Understanding EFL students’ academically transitioning experiences with meaning-making-based instruction: A qualitative inquiry

Abstract

This qualitative study took place in a content-based English as a foreign language (EFL) reading course at a Chinese university. The students had to academically transition from their prior reading practices, which involved surface meaning and/or linguistic resources, to the deconstruction of the deep meaning of texts. Interviews with 16 EFL students, their reflections, as well as the researcher's field notes and audio recordings of classroom interactions, were qualitatively analyzed. The study reveals that the EFL student readers’ academic transition to the content-based reading course was supported by the pedagogical use of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). With SFL pedagogy, the students were exposed to meaning-making-based instruction, which focused on the close relationship between linguistic resources and meanings. This transition was especially exemplified by the students’ positive experiences with leveraging meaning-making-based knowledge when harnessing linguistic resources as gateways for gaining access to the deep meanings of texts, as expected in the transitioning context. However, during the transitioning process in relation to their meaning-making-based knowledge, students encountered constraints from their previous and ongoing experiences (e.g., their sensitivity to the linguistic resources in a text or textbook design), which were mitigated through teacher mediation. This study concludes that meaning-making-based instruction may have played a useful role in mediating and facilitating the EFL student readers’ transition to academically demanding reading, although the transitioning process was sensitive to dynamic but surmountable constraints.