Understanding Advanced Second-Language Reading

Elizabeth Bernhardt, Elizabeth B. Bernhardt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415879101
• eBook ISBN: 9781136976254
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Educación general

What distinguishes this book is its broad, yet thorough, view of theory, process, and research on adult second-language reading. Offering extensive discussions of upper-register second-language texts (both expository and narrative) that adult second-language readers encounter daily across the globe, it also presents an assessment schema for second-language text comprehension as well as for the assessment of teaching.

Understanding Advanced Second-Language Reading:

• includes languages other than English in the discussion of second language reading
• is firmly anchored in a theory of second language reading ? the concept of compensatory processing
• emphasizes the multi-dimensionality and dynamic nature of L2 reading development
• focuses on comprehension of upper-register literary texts
• balances theory and instructional practices.

Filling the need for a coherent, theoretically consistent, and research-based portrait of how literate adolescents and adults comprehend, and learn to comprehend, at greater levels of sophistication and whether that ability can be enhanced by instruction, this is a must-have resource for reading and second-language researchers, students, and teachers.

Chapter 1
Exploring the Complexities of Second-Language Reading

Reading in a second language has led an interestingly schizophrenic existence over the centuries as both universe and as subset. For example, European and American history underline that reading was at one time the only purpose for learning a foreign language. Howatt (1991) reminds us that reading in 19th-century Europe was “a more practical and useful objective than learning to speak” (p. 154). The same view held in American education circles in the early 20th century when the National Education Association’s Committee of Ten declared that “foreign language instruction in American schools should be for reading only” (Bernhardt, 1998, p. 48) and that only the most gifted students should pursue it and pursue it to the level of “approximating reading in the mother tongue” (Coleman & Fife, 1949, p. 167). This declaration was not merely reflective of what educators felt was important in the American school curriculum; it also underlined the social status linked to being able to read another language. Huey (1908), in fact, refers to reading in another language as the “acme of scholarship” (p. 4), underlining what I referred to as the “stigma of elitism” with which American foreign language instruction still struggles (Bernhardt, 1998, p. 49). After the Second World War, when the oral approach to language learning was seen to be of value, reading then became a subset of the language learning curriculum, a supporting character in the project. In that role, it buttressed language learning dimensions, in particular the learning of grammatical form. Reading Development in a Second Language noted the importance of reading within the field of language teaching because of the durability of reading skills as juxtaposed to speaking skills that attrite rapidly. Unquestionably, reading affords the second-language learner the luxury of time that is inconceivable with online spoken discourse and it provides an arena for linguistic explorations that cannot be approached through aural channels. With time, learners accompanied by grammars and dictionaries can, in theory, “decode” a passage; in speaking or in listening there is no time available to use ancillaries. Given the time factor, reading is often used in instructional settings as practice material. In fact, texts are often used to illustrate particular grammatical features that learners are meant to acquire. Or texts are written “around” particular semantic fields to ease the learners’ vocabulary burden. In fact, much of beginning language instruction focuses on the instrumentality of written texts for language learning purposes or as material for “translation practice, grammatical analysis, vocabulary study and, finally, test questions” (Bergethon & Braun, 1963, p. ix). Any exploration of second-language reading should surely acknowledge the multiplicity of variables and conceptualizations at play in any discussion of it in order to provide credible insight into the process. This has rarely been the case within the research area of second-language reading.

Confused Concepts of Language and Culture

When Reading Development in a Second Language was written in the late 1980s and published in the early 1990s, reading in a second language was essentially a subfield of foreign language education and applied linguistics. While professional conferences on literacy lent program space occasionally to second-language research, the field of second-language reading was considered to be derivative, relying on first-language beliefs, models, and research designs (Weber, 1991). As the years passed, and second-language learners essentially grew up in schools, it became clearer that the concerns should not be, and could not be, exclusively on English-as-a-Second-Language learning (ESL) but, rather, needed to focus on higher-level literacy skills. The model of learning language within two years of instruction producing new Americans fluent in school English was simply not viable. Consequently, the area of second-language reading broadened to become a concern for all educators. Further, as language backgrounds became more complex, it became clearer that empty slogans such as “Provide students with a rich language environment” and “value the home language of the child” were helping neither learners nor their teachers through the second-language literacy learning process. While the mantra Every teacher a second-language teacher became a truism in a huge number of countries across the globe, there was little if any acknowledgment of this complexity within the literacy community. That community was stymied by the notion of literacy learning for children who did not have a command of the language of schooling—a language that was very different from their school-age peers who did have a spoken command of school language. In fact, in a review conducted on materials for literacy teachers (namely, textbooks and journals focused on professional development), few if any research-based materials were available (Bernhardt, 1994a) for teachers at any grade-level for enhancing the reading development of second-language learners across the globe.

At some level, this is not a surprising development, given that culture and language became concepts which, by the end of the 20th century, were increasingly popularized. Arguably, they were so broadened in conception that they came to mean almost anything to almost anyone. The standard definition of culture, a consistent pattern of behavior known to members of communities, had come out of the sociology literature and into popular speech. Indeed, the end of the 20th century saw the use of terms such as “corporate culture”; a “culture of consumerism”; and the “culture of the classroom” used as commonplace terms, denoting expected patterns of behavior and connoting in-groups and out-groups. Phrases such as “it’s not part of the culture here,” referring to how individuals should (or should not) behave in particular professional or local community settings, became a part of everyday language. In like manner, language began to be used as a term referring to utterances unique to particular settings. In other words, a language of business referred to words and phrases used primarily in corporate settings and the language of the classroom referred to words and phrases used to accomplish classroom goals and procedures—words and phrases not generally used in other settings. Academics began referring to means of speaking that learners had to acquire in order to become part of academic cultures as languages. Science was at the forefront of this use of language. Science educators argued that students of science need to learn the cultural rules of scientific procedures as well as the words and phrases that scientists in particular areas use. Knowing how to conduct experiments properly and to write those experiments up using words appropriate to the setting (hypothesis rather than guess; research rather than find out; experiment rather than test ; and the like) meant learning and using the language of science (Lemke, 1990).

The profound monolingualism of Americans might be at the heart of this set of beliefs. If one has only one perspective and one language and no experience with anything else, there is little wonder that the focus has been on English (in the ESL acronym) as the synonym for language and on English-speaking culture and its subcultures as the synonym for culture. This array of beliefs sets forth an incredibly narrow perspective—one that does not provide appropriate grounding for understanding the complexities of reading and learning to read in a second language. To underline the point: learning to speak or to write I hypothesized that my research would yield the following data while already knowing how to speak or write I guessed that what I was looking at would help me find information is a substantially different process from learning to compose Es wurde von der Annahme ausgegangen, daβ die Untersuchung die folgenden Daten hervorbringt [I hypothesized that my research would yield the following data] after knowing how to utter Ich mache ein Experiment because when a learner moves from a first-language into a second, a set of linguistic features complexifies the already complex content environment, in this case, science and, specifically, the scientific method. At the culture level, learning the social rules of whether one brings a cup of coffee to a business meeting, or whether one may drive a better, faster, bigger car than one’s boss, or the conditions under which a pupil may interrupt her teacher are vastly different from social rules within culturally complex discourse environments such as whether and how long one may hold the floor and how to relinquish it to an “unequal” interlocutor.

In Reading Development in a Second Language the distinction between language and language as a linguistic system, as well as the distinction between culture and subculture were made; to make these distinctions in the early years of the 21st century is even more crucial. The field seems to have lost, or perhaps never had, the notion of linguistic difference between and among languages, yet the research and theory to be explicated in further pages of this book make it eminently clear that these linguistic differences are critical toward understanding text processing. Access to literacy when one is essentially shifting social registers (as in the example above from an everyday expression to a more appropriate expression; i.e., everyday language to technical language) is very different from shifting between everyday language in Swahili, for example, to technical language in English. There are additional levels, both cognitive and social, in that process that the learner learning a new social register will rarely encounter. Examining culture in the same framework is equally critical. Switching behavioral norms within an overarching familiar cultural framework (such as moving from one corporation to another or from an urban school to a suburban school) can, indeed, be somewhat disorienting for a period of time. This disorientation is, however, of a different kind and quality from what one would encounter in moving from a single-gender elementary school in Saudi Arabia to Oak Park Elementary School in Westerville, Texas. Inhabitants do not look the same and they do not speak a language that is remotely related to the pupil’s home language. Even the chairs and blackboards are different, and notions of equality and collaboration might be poles apart. To deposit all of these experiences under the term culture and then to treat them as equivalent experiences is to denigrate and profoundly misunderstand the processes.

A corollary phenomenon exists in the reading/literacy field. The term “reading” has become rather dull, meaning that somehow in the eyes of some academics it is too commonplace, too restricting. Literacy is the more fashionable notion. It is the term that in the early 1990s referenced reading and writing connections and which, in a current iteration, refers to the ability to navigate semiotically through the world. In other words, all objects that one encounters are “read and understood”—not just printed matter. This principle, while interesting enough on the surface, leads to a void that is so unbounded as to become practically meaningless. Working with printed material and learning to contribute to the print world are important and critical skills. A major difference between the beginning and the end of the last decade of the 20th century in the conceptualization of reading is the general admission that reading is a sociocognitive process. Around 1990, a very real distinction existed between research that was cognitively oriented and research that was socially oriented. Each of these perspectives, on its own, consistently fell short in providing either explanations for, or adequate predictions of, second-language reading performance. Only a wedding of the perspectives—that reading is both cognitive and social; that one does not follow the other, but co-occurs—pushed the field forward.

Perspectives on the Who , Why , and What of Second-Language Reading

When Reading Development in a Second Language was written, the question of who second-language readers actually were, was a question to be explored and answered. The answer that Reading Development in a Second Language offered was one very much within the North American context. The first group referenced was children who were placed in schools that used a language other than the mother tongue who needed “school” reading. The second group referenced was adults. That group was further categorized into immigrant groups, temporary graduate student groups, and foreign language learners all of whom were seeking second-language skills for their education, job enhancement, or for interest. This bifurcation between children and adults, focused exclusively on educational settings (education in the academic sense), presents an interesting and relatively naive picture in the 21st century. One explanation for this naiveté is that, in fact, Reading Development in a Second Language was written before the internet: and the internet changed second-language reading in much the same way that it changed everything else in our world. The internet increased the number of second-language readers dramatically in that it made the availability of second-language materials (admittedly, written principally in English) immediate, plentiful, easy to access, and cost-free. It enabled readers (many of whom are non-native readers of English across the globe) to find materials on their own without mediation from some kind of academic institution that made choices for the reader. This kind of unfettered access to materials meant that anyone with an internet connection and a translation feature could have access to materials written in essentially any language. The breadth, then, of what it means to be a second-language reader and who could be characterized as such could never have been predicted in 1991. More importantly, and most assuredly, the implications of the breadth have yet to be fully explored.

An accompanying question is why anyone would read in a second language. An obvious early 20th-century answer, based in aesthetics, is that literary works written in the original can only be fully appreciated in the original. If this were the only answer to the question, then second-language reading would be little more than an academic exercise for an elite few. The aesthetic answer does not account for the millions of second-language readers across the globe who regularly read in second languages. A more compelling answer lies in the desire to gain unfiltered information in its convenient and overwhelming availability. While the very act of reading implies a filtering process, the act of reading “in the original” actually refers to a primary layer in the act of communication. Many readers are hungry for the ability to relate directly to a source rather than indirectly through translations and adaptations. In a world broken by misunderstanding that leads to unbelievable trauma and bloodshed, the ab...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Exploring the Complexities of Second-Language Reading
• Chapter 2 A Compensatory Theory of Second-Language Reading
• Chapter 3 Sketching the Landscape of Second-Language Reading Research
• Chapter 4 Compensatory Theory in Second-Language Reading Instruction
• Chapter 5 Second-Language Readers and Literary Text
• Chapter 6 Assessing the Learning and Teaching of Comprehension in a Second Language
• Chapter 7 Continuing to Research Second-Language Reading
• Appendix to Chapter 3
• Works Cited
• Index