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According to Kenneth Goodman (1967), reading is a psycholinguistic process in which the reader, guided by (he knowledge of the language being read, reconstructs an encoded message by selecting syntactic and semantic cues as he proceeds. To read in a foreign language, we use basically the same method, even though native language interference and unfamiliarity with the code make the process much more complex. Foreign students consider vocabulary their most serious handicap in reading English; because of the nature of the reading process, words are the smallest physical meaningful units of the message and they play a more important role and constitute more of a problem than we are sometimes willing to concede. Current pedagogical approaches to dealing with this problem could be modified with a more accurate understanding of the reading process. Several specific suggestions are made.

This article examines the role of negotiations of meaning in providing comprehensible input for NNS learners. We report on an experiment conducted with NS-NNS and NS-NS pairs involving a picture-drawing task, where one member of each pair instructed the other in the drawing of simple objects. The results of the experiment suggest that the success or failure of meaning negotiations in providing comprehensible input depends on the point in the discourse at which they occur. We therefore question a prevailing assumption in the second language acquisition literature that the mere quantity of meaning negotiations within a discourse is an accurate predictor of the quantity of comprehensible input that results. We propose that meaning negotiations should be analyzed within a discourse framework to explain their role in creating comprehensible input.Much recent work in second language acquisition has been concerned with the nature of the linguistic input received by non-native speakers. The view that input plays a crucial role in second language acquisition is one most often associated with It is with great sadness that we report the untimely death of Carlos Yorio, an author of this article. He was our teacher and our friend, and we miss him greatly. We dedicate this article to his memory. This is an extensively revised version of a paper delivered at AILA '84 in Brussels, Belgium. We thank Bernd Frohmann, David Mendelsohn, and two anonymous reviewers for comments on a previous draft of this article.

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