Research on second culture and second language reading comprehension is reviewed to support the claim that second language reading is an interactive process, involving the interrelationship of cultural schemata and discourse structure. Studies on content schemata include investigations of the roles of cultural knowledge and second language proficiency in comprehension. Studies on discourse processing include linguistic descriptions of ethnolinguistic discourse patterns (contrastive rhetoric), as well as psycholinguistic comprehension studies on expository prose, story structure, and cohesion. This multidisciplinary review functions as an argument for the roles of cultural schemata and discourse structure in an interactive model of first and second language reading.It is a well-documented fact that native language reading comprehension involves the role of knowledge of the world and knowledge of native text structure (Langer & Smith-Burke, 1982; Spiro, Bruce, & Brewer, 1980). Reading is a complex interactive, hypothesis-generating psycholinguistic process which is tied intimately to the reader's language proficiency. While there are basic similarities in the fluent reading process in various languages (see Goodman & Goodman, 1978;Hudelson, 1981), it is natural to expect that nonnative language proficiency or language differences may influence reading and learning 96Journal of Reading Behavior to read a second language. Likewise, specific linguistic and cultural differences can affect learning to read, especially because differences exist in orthographies (Barnitz, 1982; Kavanagh & Venezky, 1980;Taylor & Taylor, 1983), morphology (Greene, 1981), syntax (Cowan, 1976), and discourse (Carrell, 1984b;Kaplan, 1983). At present, a body of literature continues to accumulate that documents the role of cultural and cross-cultural content and discourse schemata on the reading comprehension of first and second language learners. While much research is conducted on first language reading, a need exists for investigation of the effects of cultural and linguistic differences of schemata and text structure on the reading comprehension of second language learners. Cross-cultural comprehension research can contribute to our understanding of the reading process in a first and second language.This research review integrates the rapidly growing multidisciplinary body of literature on the effects of cross-cultural "content schemata" and "formal schemata" (Carrell, 1983b) on second language and second culture reading comprehension. Research trends receive the primary focus. For discussions of instructional practices in teaching reading comprehension to culturally and linguistically variant children, see Andersson and Barnitz (1984), Barnitz (1985), Carrell (1983a, 1984c), Carrell and Eisterhold (1983), and Joag-Dev and Steffensen (1980. This review functions as an argument to support the roles of cultural and linguistic variables in models of reading.Before proceeding with the main discussions of literature, it is important to ...

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Language acquisition scholars are naturally interested in the interrelationship of language, culture, and cognition. These variables interact in the total language-communication process acquired by native and nonnative speakers. Discussions on this topic often include some controversy on the validity of the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis: "that diverse languages influence the thought of those who speak them" (p. 1). John Lucy's research, represented in two books, is an enthusiastic revisitation of this hypothesis from a multidisciplinary perspective. Lucy critically reviews decades of scholarship and thoroughly reports his experimental psycholinguistic case study designed to explore the linguistic effects on thought by native speakers of American English and Yucatec Maya.

Seventy-three ESL students from three groups (seventh-grade, university intermediate, and university advanced) served as subjects in an exploratory psycholinguistic experiment designed to investigate the roles of context and selected linguistic structures on comprehension. Subjects read a free-verse poem in one of three context conditions: fur! contat, in which both a picture and the poem's title accompanied the poem; purtiul context, in which only the title accompanied it; and no context, in which neither picture nor title accompanied it. In free-and probed-recall results, no significant effects were found for context. Group membership was significant for probed inferential recall of micropropositions. High-level propositions in the text hierarchy were better recalled than low-level propositions. No interaction reached significance. These findings suggest that ESL students tend to focus on literal language and need additional instruction in making inferences.