This partial replication of an earlier study that found second language (L2) learners of Spanish have trouble simultaneously attending to meaning and form of aural input addresses the effect of modality on attention to meaning and form by including a written mode and using English as a Second Language. Revealed listening was more difficult than…

Reviews the research on how readers or listeners construct mental models of the situation a writer or speaker is describing. Narrative components and spatial models are discussed. (YP)

First-year students of Chinese at the United States Air Force Academy (n=60) were tested for reading speed and comprehension of Chinese passages presented either in characters or romanization. Students read faster and understood more in romanization than in characters. (LMO)

A study investigated the effects of varying the morphological characteristics of input on comprehension and input processing. Nine targeted subjunctive verbs in a text were substituted with infinitives and a nonsense morpheme. Passage comprehension, measured by recall, was significantly lower for the correct, subjunctive forms than for incorrect…

Investigated the online processing strategies used by a sample of nonnative speakers of English who were asked to give the meanings of selected common idioms presented in a written context. Data were gathered using a think-aloud procedure; participants were asked to verbalize their thoughts as they arrived at the meaning of the idioms. (Author/VWL)

Recent advances in cross-language psycholinguistics provide reading researchers with both the models and the tools needed to investigate the syntactic processing of second-language (L2) readers. In this study, 48 first-language and 48 highly fluent L2 French readers read sentences containing constructions that do not exist in English, pre-verbal…

Investigates the extent to which tasks involving processing differences in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) reading result in differences in performance on comprehension. Processing differences were created by the assignment of two tasks--writing a text summary and listing the examples in the text. (Author/VWL)

The results of a within-subject cross-language study of text comprehension in adult second language (L2) learners are presented. Text comprehension and sentence reading time measures were obtained for matched narrative and procedural texts in English and French from adult learners of French as a second language (FSL) at two levels of French…

An adult developmental model of self-regulated language processing (SRLP) is introduced, in which the allocation policy with which a reader engages text is driven by declines in processing capacity, growth in knowledge-based processes, and age-related shifts in reading goals. Evidence is presented to show that the individual reader's allocation…

The aim of this book is to provide a thorough account of what is known about the acquisition of reading abilities in a second language and to foster a more principled research and instruction in second language literacy. Discussion is set forth from a variety of perspectives: first, through examinations of theoretical models of the reading process…

Students of English as a Second Language (ESL) in an academic program must be able to write paraphrases, but they often lack strategies for accomplishing this complex task successfully. The process requires skill in reading, comprehension, analysis, selection of new structures and vocabulary, and integration into a written product. Paraphrases…

A study investigated the relationship between text organization and children's reading comprehension of expository material. Upgraded and downgraded versions of both macrostructures and microstructures were combined to produce four texts on the topic of insect-eating plants. Forty-three seventh grade students were randomly assigned to one of the…

A study examined how the text variables of organizational plan (top-level structure), emphasis plan (implemented through signalling devices), and presence of details influenced the selection of reading strategies by adults. Subjects--149 young, middle aged, and older expert readers--read and recalled in writing two expository prose passages of 388…

Thirty-six college students read a portion of a contemporary novel presented on a cathode ray tube while their eye movements were being monitored and recorded in an effort to determine how soon after the onset of a fixation during reading the mind begins to deal with characteristics of the language being perceived. The passage contained a total of…

The paper focuses on networking, a process of identifying and understanding the relationships among concepts in prose passage, as a learning strategy for deaf college students. It is explained that students using the technique perform three basic overlapping processes, one of which, identification and understanding of concept relationships, is the…