Vee Harris

A cross-curricular approach to ‘learning to learn’ languages: government policy and school practice

This article connects two fields of research: ‘learning to learn’ and school-based teacher development. The context is a cross-curricular project between English and modern languages teachers. Carried out in two London schools, the study aimed to encourage students to transfer common language learning strategies across the two subjects. Findings from interviews with teachers and students highlight the gap between the governments ‘learning to learn’ agenda and the realities of implementing it. A distinction is drawn between providing school-based opportunities for teachers to share generic ‘good practice’ in relation to initiatives such as Assessment for Learning and those where the actual content of lessons crosses subject boundaries. Recent government guidelines appear to mask inherent tensions in the aims and pedagogical approaches of the two languages – tensions exacerbated by the current preoccupation with performance measures. It is suggested that the differences are unlikely to be resolved without a supportive school culture that provides adequate release time for teachers to engage in extensive cross-curricular dialogue.

Learning a third language: what learner strategies do bilingual students bring?

This article seeks to develop the research agenda of multilingualism and multicompetence by bringing together three research fields and their related methodologies: bilingualism, third language acquisition and language learner strategies. After a brief introduction to each area, it describes a study to explore whether bilingual adolescent students learning French in two London schools outperform their monolingual peers in reading and listening comprehension. The significant difference in bilinguals students’ listening comprehension test scores leads to in-depth analysis of qualitative data of three case study students in order to identify the differential features involved in the interaction of the languages. It appears that their greater use of oral/aural strategies is developed through the home environment; code-switching in the parental input fostering the development of the strategies. The article concludes with implications for pedagogy and for research.