Volume: 20  Number: 3  Page: 232–254

‘Hospital’: A Five-year-old Samoan Boy’s Access to Learning Curriculum Content in his New Zealand Classroom

Elaine W. Vine School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Previous research suggests that young ESOL learners in mainstream English-medium classrooms are afforded limited opportunities to engage with curriculum content. This paper reports on a study of a five-year-old boy from Samoa who was just beginning to learn English in a mainstream New Zealand classroom. Interactions between the boy and his teacher and English-speaking peers are analysed for evidence that he was learning ‘hospital’, a central concept in a social studies curriculum unit. The analysis shows that, while this was a language and resource rich classroom, affordances of ‘hospital’ were not consistently accessible to the boy. He did begin to attend to the word ‘hospital’, but there is little evidence that he engaged with the concept. However, noticing the word is a step towards learning its meaning, and it was in interactions with his teacher that he attended to the word, not in interactions with his peers.

Keywords: ESOL in mainstream, classroom interaction, curriculum content

© 2006 E.W. Vine

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