledge of how Pasifika students in schools comprehend English texts but specifically how they should be taught.