Second-Language Reading Comprehension: A Socio-Cognitive Perspective

• In Event: Complementary Approaches to Understanding Discourse as a Unified Linguistic, Social, and Cognitive Process

Abstract

The perspective of this discussion paper is that of a researcher whose primary focus has been second-language reading and writing. The objective of this paper is to describe analytic procedures used in this research to discuss how those procedures can be extended into and complemented by other approaches to discourse analysis in learning situations.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding functioning in a second language, especially if that second language is English, appears to assume that if the learner can recognize and produce the lexical and syntactic forms of the language then she can function in that language. This position gained support from second-language reading research where the question was often phrased in terms of “Is it a language problem, or a reading problem?” (Alderson, 1984) and the answer often given was that the primary issue for the second-language reader was “language” (e.g., Bernhardt & Kamil, 1995). Recent years, however, have seen more sophisticated cognitive models coming from first-language text-processing research reflected in the second-language reading literature (e.g., Grabe, 2009); however, the social aspects of the processing of written text by second-language speakers have not been well-addressed.
When one takes a text processing or discourse perspective it becomes apparent that comprehension and learning from printed text, whether it is in one’s first or second language, involves more than language. The model of the text that one builds reflects many types of knowledge with which the reader approaches a given text within a given context (c.f., Donin, 2004). In addition to linguistic knowledge, these include: (a) content knowledge; i.e., knowledge, such as that which may be specific to a particular domain, allowing the reader to assess the semantic content of the text; (b) knowledge of rhetorical structures that may be the same or different across discourse communities; i.e., knowledge of how a particular type of text or a text in a particular domain is organized (c.f., Connor, 1996); (c) situation-specific knowledge, e.g., knowledge of how the text material is to be used in its particular situational context; etc. Moreover, the knowledge bases that an individual brings into a situation are products of her entire history. What knowledge is actually accessed in the particular situation is determined not only by that history but also by the individual’s reaction to, or reading of, the current situation, including the other actors in the situation.
There are a number of ways to display the socio-cognitive processes involved in second-language text comprehension and learning from text. We have used multiple layers of analysis to analyze individual readers as they read in both their first- and second-languages: propositional and frame analyses of semantic content of on-line and recall protocols, analyses of strategy use, analyses of interview data, etc. We have extended these analyses to students’ written production. In this discussion, examples will be drawn from studies of second-language students in a number of contexts: Canadian military pilots; high school students in immersion programs in Montreal, Colombia and Lebanon; and university physics students in a laboratory methods course.

Author

• Janet Donin, McGill University