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ALTHOUGH the entire curricula of most foreign language departments are absolutely dependent on the ability of students to read, many professors of foreign literature have given little serious thought to how they can help either elementary or advanced students read better. In fact, relatively little is known about the underlying cognitive processes; “in college developmental reading classrooms,” Mealey and Nist observe, “the strategies used seem to be based on conventional wisdoms” (484). Yet research indicates that many teaching practices are ineffective or even counterproductive (see Westhoff, Some Common Teaching Practices ). Much reading instruction shows the following characteristics:
The type of teaching characterized by these three features does not seem very useful. To be effective, a teacher's activities (even questioning) should focus on developing comprehension rather than on testing it. That is to say, it should help students learn how to get the information they need or want from a written text. This essay explores some of the important current thinking on the cognitive processes involved in reading in a foreign language and describes alternative learning activities based on an analysis of these processes.
At first thought, the reading process seems easy to describe: the reader recognizes characters, puts them together into words, identifies the meanings of the words, and strings the words into sentences. The description sounds logical, but it does not fit in with a few phenomena. We cannot identify the single characters in the following figure with certainty:
And yet, we can read words printed in the same characters:
The basic mental operations involved here were discovered by James McKeen Cattell. He found that a reader exposed to single characters for a quarter of a second can only name four or five of them. Given the same exposure time, but shown characters in single words, the same reader can report twice as many. Finally, when exposed to words in the context of meaningful sentences, the reader can recall four times as many. Furthermore, Cattell observes that readers can read words under conditions in which the individual characters, shown singly, would not be recognizable.
These findings can be accounted for by the functioning of our perceptual system. Several researchers have described this system in full detail (e.g., Lindsay and Norman; Smith, Understanding ), but a simplified explanation will suffice here. All incoming visual data are held in sensory storage for about a quarter of a second, during which time the information that seems relevant and useful is selected and passed on to the working memory, where it is combined into “meaningful wholes.”
Klatzky compares this working memory to a workshop where a carpenter assembles incoming furniture parts into complete pieces (88). Every quarter of a second a new load is put on the workbench, pushing on the other parts. Those parts that reach the end of the bench without having been used fall off and are destroyed. Whenever we, like the carpenter, succeed in constructing a meaningful whole from raw materials, it is shown on a screen for us to see and passed on to our long-term memory from which we can retrieve it.
The problem is that the incoming pieces of information are available for only six seconds at the most. During this period the working memory is capable of processing only a small part of that input (say, four or five characters every quarter of a second), not enough to make reading possible. Therefore, the strategy that enables us to read, to identify incoming information, is to use what we already know about that information.
What happens in terms of Klatzky's metaphor is that the carpenter at the workbench is helped by “warehouse clerks” in the long-term memory who are thoroughly familiar with every type of furniture and with the particular features of each one. As soon as they recognize an incoming part, they alert the carpenter to what remaining parts to look for. Through this harmonious cooperation, the factory becomes a profitable enterprise.
In short, reading can be characterized as a constructive process in which information from the outside continuously interacts with knowledge already available on the inside. (See also Van Dijk and Kintsch; Alderson and Urquhart, Reading ; Carrell, Devine, and Eskey.) Analyzing outside information is called data-driven or bottom-up processing; adding knowledge already in one's possession is called conceptually driven or top-down processing. Cattell's findings suggest that top-down processing accounts for at least seventy-five percent of the constructed meaning. If knowledge we already have plays such an important role, as it apparently does, it seems worth our while to take a closer look at it.
Empirical evidence indicates that at least five “fields” of knowledge are involved in top-down processing (see Westhoff, “Voorspellend Lezen”; Didaktik ):
1. Probable letter combinations. Miller, Bruner, and Postman have shown that this kind of knowledge makes it easier to read nonexistent words with “probable” character combinations, like culatter , than madeup words with random character combinations, like gfujxzaq. That this knowledge plays a role can be demonstrated by playing a familiar word game. Students are asked to guess a word represented by a series of blanks, one for each letter. They suggest letters that might make up the word, and each correct suggestion replaces the appropriate blank. A player's turn is limited to a given number of suggestions, and the first player to guess the word wins. Even if the game is played with a word familiar to all students of the language-say, the French word monsieur -the average intermediate learner will need more turns to guess the answer than an advanced learner will. The advanced learner, knowing what sequences of letters are common in French words, will be able to make more “educated” guesses after the first letters are placed.
2. The probable course of sentences. As Levin et al. have shown (36), a knowledge of probable word sequences makes it easier to read a sentence like “After the meeting the janitor found the magazine that the woman had left on the chair in the hall” than one with unexpected twists, like “Before he died the gangster that the police shot closed the door of the room near the kitchen.” The second sentence poses difficulties because the reader expects the noun following a verb to be a complement, not the subject of the next clause (the missing comma after died is thus a stumbling block); because the pronoun he would normally follow rather than precede the noun it stands for; because two verbs are not commonly juxtaposed; and because the word order falsely suggests that it is the room, rather than the door, that is near the kitchen. A knowledge of sentence structure includes the recognition of “course indicators” (e.g., noun markers like the and verb-marking morphemes like the suffix-ed). Such clues make it easier to read the meaningless sentence “The croop has expermina the bloneys” than the sequence “Cloor expermina frons teh blomen an.”
3. Probable word combinations. Knowing how words are usually combined, we can identify all the words on a postcard although only half are legible: “Having …… time. Wish …… here.” The extent and differentiation of this knowledge are demonstrated by Smith, who finds that the sentences “After dinner let's all go to the theater” and “It was agreed that he would meet me at the station” can be reported more easily than “After dinner let's all go to the station” and “It was agreed that he would meet me at the theater” (201–02).
4. Probable structural relations. A knowledge of the ways that textual components relate to one another also contributes to our ability to read with understanding. For instance, in a sentence such as “He was a very good swimmer and yet he has … ,” and yet enables us to predict that what is to come is something we would not expect from the first part of the sentence-to predict, say, that the final word will be drowned. Here, as in field 2, familiar structure markers direct our expectations and enable us to hypothesize about what is likely to occur. In this category, connectives play an important role; because , for example, indicates that a preceding textual element will be explained. So do other kinds of referents, like relative, personal, possessive, and demonstrative pronouns, as well as referring indications like the girls. But nonverbal indicators also play a role; a colon, for instance, heralds an example or a summing up. Using our knowledge of these signs and their functions, we can increase the amount of meaning we can construct from incoming signals. Structure markers not only function within sentences, they can also facilitate our understanding of paragraphs or even of entire texts.
Research by Meyer (“Structure of Prose”) and by Meyer, Brandt, and Bluth has demonstrated the relation between recognizing structure and comprehending a text. Other research shows that students improve their reading performance if they are taught to use their knowledge of the relations between textual elements and the graphic symbols that represent these relations (Anderson and Armbruster, “Reader”; Dansereau; Westhoff, “Voorspellend Lezen”).
5. Common knowledge. Our ability to process information from a written text depends a great deal on our everyday knowledge about the world. Alderson and Urquhart have demonstrated, for example, that second-language readers with knowledge in a certain field show far greater comprehension of texts in that field than do readers without such knowledge. But it is not only our specific knowledge but our general knowledge that affects the processing of what we read. According to Carton all “regularities in the objective world we read about, make it possible for us to expect many occurrences” (55). We know that something falls down and not up , even when the accompanying adverb is not legible.
Smith describes this kind of knowledge as a structured “model of the world” (169), and schema theory provides striking examples of how such structure could be imagined (see, e.g., Anderson and Pearson; Rumelhart and Ortony). Rumelhart and Ortony compare a schema to the script of a play: just as a play has roles that may be filled by different actors in different performances, so schemata have variables that may become associated with, or tied to, different aspects of our environment on different occasions. In filling a slot, we choose the particular interpretation that best accounts for the material to be comprehended. One example the authors give is the drink schema, which includes a slot to be filled in by some sort of liquid. If the sentence “I would like something to drink” is delivered in a bar setting, the unspecified something is more likely to be beer or bourbon than lemonade or milk. If the setting were a children's birthday party, the reverse would be expected.
Between knowledge in fields 1, 2, and 3 (letter combinations, the course of sentences, and word combinations) and knowledge in fields 4 and 5 (structural relations and common regularities), there is an important difference that seems especially significant for foreign language reading and very relevant when we are looking to theory for insights into the learning process. Knowledge in fields 1 to 3 is language-bound. As we have seen, this knowledge is vast and differentiated in native readers. Most foreign language students have already learned to apply much of this knowledge automatically in their native language. So, depending on the degree of difference or similarity between the foreign and the native languages, at least some of this knowledge must be acquired anew for the second language. Instruction, therefore, should concentrate on the acquisition of knowledge about the characteristics of the language.
Because this knowledge is extensive and richly variegated and because the time available for learning is limited, we can assume that even very advanced foreign language readers will always have gaps in their knowledge in fields 1 to 3. Fortunately, the knowledge in fields 4 and 5 is largely independent of language. While our knowledge about “regularities” in these fields is also partly culture-bound, much of it is not: an avalanche comes down in Tibet as well as in Switzerland; a room has a floor, walls, and an entrance in Japan as well as in France; in both countries, things in that room can lie on the floor but not on the ceiling.
There is some evidence (Cohen et al.; Westhoff, “Voorspellend Lezen”; Didaktik ) that native language readers are so familiar with their parent tongue that their knowledge in fields 1 to 3 enables them to construct almost the whole meaning of a text; they have much more knowledge in fields 4 and 5 than they normally need to use. As foreign language readers, however, they can draw on this reserve to compensate for their knowledge gaps in fields 1 to 3. Hudson empirically demonstrated that language proficiency and background knowledge are interrelated in second-language reading. His results show that, while proficiency in the second language may limit reading performance, readers' relevant background knowledge may interact with their language ability to facilitate reading comprehension: “the significance of this finding is that the linguistic ceiling is only one determinant of reading comprehension. The fact that it can be over-ridden indicates that it is not a fixed or static proficiency, but is rather a relative proficiency” (20).
Since foreign language readers are not accustomed to making effective use of the knowledge they already have, instruction in this respect should concentrate on its application as a compensatory strategy. Several researchers have confirmed the relevance of this sort of training (see, e.g., Anderson and Armbruster, “Reader”; Bartlett, qtd. in Meyer, “Text Structure”; Dansereau; Westhoff, “Voorspellend Lezen”; Didaktik ).
Since, from the point of view of learning theory, the acquisition of knowledge and its application are quite different things, we can conclude that foreign language reading instruction has to be conducted along two different tracks. Each has its own requirements, needs, and criteria for instructional settings and materials. Little research is available, however, on the best proportional ratio between these two tracks. Although Williams suggests a one-to-one relation, he offers no justification (44).
While there is little empirical evidence to show how knowledge is acquired, leading theorists agree about the main principles involved. Smith explains the process as the innate human capacity to make rules about reality by formulating and testing hypotheses ( Under-standing 74ff.). Since this kind of rule making is far too complicated to be taught systematically, there seems little point in spending much time on grammar, vocabulary, or word-recognition exercises-the approach proposed, for example, by Eskey (“Holding”) and Carrell. The best one can do is to avoid putting up obstacles to the natural process-to forgo such negative approaches as demanding very careful reading, discouraging guessing, tolerating no mistakes, and insisting that every word be read perfectly.
All these widely adopted practices are counter-productive. What students mainly learn from such teaching is to distrust their own knowledge and their capacity to hypothesize well. It encourages them to rely on bottom-up processing before all else, thus forcing them into the slow, word-for-word reading that is characteristic of all weak readers (Smith, “Twelve Easy Ways” 188–90).
Instead of being subjected to this treatment, the learner should be put in a rich learning environment consisting of abundant reading materials at an appropriate level. In this context, appropriate means that the text should contain enough fresh, unknown elements to give the learner frequent opportunities to hypothesize about their meaning but should at the same time have enough familiar, repeated elements to allow the learner to test these hypotheses and to read at a considerable speed. According to Smith, the best way to make learning to read easy is to make reading easy (“Twelve Easy Ways” 195).
Furthermore, learners should be encouraged not only to check their hypotheses but also to accept some uncertainty at times, namely, in passages where the risk of failure seems smaller than the risk of spending too much of one's limited processing capacity on too little information. A learner should not be given the impression that careful reading necessarily means eliminating any possible doubt. Teaching beginning readers that they can never be certain enough is about as useful as teaching novice cyclists to ride by having them walk beside their bikes and keep their eyes on the ground to make sure that the road is passable.
In psychological terms, the most effective application of knowledge in fields 4 and 5 can be described as a kind of heuristic problem solving. At this point we can use some of the basic principles from Gal'perin's learning theory (see his “Stages” and “Study”; see also Haenen; Talyzina). According to this theory, thoughts are an internalized, shortened form of physical actions. Learning takes place by performing these actions, not by being informed about them.
Five stages can be distinguished along the road to internalization and shortening. The first is orienting oneself toward the action to be performed. The learner analyzes the problem and chooses the appropriate strategy. The next stage is carrying out the strategy through a specific physical action-for example, calculating by manipulating the balls of an abacus. Then comes the so-called verbal stage, in which the action to be internalized and shortened has to be expressed in words. In the next stage, while the action is still performed consciously, it is done in less time and without accompanying speech. In the last stage the action is maximally shortened and internalized; in other words, it is performed very fast and no longer consciously.
One learns best by completing all these stages in the right order and at a controlled and appropriate pace. According to Talyzina, research shows that the verbal stage is among the most important (117ff.). Designing learning activities for this stage, hower, is relatively easy only when the action to be internalized is algorithmic—that is, when the mental steps involved can be clearly defined and described and when they lead more or less automatically to the correct solution. But since the strategies to be used in reading are heuristic, they call for creativity and something like feeling; thus no preplanned problem-solving method can be given for all cases. The sort of feeling that can be described as sensitivity to significant clues can certainly be developed, but only rarely by applying algorithmic strategies.
To solve this problem, Van Parreren suggests conducting the verbal stage by asking learners to discuss the problem-solving strategies and textual cues they have used (12–13). The validity of this suggestion seems to be confirmed by research findings. Jongsma reviews ten experiments involving exercises in which learners had to guess words that had been removed from a reading passage. In the only experiment in which the reading ability of participants appears to have improved, the teacher followed the unique practice of discussing the pros and cons of the proposed solutions with the students (14–15). Stallings found that frequent teacher-student interaction during instruction correlated highly with improvement in reading ability (qtd. in Vaughan 70). On the basis of these findings, Vaughan concludes that reading strategies can be taught more effectively if they are developed in a highly interactive context in which students (individually or in small groups) discuss with the teacher each part of the strategy they have used and the reasons that it was or was not effective (70–71).
Gal'perin's theory appears not only to fit very well with research findings in the field known as “metacognition“ but also to strengthen their theoretical base. Brown, Armbruster, and Baker distinguish two aspects in metacognition: knowledge of strategies for learning from a text and the control one has of one's own actions in reading (49). These aspects approximately match Gal'perin's orientation and verbal stages. Brown, Armbruster, and Baker contrast this metacognitive “training with awareness” with the more traditional approach that Brown, Campione, and Day term “blind training” (18). In blind training, the teacher typically instructs the class to perform certain activities but does not explain their significance. While students can learn a particular set of materials in this way, they subsequently tend neither to perform the activities voluntarily nor to apply what they have learned to new but similar situations (Brown and Campione 522).
Brown, Armbruster, and Baker describe research projects conducted by Collins and Smith, Palincsar and Brown, and Paris et al. and point out that in the Palincsar and Brown studies, the learners were all trained with awareness. They conclude that such training programs can result in dramatic and durable improvements in children's reading proficiency (74). Specifically, the students should be told exactly why the trained activities are important (here we once again recognize Gal'perin's “orientation base”). Further, students have to be trained in self-regulatory activities, including the checking and monitoring of their own comprehension (Gal'perin's verbal stage).
We can conclude that readers make the best use of knowledge in fields 4 (structural relations) and 5 (common knowledge) when they are informed about the reading process (the orientation stage), that students learn reading strategies most efficiently by performing them (systematic “shortening”), and that learners must be assigned exercises requiring them to verbalize what they are doing (the verbal stage). In short, what makes students learn is reasoning.
Students' acquisition of knowledge in fields 1 to 3 depends to a crucial degree on the difficulty of the assigned reading material. To be effective, the text chosen should enable the learners to read at a reasonable speed. Only then will they have the opportunity to hypothesize and then to test their hypotheses frequently. For this reason, materials should be selected more for their ease of reading than for their cultural value.
Research has shown that, at least in the Netherlands, many teachers systematically overestimate their students (Westhoff, Didaktik 103–17). At an early stage students are asked to read material that is too difficult to enable them to complete the assigned number of pages. When confronted with this research finding, teachers often say that there is no time to linger at low reading levels, that since the final examination will require students to read rather difficult texts, they should learn to do so as soon as possible.
Once again, reading can be likened to cycling. Anyone who wants to bike to the top of a mountain will take the long and winding road with turns and hairpins-perhaps not the shortest way, but most certainly the fastest. Now, challenging students with texts that are too difficult is like telling cyclists to take the shortest route to the top, which is also the steepest. To do so, they will have to put their bikes on their backs and climb, taking much longer to reach the summit than they would have if they had followed the circuitous trail. What learners learn most of all from an excessively demanding text is that reading in a foreign language is too hard for them. What they need instead is a long and winding approach: a large number of carefully graded easy readers.
Another reason to avoid overly difficult texts is some evidence that they foster poor reading behavior (Clarke 206). In this respect, there is a great difference between learning to read in one's native tongue and learning to read in a foreign language. According to Singer, most children at the age of six have a sophisticated control over their syntax and possess a vocabulary of about five thousand words-advantages not shared by beginning foreign language readers (295). Eskey has characterized the limitations of foreign language readers as a ceiling or threshold that they must conquer before they can develop fluent reading abilities (”Theoretical Foundations“).
The implication here is not that we as instructors have to teach five thousand words and an almost complete syntax before we can teach students to read a foreign language. But we do have to deal with the paradox that the knowledge necessary for learning to read has to be acquired by reading. In practical terms, this means that beginning foreign language students should be reading a lot right away and must therefore have texts that are natural and interesting as well as appropriate for them. The difficulty of finding such texts, however, is one of the most unmanageable problems in foreign language instruction, and I can offer no magical solution.
We can, nevertheless, provide learners with some help at this stage. Their problem is a lack of knowledge in the fields that I have called language-bound. On the basis of the theory discussed earlier in this chapter, this disadvantage could be compensated for in part by the use of materials relevant to learners' knowledge in the non-language-bound fields: common knowledge and structural relations within texts. Some practical measures could be to provide
In this context, the question quite naturally arises whether literary texts are appropriate learning materials for reading instruction. On the basis of the theory discussed so far, one must conclude that the answer depends. Per se, fictional texts can be quite suitable. Empirical evidence suggests that foreign language readers can read them more easily than, say, newspaper articles (Yorio 113). Journalists, by virtue of their profession, prefer to restrict themselves to providing information their readers presumably don't already know. Newspaper accounts tend to leave out whatever native readers presumably know on the day of publication. Obviously, nonnatives who read these reports in a remote country, sometimes years later, can add much less knowledge of their own than the original readers could. Fictional texts, by contrast, offer similar conditions for natives and nonnatives alike. For both groups the setting of the story has to be described. Moreover, the plot can be so compelling that readers are highly motivated to get on with the story. This heightened interest can even lower the readers' frustration level, so that they will go on reading texts that might objectively seem too difficult.
But not every literary work is suitable. On the contrary. The reading material should enable the learner to discover what linguistic characteristics can be expected with the greatest degree of probability. Many literary texts, especially older literature and poetry, don't provide readers with the most likely combinations, and they give the learner the wrong impression of what is usual. For the purpose discussed here, instructional materials should provide the learner with information about “regularities.” Thus, when one assesses the appropriateness of a literary text for foreign language readers, a crucial consideration is the degree to which the work owes its value to deviating or surprising linguistic or formal features. The unusual and the unexpected, which often give a literary text its value, can only be enjoyed by readers who have expectations based on a knowledge of what is normal. They cannot recognize deviations unless they know what is regular. To be able to enjoy literature, readers must first have learned the regularities. That is to say, before they can appreciate literary quality, they need to experience a lot of trivial precedents.
The theoretical considerations discussed here have been given practical application in a series of exercises designed for use in the foreign language classroom. I present these exercises in the second half of my paper. Part 2 of “Increasing the Effectiveness of Foreign Language Instruction” will appear in the Spring issue of the ADFL Bulletin.
The author is Associate Professor and Head of the Modern Language Department at the Institute of Education, State University of Utrecht, Netherlands. This paper was prepared by the author in conjunction with a course he taught at the 1989 Summer Linguistic Institute cosponsored by the Modem Language Associationand the Linguistic Society of America at the University of Arizona.
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