Reading through Context: How Real and Perceived Strategy Use Affects L2 Comprehension

Abstract

SINCE T H E LATE 1970'S, MANY L2 LEARNINGtheorists have advocated teaching students to use a variety of reading strategies or skills in order to read better. As implicitly defined by these specialists, reading strategies are the mental operations involved when readers approach a text effectively and make sense of what they read. These problem-solving techniques include guessing word meanings from context and evaluating those guesses, recognizing cognates and word families, skimming, scanning, reading for meaning, predicting, activating general knowledge, making inferences, following references, and separating main ideas from supporting details. Suggested pedagogical approaches for helping readers develop successful strategies entail such pre-reading activities as brainstorming for appropriate background knowledge or imagining text content from a title or illustrations, activities while reading such as discussing word formation and word meanings in context, and post-reading global comprehension activities requiring student readers to summarize or get the gist of a text. Certainly, common sense and our own reading experiences tell us that L2 students who use efficient reading strategies will understand more than those who do not. And most teachers would support the assumption that students who think about reading strategies and believe they use them effectively actually do so and comprehend well. Nevertheless, we need more objective research on the efficacy of real and perceived strategy use to verify suggested pedagogical models of reading. The Modern LanguaseJournal, 7 2 , ii (1988) 0026-7902/88/0002/150 $1.50/0 a1988 The Modern Language JournalTo discern the usefulness of individual strategies and reader perception of strategy use, it is best to examine each strategy separately; to compare strategy efficacy, we must use similar research designs in each study. Thus, a series of experiments was devised to study the following hypotheses: 1) readers who use certain problem-solving strategies will understand more of what they read than those who do not use reading strategies; 2) readers who perceive that they use strategies generally considered effective will understand more of what they read than those who do not think they use such strategies.For the purposes of this on-going inquiry, effective reading strategies are divided into two general categories: 1) text-level; and 2) wordlevel. This binary division rather closely parallels classifications presented in other studies: e. g., Block's "general comprehension" and "local linguistic," Barnard's "global" and "local," Hosenfeld's (24) "main meaning line" and "word-solving strategies," and, in L1 reading theory, Olshavsky's "clause-related'' and "word-related" and Fisher and Smith's "text processing" and "word processing." According to my definitions, text-level strategies are those related to the reading passage as a whole or to large parts of the passage; they include considering background knowledge, predicting, using titles and illustrations to understand, readin...

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