SLA and Classroom Instruction: Reading

Abstract

Theories and models of seond language acquisition have tended to focus on the role of oral language. While some acknowledgement is given to the role of reading (andwriting) in SLA (e.g., by Krashen 1984; 1985), the relative inattention given to reading in SLA had resulted in a dearth to reading research which is explicitly tied to the most popular theories and models of SLA or which is expressly designed to deal with issues commonly addressed in SLA. Although there is no simple explanation as to why SLAresearch has focused almost exclusively on oral language, to the neglect of written language, it is interesting to speculate about why the “canonical” theories of SLA do not to any significant extent deal with reading and writing, especially when there seems to be broad consensus that language has to be considered from a textual point of view, and when written as well as oral language may be a substantial source of language input. One possibility is that SLA, while in some sense part of the backlash against the structuralism of the audiolingual approach, has nonetheless simply maintained the focus on oral-aural language of audiolingualism (which itself originated as a reaction against earlier grammartranslation models relying heavily on reading and writing).

Demystifying a Q-Matrix for Making Diagnostic Inferences About L2 Reading Skills

“…Upton's (1997Upton's ( , 1998 studies highlight similar results: low-proficient ESL students tended to rely on L1 resources and focused on lexical processing at the local level. Similarly, Carrell (1988) noted that, compared to L1 readers, L2 readers tended to rely overly on text-based processing and knowledge-based processing. Through the text-based processing, readers paid attention to decoding individual words and syntactic structures at the sentence level when there were insufficient knowledge structures to utilize for the higher level of cognitive process.…”

“…Items associated with the Inferencing skill included difficult vocabulary and complex sentence structures. Further, the Inferencing skill involved some degree of synthesizing textual information at the global level by connecting textual information to background knowledge including both formal schemata (associated with knowledge about text genres and rhetorical organizational structures) and content schemata (associated with the knowledge of textual content ;Carrell, 1988;Nassaji, 2007). The verbal report data revealed numerous instances in which participants resorted to their background knowledge.…”

Dialogic meaning construction and emergent reading domains among four young English language learners in second-language reading

“…ELLs situate themselves in five domains-(a) cultural, (b) lived-through (interchangeably aesthetic), (c) efferent, (d) dialogic, and (e) critical-to construct meaning and to enhance their experience while engaging in reading activities. Apparently the five major semiotic domains for the responsive reading process discussed here are related to such prior theories as Carrell's (1988) schema theory, Rosenblatt's (1978Rosenblatt's ( , 1993 reader-response theory, and, especially, Bakhtin's (1986) dialogue and Freire's (1970) critical consciousness, because all the domains are grounded in the dialogic principle.…”

IS THERE ANY INTERACTION BETWEEN BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE AND LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY THAT AFFECTS TOEFL IBT® READING PERFORMANCE?

“…This indicates that bottom-up processing is very important in TOEFL iBT reading comprehension, and if a reader exercises top-down or content-knowledgedriven processing to the extent of overlooking the bottom-up or text-driven processing, performance might be disadvantaged. Carrell (1988) also noted that second language readers, compared to native-speaker readers, tended to rely too heavily on culturally biased schemata, which interfered with their text-based comprehension.…”