Reading to Learn (R2L) is an instructional approach that leads students from aided to independent creation of meaning in reading and writing. The approach uses whole texts as the point of departure for instruction. This case study explored how R2L promoted ninth graders’ comprehension of explanation texts in EFL during six lessons and students’ perceptions about R2L. The study involved a group of ninth graders from a secondary state school in Colombia whose results in national standardized tests had been traditionally low, particularly in EFL reading. Results revealed that students became better readers of explanation texts and perceived R2L as a useful approach to develop their ability to understand written texts in EFL. The study highlights the benefits of R2L for enhancing L2 students’ meaning-making potential.

Reading to Learn (R2L) is a genre-based pedagogical model that has been used worldwide for promoting student literacy in L1 and L2 contexts. Despite its increasing popularity, very few studies have reported how R2L can be used to support learners’ spoken communication in foreign language classrooms. This article reports the results of a qualitative study that explored how a rural-school teacher of efl used this model to support ninth graders’ understanding and production of spoken biographical recounts. Findings revealed that learners’ spoken meaningmaking potential increased during the R2L lessons, both in terms of the amount of new content students conveyed throughout the stages and phases of the genre and in connection with the variety of lexico-grammatical resources learners used. Findings also revealed that the teacher’s use of metalanguage, both verbally and represented in a diagram, became a key scaffold in students’ independent construction of biographical recounts. The study underscores the value of this pedagogy for promoting spoken discourse in efl classrooms.