Using R2L to achieve UDL: Applying Genre-based Pedagogy in a pre-service teacher-training course
Authors:   ,   Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Facultad de Letras, Ibaceta Quijanes Ximena 
Published: September 2023

This action research aims to improve the teaching quality of preservice teachers at the school level. The study takes place in an elective course from an English as Foreign Language (EFL) Teacher Education programme in Chile. The purpose of the course is to support preservice teachers in the achievement of the principles of the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework in their own teaching. Using UDL in English language teaching is concerned particularly with making language resources accessible to all language learners. In the last few years, preservice teachers in the course showed insufficient demonstration of accomplishing the UDL principles in their teaching performance at the end of the course. An important reason for this unsatisfactory outcome is that preservice teachers were not provided with sufficient and concrete pedagogic strategies for achieving the principles; the UDL principles tended to remain as abstract concepts. To tackle this issue, this study aims to provide an innovation of the undergraduate course, by offering explicit teaching of a pedagogic strategy that gives concrete guidance for pre-service teachers to achieve the UDL principles in their teaching practice. The study conducts an action research following a two-fold intervention informed by the genre-based pedagogy (GBP). First, the study implements a genre-based pedagogy, known as Reading to Learn (R2L), as a way of helping preservice teachers achieve the UDL principles in their teaching practice. The R2L pedagogy is informed by systemic functional linguistics (SFL), which considers the inherent relationship between language and context. With the linguistic underpinning, the pedagogy provides a series of teaching strategies that promotes equal access to knowledge by making explicit the language patterns in the teaching practice. The objectives of the pedagogy complement the objectives of UDL principles, providing helpful strategies for achieving the UDL principles in pre-service teachers’ classroom practice. Second, the teaching of the pedagogic knowledge about R2L in the course also follows a genre-based principle, specifically the Teaching-Learning Cycle (TLC). This design aims to provide a scaffolding process that benefits preservice teachers’ process of learning to teach. The study therefore adopts the genre-based pedagogy in the action research, including both the teaching about R2L, and the teaching through TLC. The outcome of this action research is assessed by analysing the teaching performances of the preservice teachers. Surveys are also conducted to understand the preservice teachers’ perception of teaching with R2L, and the perceptions of the school students’ learning 3 experience. The results of the study demonstrate that using R2L contributes to preservice teachers’ achievement of the UDL principles. The study directly benefits preservice teachers’ pedagogic knowledge development, providing useful pedagogic activities in the classroom practice. Second, the study contributes to the innovation of preservice teacher training in two important ways. It firstly demonstrates an effective way of achieving UDL principles through concrete and systematic pedagogic activities - i.e. the R2L pedagogy. Secondly, it shows an effective way of teaching pedagogic knowledge with a genre-based scaffolding, supporting presservice teachers’ learning to teach.