Learning English under Conditions of Constraint: Student Narratives from the Kei Islands

Abstract

This narrative-informed qualitative study examines how students in the Kei Islands describe learning English under restricted educational and technological access. The reported corpus comprised in-depth interviews, classroom observations, field notes, and researcher reflective journals. The available accounts were read for temporal movement, social and material conditions, and evaluative meaning, and were then compared across narratives. Three interconnected storylines were developed: interrupted beginnings and uneven exposure to English; literacy opportunities narrowed by scarce print and digital resources; and linguistic uncertainty accumulating into fear and silence. The findings do not establish that limited resources caused low English proficiency. They show how students perceived discontinuous instruction, unavailable books and devices, difficulty with the language of schooling, and anticipated failure as mutually reinforcing constraints on participation. The study contributes a situated account of how structural inequality becomes lived and affective in an archipelagic learning context. It recommends continuity of English instruction, multilingual and locally meaningful materials, offline and shared-device options, and low-risk participation structures. Because the source record does not preserve essential participant, procedural, and ethics details, those items require author verification before journal submission