The main aim of this study is to contribute to the body of knowledge pertaining to the systems surrounding Malaysian primary school students who are struggling with their English language reading. Building on cognitive and sociocultural perspectives of reading, as well as Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development, I offer a rich and holistic understanding of the dynamic interactions among children, parents and teachers that influence the students’ learning experiences and development. First, I examine the ways in which their teacher works with the struggling readers in the classroom. Second, I identify the ways participating parents work with their children at home and, third, I gather struggling readers’ own perspectives on their experience and participation in ESL reading. These perspectives are put together in order to reconstruct the dynamics within the main ecological systems surrounding the children, delivering insights for theory, policy and practice.
This was a qualitative study conducted in 2017, incorporating six ESL struggling readers studying in Year 1 of a suburban primary school, seven parents and one English teacher. I primarily employed interviews, classroom observations and document collection as research methods to garner information from the participants. Data analysis was carried out inductively, encompassing a co-construction of meaning between the participants’ expressions and my own interpretation as a researcher.
The study findings delineated the ways the teacher and parents worked with the struggling readers, as well as the students’ own perceptions of their ESL learning experience, highlighting their respective practices and challenges. Through this rich holistic understanding of the total learning environment of these struggling readers the research identifies a series of disconnections between the parents and the teacher and the teacher and the students. Four main areas of disconnect, among others, were:
(1) the teacher and parents having different views about homework, with the former assuming minimising homework in the belief that parents could not engage with it, and the latter seeing more homework as central to their ability to support their children with English reading.
(2) Lack of communication between the teacher / school and parents, with each party having little insight into the needs and circumstances of the other.
(3) Differences in instructional techniques and utilisation of different kinds of learning resources between home and school environments.
(4) Use of instructional techniques in the classroom that do not engage struggling readers.
The above issues imply the need for wide-ranging reform of educational policies and practice so as to provide better support for struggling readers across the school and home environments. The findings of this study now need to be verified across a wider sample within Malaysia.
