Reading in a foreign language: a reading problem or a language problem?

Even knowing that the knowledge of a foreign language is important to academic studies, most students fail to learn to read adequately in the foreign language. Either they read with less understanding than one might expect or considerably slower than they reportedly read in their first language.
Readers do not simply have to learn translation rules, but far more: how to relate what is being processed to one’s existing knowledge, emotions, etc. and to do so with an appropriate degree of flexibility. MacNamara (1970), studying Irish-English bilingual students, found out that those who understood the words and structures of the texts were still unable to understand what they read in the second language as well as in their first language.
Knowing that, researchers started to wonder if reading in a foreign language is ‘simply’ a problem of knowing the words and the grammar of the language, or if there were other causes of the difficulties learners experience.
In Latin-American countries, teachers have asserted that the reason their students cannot read adequately in English is that they cannot read adequately in the native language, in the first place an if only they knew hoe to read ‘properly’ in their first language, the problems of learning in English would be vastly reduced.
Several speculations have risen upon this matter:
Jolly (1978), for example, claims that success in reading a foreign language depends crucially upon one’s first-language reading ability rather that upon the students level of English ‘if this is identifiable’.
Cody (1979) shares the same view and asserts that foreign language reading is a reading problem and not a language problem.

Yorio (1971), however, takes a contrary view. He claims that the reading problems of foreign language learners are due largely to imperfect knowledge of the language and to native language interference in the reading process. In Yorio’s view, reading involves four factors:
1. Knowledge of the language;
2. Ability to predict or guess in order to make the right choices;
3. Ability to remember the previous cues;
4. Ability to make the necessary associations between the different cues that have been selected.

And this process becomes even more complex because of new elements which summarize as interference from the native language and inadequate knowledge of the target language:
1. The reader’s knowledge of the foreign language is not like that of the native speaker;
2. The guessing or predicting ability necessary to pick up the correct cues is hindered by the imperfect knowledge of the language;
3. The wrong choice of cues or the uncertainty of the choice makes associations more difficult;
4. due to unfamiliarity with the material and the lack of training, the memory span in a foreign language in the early stages of it’s acquisition is usually shorter than in our native language: recollection of previous cues then is more difficult in a foreign language than in the mother tongue; and at all levels, and at all times, there is interference of the native language.

Unfortunately, the views of Yorio, Coady and Jolly remain assertions: they are eminently researchable assertions, but do not base themselves upon empirical evidence.
What is needed is the development of a series of researchable hypotheses, from which not only empirical evidence should flow but hopefully also a series of pedagogic implications might be derived for the teaching or learning of reading in a foreign language.

*A cue is anything that leads you to act in a particular way.
*Empirical means resulting from or involving practical experience rather than theory.
*The word span is added to nouns to form compound words which refer to a particular length from end to end in distance or time.

What is reading - The text

This post talks about the text, the second element in the interaction in the reading process, focusing on the features of it that cause difficulty to readers.
Several articles have discovered that if a text is found not to be readable, attempts may be made to alter it in order to make it more readable or simpler. However, that simplification may be a more complex process than has been traditionally assumed and may actually have the effect of distorting the “message” or, indeed, increasing difficulties in other aspects of the text.

The typical readability study takes a range of passages, determines their “difficulty” for a range of readers by means either of multiple choice questions or, more recently, cloze tests. The passages are usually analysed in terms of their linguistic units: structures, words, clause and sentence relationships, or whatever. Word difficulty may relate to infrequency of occurrence, and has been indexed either by reference to frequency lists, or by reference to word length, usually measured in number of syllables, since, on the whole, longer word tend to be less frequent and therefore might be expected to cause processing problems. Sentence complexity can be measured by a variety of devices but, on the whole, the longer the sentence, the more complex it is likely to be, with embedded and subordinate clauses, and the like.

One typical readability formula is Urquhart´s Fog Index:

No. words / No. sentences + no. 3-syllable words/ no. words x 100/1 x .4

The result is interpreted as:
---> 12 – = easy
---> 13 – 16 = undergraduated
---> 16 + = postgraduate.

It should be emphasized that readability studies result in “indices” of difficulty and do not claim to be indicative of clauses of difficulty: that is, if one applies a readability formula to a text, finds it too difficult for a given audience, and the manipulates the text to shorten sentence length and remove long words, it will not necessarily follow that the cause of difficulty has been removed: the text might actually have been made more difficult, although the readability index would be lower.

Other studies have shown how the global organization of a narrative text can influence how a reader recalls the text. Berman suggests the importance of transparency – the opposite of her term opacity – of the kernel sentence: the basic subject – verb – object ordering of sentences. If decomposing a sentence into it’s basic svo constituents is delayed by, for example, deletion of relative pronouns, wh + be deletion in post-noun modifiers, or ‘one’ or ‘do’ substitution for repeated lexical material, and the like, then the sentence will be more difficult to process.

Cooper, comparing what he called practiced and unpractised readers found little difference between them in terms of the processing of syntactic features (tense, aspect, modality), but he did find differences in the problems caused by some cohesive devices and particularly in the relationships between sentences.

When researching with foreign language readers, Alderson found out that vocabulary problems were the most important contributors to text difficulty, but they also found that there were many foreign language readers who did not have “language problems”, including difficulty with vocabulary, but who still found text difficult to process. In fact , a linguistic description of a text is a necessary but not sufficient guide to the problems that readers might have with that text.



- Embedded: A thing is embedded in something when it is fixed or set in it firmly and deeply.
- And the like: You use “and the like” to mean “and other things of the same sort”.

What is reading?

This article was taken out from the book Reading in a Foreign Language - Alderson & Urquhart.
The purpose of the whole book is to answer the question What is reading?, and this first part of the introduction talks about one of the three necessary elements of Reading which is The reader.
It says that, in order to understand the process of reading, teachers and researchers have tried to approach readers giving them a series of passages to understand and then asking them questions about it afterwards. As a result, they came up with levels of understanding that could be only related to the product of reading but not to the process of reading. They came to the conclusion that “a description of what a student has understood of a text is not the same as a description of how he arrives at such an understanding”.
When researchers actually started to investigate and gather information about the nature of the reading process, they realized that since reading is essentially, in most cultures, a silent, and private activity, it would be a difficult task to describe the process itself. So, they came up with a method in which they recorded the eye’s movement while people were reading.
By analyzing the eye’s movement on the reading process, researchers have established that good readers make fewer fixations, with less duration, than do weak readers. So, they started to themselves questions like “What causes regression?”, “What information are the eyes processing when fixating?” and “What is going on in the head when the eyes are not fixating?”. Carpenter (1980) suggests that almost all content words in text are fixated, and that longer fixations occur on infrequent words, and at sentences ends when inferences are being made.
Some authors have developed a process model of several stages:
1. Moving the eye to the site of next input;
2. Encoding the visual features of the word;
3. Accessing the lexicon ( in what is called the working memory, for conceptual information; assigning case roles of the word in question ─ i. e. determining the relation among words in a structure; integrating clauses to each other; sentences wrap-up);
It is now almost universally accepted that frequent fixations and regressions are symptoms of poor comprehension, rather than causes of it.
Researchers also developed another technique called miscue analysis which consists of analyzing oral reading errors and seeing how similar or how different they are from the words in the text. Such work has shown that readers use graphic, syntactic, semantic and discourse information in text during their processing.
The basic reading strategies that miscue analysis appears to reveal are:
- Prediction: what the next chunk of language will be.
- Sampling: selecting the minimal information from text consistent with the prediction;
- Confirming: testing the prediction against the sample;
- Correction: if the prediction is not confirmed, another prediction is generated.

Goodman (in Smith 1978) asserts that “only in special circumstances is oral reading free of miscues, and silent reading is never miscue-free”. However, the connection between reading aloud and silent reading is somewhat difficult to prove, since there is a lack of information about the nature of the silent reading process, the process after all in which most reading researchers are interested.

Pelotas

I know a lot of people who hate Pelotas. Why? They say it's boring, it's is provincial, it's too small and it's retrograde.
But I don't agree whit them! I really love Pelotas. I always lived here, so all my friends also live here. And I can say I had great experiences here! I studied in good schools, now I study at a good College. Ok, UFPel has many problems, but we have good teachers and we have a opportunity of studying in a state university.
Pelotas is an old city, so we have beautiful buildings, parks, like Praça Coronel Pedro Osório, Parque da Baronesa, Charqueadas... It's not a small city: there are about 380000 residents!
Here we have museuns, good restaurants, good schools, theatres, Universities. There are nice parties too, for those who like going out.
And we can feel safe here, it's a very calm city! Of course there are problems, but we can live very well here! I don't have plans for future, but I think I would have a happy life living here. Ok, there are many nice cities where I'd like to live, but I just don't exclude Pelotas!

Well, I hope you like Pelotas too :)
And have a nice week!