Reflective task 5

A key issue in reading research is whether, for learners, L2 reading is a reading problem as such or whether it is more a language problem. In other words, is poor reading in L2 due to poor reading ability in the mother tongue, or is poor L2 reading the result of inadequate knowledge of the foreign language? There is a full discussion of this topic and of relevant research in Alderson (1984), on which the following summary is based. On the first view, L2 reading is seen as a question of getting learners to transfer reading ability from L1 to L2. Those who are proficient in L2 but who still read slowly and with poor comprehension are employing bad reading strategies. Therefore the challenge for the language classroom is to teach appropriate reading strategies. Furthermore, if reading strategies can be transferred readily to L2, it might be more efficient to teach those strategies in L1. A variation on this view is that poor L2 reading is due to incorrect strategies for reading that particular foreign language, strategies which differ from the strategies for reading L1. For example, English readers will process L2 German using a subject-verb-object word order and will have problems when they encounter German object-verb-subject word order. This refinement of the view that L2 reading is a question of reading suggests that reading strategies are language-specific and L2 learners have different processing strategies for L1 and L2. Mother-tongue reading strategies will transfer readily where languages are similar, but where they are very different, transfer from L1 to L2 will have a negative effect.

Research backing for this first hypothesis is rather thin. There does, however, seem to be quite a bit of evidence to support the second position, namely that what matters in reading comprehension is knowledge of L2. Studies suggest that L2 students at a low level of competence are unable to use their good L1 reading strategies in L2 reading simply because of their lack of proficiency in the foreign language. A crucial extension of this line of thinking is that there is a 'language competence ceiling' which prevents good L1 readers from using their reading ability effectively in the L2 and forces them to resort to poor reading strategies. The conclusion seems to be that there are two types of poor L2 readers: (a) poor L1 readers, and (b) good L1 readers who are unable to transfer their L1 ability to the L2 because of their problems with L2.

These ideas provide an interesting comparison with Cummins' (1979) 'threshold level of linguistic competence' which represents the crucial stage of linguistic development for bilinguals. Readers cannot hope to read as well in L2 as they can in L1 until this threshold level is reached. However, this threshold is not some absolute measure but is likely to vary depending on different factors. For example, the more demanding the task a learner has to perform, the higher the threshold is likely to be. Conversely, the level is quite likely to be reduced if the learner possesses a high degree of 'conceptual knowledge', or knowledge of the particular subject area. Support for this position comes from research in which induced background knowledge enabled L2 readers to use language decoding which was otherwise unavailable to them, thus showing that the competence ceiling is relative and can be overridden.

The tentative conclusion that can be drawn from this research work is that L2 reading is more of a language problem than a pure reading one - at least for lower levels of L2 competence. At upper intermediate and advanced levels the distinction between L1 and L2 reading is greatly reduced and the picture remains much less clear: it may be that at these levels of linguistic proficiency L2 reading is as much if not more of a reading problem.