L2 teaching strategies used by teachers in multigrade rural schools in Chile: a case study

Abstract

The study describes the teaching strategies a group of teachers use in multigrade rural schools in Chile to teach English as a second language. This study also describes the context where the L2 teaching takes place. The study draws on observations of the L2 teaching interaction between teachers and students in rural multigrade schools. It is interesting to reveal information about the L2 teaching process as it occurs in the context of rural schools instruction. This setting has been largely left out of investigation in the literature. Rural L2 teaching is relevant, since there is a large amount of people that still reside in rural areas and will satisfy their educational needs by attending a rural school. This study describes the strategies teachers use in terms of activity type, participation organization, content, modality, materials, use of target language and discourse initiation. These feature allow a thorough description of the context as well of the characteristics of L2 instruction. The way to obtain this information are semistructured interviews to teachers and classroom observation of five rural multigrade schools. Key words: L2 teaching, rural context, primary education, multigrade school, strategy, macrostrategy.