Beginning Reading in English as a Second Language.

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AUTHOR Bruder, Mary N.; Henderson, Robert T.TITLE Beginning Reading in English as a Second Language.INSTITUTION ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics,

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MF01/PC04 Plus Postage.Adult Students; *Classroom Techniques; EducationalStrategies; *English for Academic Purposes; ForeignStudents; *Instructional Design; IntroductoryCourses; Learning Theories; Limited English Speaking;Literature Reviews; *Reading Instruction; *ReadingSkills; Second Language Instruction; StudentEvaluation

ABSTRACTThe design of an effective reading course in English

for academic purposes must be based on an understanding of thereading process (including perceptual skills and cognitiveprocessing), an understanding of problems in mastering the Englishwriting system (punctuation, decoding handwriting, and confusionbetween typefaces), and an awareness of the deficiencies theparticular learner group must overcome. Assessment of learners'reading skills, by a variety of techniques, in the context of theirlanguage backgrounds can then lead to development of materials andmethods for effective reading instruction. English as a secondlanguage (ESL) programs have adopted a number of approaches to theseissues; both theories and procedures are in the process of beingrefined. Instructor familiarity with foreign languages, especiallythose with a different writing system, is al:.) helpful in ESL readinginstruction. Examples of a number of teaching and testing exercisesare included. A six-page bibliography concludes the document.(MSE)

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BEGINNINGREADING

1 in ENGLISHas a SECONDLANGUAGE

by Mary Newton Bruderand Robert T. Henderson

A publication of egaLlCenter for Applied Linguistics

Prepared by ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics

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LANGUAGE IN EDUCATION: Theory and Practice 64

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iv BEGINNING READING

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6vi BEGINNING READING

Contents

1. THEORIES OF READING IN ESL 1

2. PROBLEMS IN READING ESL 11

3. ASSESSING COMPONENTS OFTHE READING SKILLS 25

CONCLUSION 64

BIBLIOGRAPHY 65

ADDITIONAL READING 69

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 71

B RUDE gi HENDERSON vii

Chapter 1Theories of Reading in ESL

THE PROBLEM

The development of an ability to read with speed andcomprehension is clearly an essential objective ofmost students of English as a second or foreignlanguage (ESL/EFL). For learners in non-English-speaking environments, printed material representsthe primary medium of communication in the new lan-guage. Good reading skills are also important forstudents in English-speaking countries, particularlyfor those who are preparing to undertake academic

work, where success depends to a great extent on theability to absorb knowledge from books and otherwritten sources. It is therefore imperative thatESL/EFL instructional programs prepare students tobe able to read efficiently. The task is furtherintensified if the language of the learner does notuse the same writing system as English, and if thelearner has had little exposure to English.

The present focus is on adult foreign studentswho need to gain proficiency in reading English foracademic purposes in order to achieve the fullpotential of their education at the secondary oruniversity level. The problem of illiteracy, thatis, the inability to read in any language, is notdealt with. The students of concern here are thosewho can read a language but who are nonreaders inEnglish.

The problem of nonreaders is -elatively new toacademically oriented ESL program,, until the mid-1970s, international students who came to university

THEORIES OF READING IN ESL 1

programs could, virtually without exception, read atleast elementary texts in English. At that pointthe international student population began tochange. ESL programs increasingly admitted studentsfrom countries where English was not part of thenormal curriculum, or who had avoided English inmuch the same manner as U.S. students sometimesavoid foreign languac,es. For these and variousother reasons, students Who could not read any Eng-lish and who often did not know the Roman alphabetwere entering the U.S. programs. The tried-and-truephilosophy of "give them the opportunity to read,see that they do it, and they'll learn" no longer

worked. Teachers now had to learn how to teach thestudents to read English.

A further problem with some students has beenthat although they can read their native language,there is such a difference between written and spo-ken forms of the language that they tend not toassociate reading and speaking. Arabic-speakingstudents, for example, generally speak one of theirmodern regional dialects, while a good portion ofthe written material is in Classical or StandardArabic, which can be quite different from the spokenlanguage used for all but the most formal occasions.While written English is also somewhat more formalthan the spoken form, there is not such a widedivergence as in Arabic. Thus, students have to betaught to make the connection between the two.

The design of an effective reading course mustbe based on an understanding of the reading process,which entails an examination of the various com-ponents of fluent reading, including perceptualstrategies and cognitive subprocesses, which haverecently been the object of considerable attentionby psychologists, language specialists, and educa-tors. A clear picture of what is involved in effi-cient reading will enable teachers to providelearners with the kinds of skills they need.Teachers must also gain an awareness of the specificproblems that learners can be expected to encounterin their attempts to master the English writingsystem, taking into consideration relevant featuresof alphabetic representation, sound - symbol

2 THEORIES OF READING IN ESL

9

correspondences, writing style, and rhetorical orga-nization. Finally, it is essential to make anaccurate assessment of the deficiencies that par-ticular learners or groups of learners will need toovercome.

The first step in designing an effective read-ing program, of course, is to determine what thelearners already know. While there are fluentspeakers who can get by for some time in class with-out the teacher realizing that they cannot read,conversely there are nonfluent speakers who can readbetter than they are able to reveal through normaltesting procedures. It is important, therefore, toevaluate reading ability as a separate component ofoverall language proficiency and to use thisassessment when deciding on course content andmethodology.

Since the specific deficiencies of particularlearners will depend to a large extent on theirnative language (L1) background, their L1 readingability, their cultural orientation, and theirgeneral level of proficiency in English, a meansmust be available for assessing such factors forindividual students in order to determine the mostappropriate instructional techniques. The readingskill must be analyzed from the viewpoint of eachlearner's language background to discover what eachlearner actually knows. Methods and materials canthen be devised to teach reading to a heterogeneouspopulation with no common tongue in a relativelyshort time, usually less than a yeaf, so that thestudents will be able to compete in academic set-tings with American students.

This text discusses what various ESL programshave done to approach this problem.

READING THEORIES AS APPLIED TOBEGINNING ESL READERS

Reading can be viewed as a complex skillinvolving a series of subskills, all of which have


i0

to work together in order for a reader to be able to

extract meaning from a written text and reconstruct

the author's intended message. For simplicity,reading ability can be subdivided into perceptualan cognitive skills, but these are certainly not

independent skill areas: there is constant interac-tion between the functioning of the eyes and the

brain, in normal reading, and neither would be ofmuch use without the other.

Perceptual Skills

Since the first step in reading is to perceive

what is on the page (or, increasingly, the computervideo screen), and since the functioning of the eyesis much more readily observable than the functioningof the brain, the perceptual aspects of reading havereceived a great deal of attention from researchers.An analysis of the mechanics by which information ispicked up has shown that the eyes, rather thanflowing smoothly across lines of text, move from onepoint to another in short jumps, called saccades,stopping at each point for a short pause, referredto as a fixation (see Goodman, 1970; Mitchell, 1982;Smith, 1979). Each fixation lasts about a quarterof a second in normal fluent reading, and permitsthe intake of graphic information from a small areacalled the fovea, which extends approximately onedegree of visual angle in each direction from thepoint of fixation. The material within the fovea is

what can be seen clearly, but a reader can also pickup useful information from other parts of the pageeven though individual letters are not clearly iden-

tifiable. The fuzzy information outside the fovealarea is important for efficient reading, since it isused to guide the eyes to the next fixation point

(Houma, 197A; Rayner, 1978). That is, a reader cansee if there are any long words coming up, can tellhow far it is to the end of the line, and soand based on such details the eyes are directed tothe point where the most useful graphic informationis likely to be found.

4 11 THEORIES OF READING IN ESL

The visual information that the eyes pick upduring a fixation, consisting of graphic represel.-tations in terms of the limes and angles thatconstitute the letters, is coded in raw form in whatis known as iconic memory or preperceptual storage,where the uninterpreted information is stored verybriefly--for about half a second, according to Fossand Hakes (1978)--before it decays. At this stagethe reader's brain has not yet translated thegraphic shapes into meaningful units such as lettersor words. To be useful in the reading process, thisiconic material must be analyzed in some way, eitherthrough direct identification of words or morphemes--minimal units of meaning--or initially throughidentification of the individual letters or lettercombinations that are contained in the words.Storage of information in iconic memory, then, is afirst step in the perception of graphic material,but the contents of the icon have no linguisticvalue until they are further processed. This pro-cessing is carried out in what is often referred toas working or short-term memory. Theories about howthe brain might carry out this processing arebriefly discussed in the following section.

Cognitive Processing

Once the graphic material has been perceived,the brain has to decode the contents of iconicmemory in order to transform it into comprehensionof the text. For purposes of description, it mightbe helpful to view reading as a complex information-processing system (Kolers, 1970). The operation ofsuch a system requires an efficient mechanism bywhich the reader can retrieve from long-term memorythe information necessary for interpreting thegraphic input. Long-term memory, where all of theknowledge that the reader has acquired is stored,can be viewed as consisting of various levels ofinformation, from basic details about letter shapesand identities to lexical information, such as thespelling, pronunciation, meaning, and syntactic

THEORIES OF READING IN ESL1 r)

5

characteristics of words, to high-level generalknowledge abont the world.

The comprehension process for any new infor-

mation can be said to consist of comparing the newdata being introduced into short-term memory withpreexisting knowledge in the reader's long-term

memory. A text is much easier to understand if itis based on concepts that the reader is already

familiar with. A person who has studied a greatdeal of psychology, for example, will more readil.;grasp new theories of learning than one who has hadlittls previous exposure to psychological concepts.The cognitive processes that are used to match newinput with knowledge held in lonirtexA memory run inboth directions, often referred to as bottom-up and

top-down processes. Bottom-up or data-driven pro-cesses depend primarily on the information presented

by the text. Top- down, or conceptually driven,processet involve the reader's previous knowledgeabout the language and about the subject matter.

Perhaps the mwt basic kind of bottom-up pro-cessing is the vist.=1 discrimination of letters.This task is probably based on significant distinc-tive features such as the lines and angles that makeup the letters and their configuration within theletters (see Smith, 1979). Once the letters thatmake up a word have been recognized, the word itselfcan be accessed or recalled from long-term memory,either by means of a visual match with represen-tations in the "internal lexicon"--one's knowledgeof words and their meanings--or by first assigning aphonological identity to the word in order to pro-cess it in terms of its sound, as if it were being

heard rather than read. This process can involvesubvocalization--that is, converting the written

material into actual speech sounds, which usuallyinvolves moving one's lips--or, more efficiently,transforming the letter shapes or graphemes directlyinto an abstract phonological code without activa-tion of the speech mechanism. A main problem withsuch theories of phonological mediat4 n in Englishconcerns the abundance of orthographic irregulari-ties, which would require a highly complex system of,rapheme -to- phoneme correspondence rules. In


13

English, unlike many other alphabetic languages, itis often very difficult to determine how a word ispronounced based on its spelling, as can be seen inthe very distinct pronunciations of words such asthrough, tl.ough, thought, and tough, or to know howa word is spelled based on its pronunciation, as in

caught, ache, and so on. This has led many psycho-

logists (see, fm: example, Barron, 1981; iiassaro,1979; Underwood, 1979) to conclude that in reading,meaning is determined primarily through directvisual recognition of words rather than convertingto sound, though subsequent transformation to aspeech code may be a means of remembering materialuntil it can be integrated into the meaning of asentence, which is also a function of short-term

memory.Another way that lexical access--the identifi-

cation of word meaning--may be achieved is throughthe perception of visual characteristics of thewords themselves, without depending on the priorrecognition of component letters. One such charac-teristic is the overall shape of the word, includingits length and the outline pattern created by theascending and descending letters, those that extendabove (b, d, f, h, k, 1, t) and below (g, j, p,y) the line of print, perhaps along with someinternal analysis, such as the identification ofsome of the letters, especially those at the begin-

ning or end of the word. For example, fluent

readers probably do not process familiar words ofhigh frequency such as the articles a and the interms of their individual letters, but perceive them

directly as lexical units.Actually, it is possible that a combination of

phonological and visual access is used by most read-ers, very common words being recognized visually,and less OOMMCA words being recoded to speech soundsthrough a set of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence

rules. This possibility has been referred to as adual-access hypothesis (Foss & Hakes, 1978). Even

fluent readers can be observed to slow down whenthey come across an unusual word in order to sound

it ()Lt.


14

In summary, bottom-up processing hypothesesview word recognition as result of a flow fromgraphic input to meaning, either directly or throughphonological mediation.

In contrast to bottom-up processes, top-down

processes are believed to depend on the reader's owncontribution to comprehension through the knowledgethat he or she has about the world and about thesyntactic and semantic constraints of the language.A reader who is familiar with the language,including its common rhetorical patterns, and withthe topic about which he or she is reading, canusually anticipate words before they are encoun-tered, making detailed bottom-up processing unne-cessary. In a study some years ago, Wilson (1973)found that graduate students in advanced ESL classeshad much less difficulty reading material in theirfields than they did the ESL texts. Proponents oftop-down models of reading such as Goodman (1970,1973, 1976) and Smith (1973) contend that an effi-cient reader does not have to identify letters or

even words with precision, but merely samples fromgraphic cues, supplying the contextually determinedsyntactic and semantic information needed to predictgrammatical structure and subsequent graphic input.In the sentence, Please turn out the lights when you

, it is fairly easy to supply the final wordbased on the meaning of the sentence. The readingprocess is said to consist basically of testing andconfirming these predictions by comparing them withthe least possible amount of visual input. In theexample given above, the reader merely has to seethat the final word begins with the letter "1" toconfirm his prediction that the word in question isleave.

While Goodman (1976) recognizes that less pro-ficient readers require more graphic input thanadvanced readers, he claims that even beginningreaders are able to draw on the syntactic and seman-tic information available to them. Most of theresearch with top-down processing has been done withnative speakers of English. It therefore presup-poses a fluent command of the language in its spokenform before learning to read. In dealing with ESL


15

studentg, however, it is important to recognize thespecial problems of second-language learners who,unlike children learning to read in their nativelanguage, may not possess sufficient knowledge of

the target language to aid significantly in theirpredictive capability. As Yorio (1971) has pointedout, reading in a foreign language is not the sameas in one's native language due to deficiencies inthe reader's knowledge of the structure and vocabu-lary of the language, his or her ability to selectthe most productive graphic cues, and his or hermemory span, as well as interference from his or hernative language.

Perhaps it is most realistic to view reading asan interactive process, as proposed by Ramelhart(1977). The interactive model emphasizes thecooperation that must exist between bottom-up andtop-down processes. According to this model, long-term memory consists of several abstract levels ofmeaning, each storing different kinds of infor-mation, such as letter features, letters, and words.The perception of a set of letter features cantrigger the recognition of the corresponding letter,which in turn activates words containing the letter.As more and Acre letters are recognized, thecorresponding word is accessed, and as more and morewords are recognized and contextual comprehensionbegins to take place, activation will begin to flowdown to aid in the recognition of subsequent words.

In the interactive model, phonological encodingis seen as a useful mechanism both in lexical accessand as a way of storing material in short-termmemory until it can be integrated with subsequentmaterial in rrder to extract the complete meaning ofa sentence or piece of text.

For skilled readers, the lower-level processingtasks involved in reading, such as letter iden-tification and word recognition, become so automaticthat the limited resources of short -term memory canbe devoted to the integration of meaning at thelevel of sentences or longer units of text. But asPerfetti and Hogabcam (1975) point out:


16

If a reader requires considerable processingcapacity to decode a single word, his pro-cessing capacity is less available for higherorder integrated processes--for example, memoryfor the just previously coded word may suffer,memory for the preceding phrase may decrease,and the subject's ability to predict what he isyet to encounter on the printed page maydiminish. (p. 461)


Chapter 2Problems in Reading ESL

The ease with which learners will be able to acquireeffective reading skills in English can be expectedto vary, especially at lower levels of instruction,depending on their previous reading experience. The

extent to which they have developed reading strat-egies in their first language, as well as the dif-ferences between their native writing system andthat of English, will affect the types of problemsthey will have to confront and the effort that willbe required to overcome such problems. While alllearners will have to adjust to the peculiarities ofthe language and its system of written representa-tion, the nature of the adjustments that will haveto be made will not be the same for a student whosenative language uses an alphabetic system as for onewhose language is represented by means of a sylla-bary or a logographic systen. In the following sec-tions are outlined some of the decoding difficultiesthat different groups of ESL learners face as theresult of the contrast between their first (L1) andsecond language (L2) writing systems.

Some aspects of reading in English cause

problems for all learners, even those whose writingsystems are the same. Languages as closely relatedas British and American English differ in somespellings and in a number of categories of punctua-tion, so students who have learned British Englishat home have some new things to learn. The commondifficulties include punctuation, decoding of hand-written English, and confusions of different type-faces, which can vary greatly from text to text.

PROBLEMS IN READING ESL 11

18

When the writing system is different, there isthe basic problem of figuring out which pieces ofthe "squiggles" are meaningful. For example, stu-dents of Arabic have been known to carefully copymarks that were left after the teacher erased theboard. There is the problem of sound-symbolcorrespondence, deciphering Which sound goes withwhich letter or sequence, a problem that is worsenedwhen the sound itself does not exist in the learn-er's system. Then there is a very real physicalproblem of headaches and tired eyes when one mustread in a different direction.

Students from languages that use the Romanalphabet are often handicapped by their expectationthat reading English will be easy. They are tricked

by false cognates or by grammatical structures that

operate in different ways from their nativelanguages.

DECODING PROBLEMS

Problems Common to All Learners

The first set of common problems involves punc-tuation. When confronted with a page of writtenEnglish, beginning readers may know that the spaceson the page separate words; they may not know whythe beginning letter of each sentence is larger thanthe others (or even notice it), or why the pronoun Iis always larger. They probably will not know thesignificance of paragraphing, and if they do notknow the Roman alphabet, they will not notice ita-lics as different from ordinary type. They almostcertainly will not know much about the ways in whichpunctuation can influence the meaning of writtenEnglish.

Consider the following pair (Nash, 1983):

Cheryl explained, "John said I passedthe test, but he was wrong."

1812 PROBLEMS IN READING ESL

Cheryl explained, "John said, 'I passedthe test,' but he was wrong." (p. 17)

The skilled reader of English knows that in thefirst sentence Cheryl failed the test and in thesecond sentence it was John who had not done sowell, but a beginning reader of ESL could beexpected to miss the distinction.

Punctuation has not received a great deal of

attention in the literature of foreign or secondlanguage learning, perhaps because in the tradi-tional view, punctuation is a marker for intonation,and in oral-aural approaches to language learning,one hears language before one sees it, removing thenecessity to teach punctuation explicitly. The

other possibility is that punctuation is seen as thecompanion of the writing course, when the studentsactually produce English prose. One is not likelyto hear such an utterance as the one above, however,so we cannot expect intonation to sort out themeaning for the learner. And academically oriented

adults are probably not going to be assigned suchdialogues for writing practice. The only place stu-

dents would be expected to encounter usage of single

and double quotations is in a reading text, andreading texts do not teach punctuation for compre-

hension.In a study designed to discover the effect of

punctuation on reading comprehension, Nash (1983)found that punctuation does indeed affect comprehen-sion, quite profoundly at beginning levels of profi-ciency across language groups. Her comparison ofArabic speakers with Spanish speakers showed theArabic speakers to have more difficulty at alllevels of proficiency. Even though it stands toreason that students whose writing system is verydifferent from that of the L2 will have more dif-ficulty in reading, insufficient attention has been

paid to this seemingly low-level skill.Based on a study of seven modern languages

(English, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese,Thai, and Greek), Nash identifies seven functionspunctuation may serve (punctuation from English isgiven for illustration): (a) to show emphasis


( underlining or italics); (b) to terminate (periods,question marks, exclamation points); (c) to showomission (apostrophes, ellipsis marks); (d) to sep-arate (commas, colons, semicolons); (e) to amplify(brackets and parentheses); (f) to show juncture(hyphens and dashes), and (g) to name (underliningor italics, commas for appositives).

To determine precisely what difficulty the stu-dents are likely to have, Nash suggests comparingthe two language systems (L1 and English) in threeways. The first is whether the two languages markthe same functions. For the languages she compared,she found that generally all Languages mark allseven functions. The second problem is to identifyhow the languages mark the functions. The languagemay use punctuation alone to mark a function: for

example, in the yes-no question in informal English,You're going? only the ? reveals that this is not astatement. The language may use only a morphologi-

cal marker: Japanese ka needs no written mark toaccompany it to make a question. Or the language

may use some combination of punctuation and morpho-

logy or syntax to mark a function, such as theFrench n'est-ce pas followed by a ? or the normalsubject-verb inversion plus ? in English.

The third aspect to look at in comparing thesystems of the languages are the similarities anddifferences within each functional category. Some-times, the same function is marked by essentiallythe same symbol; all the languages in Nash's studymarked declaratives with something that looks like adot and exclamations with something like an exclama-tion point. when the systems compare so fully, thestudents are not likely to have any difficulty. Onthe other hand, as with Greek, which uses the semi-colon to mark questions, a familiar mark may be usedfor quite a different function, which could beexpected to cause reading problems for the students.Finally, if a function is not marked at all in onelanguage, the greatest difficulties can be expected,since the students may have to be taught new lan-guage concepts at a time when their language profi-ciency is very low. For example, English uses theapostrophe to mark contractions, as in I'm, isn't.


21

The only other language in Nas11.'s sample that usescontractions at all is Spanish, in which they arerare. Since basic reading texts that include., dia-

logues are full of contracted forms, many studentsmust have considerable difficulties with them.

English, it seems, is quite rich ,n the variety

and uses of punctuation marks. The problem for thereading teacher at the beginning levels is to besensitive to uses of punctuation that are likely toaffect the meaning of the text and to make sure thestudents understand these first. Other uses ofpunctuation can be learned after the student gainssufficient skill with the language to comprehendtheir explanation in English.

The second set of common problems concernshandwriting. Although most of the material a typi-cal ESL student will have occasion to read willbe in printed form, he or she will also find it

necessary at times to be able to read handwrittenmessages. Instructors usually use handwriting onthe blackboard as well as for comments on tests andpapers; students take class notes in longhand; and,indeed, most informal written communication ishandwritten. Since letter shapes in handwriting areoften quite different from standard printed forms(compare, for example, a - 6L, f -1 , r , s -

, v - 4r, z - ^T), and since the distinctionsbetween some handwritten letters are minimal (as

with et/ f, .k/A A-/,4 At/in f./,), it is important that students whoselanguages do not use the Roman alphabet be givenspecial training in order to gain familiarity withthe handwritten forms of the letters.

The main problem in learning to read handwrit-ing is that there is often considerable variation inform and style from one individual to another, bothin the shape of particular letters and in the over-all slant, size, and spacing of the writing. Com-pare, for example, the following samples, all ofwhich could be considered good handwriting in spiteof the differences among

PROBLEMS IN READING ESL 22 15

eic,rut- Aitticu..4

Ireezete,xy nt.64.4a-SLE._ .

4k /14#1.4_ A-tiff

Thus, in addition to teaching a standard formof handwriting, some of the major variables shouldalso be taught.

Varying typefaces present a third set ofproblems. Modern German classes, for example com-monly begin reading in a script similar to this one

and then switch to a Gothic script that looks like a

different language once the students advance to"literature." Many learners have had this traumaticexperience. With ESL learners who are unfamiliarwith Zile Roman alphabet, the same thing can happenwhen changing from text to text in different typestyles. The serifs, or the embellishments at thetops and bottoms of letters in some typefaces, maybe confusing, as students may think the Serifscreate new letters with different correspondences,in the same manner as adding dots in Arabic, forexample. Following is an example of a seriftypeface:

Reading is a valuable skill.And, as mentioned earlier, italics can presentproblems when the students do not notice the dif-ference, or do not know the significance of thedifference.

The teacher should also examine the textmaterials to see if there are particular uses ofboldface type, italics, or other features thatsignal certain types of directions or activities.

16 PROBLEMS IN READING SSL

23

Problems Specific to Language Systems

While difficulties in acquiring familiaritywith the alphabetic symbols and the conventionsof printing and handwriting discussed so far canbe expected to affect the reading ability ofbeginning ESL students regardless of their language

background, different kinds of problems can beanticipated depending on the type of graphic rep-resentation students have previously learned to use.From the point of view of various writing systemscommonly used in different languages, the adjust-ments that learners from diverse backgrounds willhave to make in learning to read English areexplored here.

English is one of many modern languages thatuse some form of alphabetic writing, in which theindividual letters or letter combinations representlanguage sounds, or phonemes. As noted earlier, thecorrespondences between sounds and symbols are notas consistent in English as in some other languageswith a more regular orthography. However, the basicprinciple is still that the way a word is written isbased on the discrete phonemic units constitutingthe oral articulation of a word. In contrast tosuch alphabetic systems, the syllabaries and logo-graphic systems used by many languages, primarily inthe Far East, consist of symbols (characters) thatrepresent syllables or complete words. Theoutstanding example of a logographic system is thatof Chinese writing, which uses thousands of charac-ters, each representing a different semantic con-cept. Japanese writing, on the other hand, makesuse of both a logographic system borrowed from Chi-nese and two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), inwhich each symbol represents a particular consonant-plus-vowel sequence.

Students from these language backgrounds mayexperience basic difficulty in learning the veryconcept of letter-sound correspondence: that eachsymbol represents not a word or syllable, but anindividual phoneme. Lacking an understanding ofthis principle, they would fail to take advantage ofthe orthographic efficiency made possible by alpha-


24

betic writing. The task of learning to read couldbe seriously hampered if a student tended to treatwritten words as isolated visual displays to bememorized rather than using sound-symbol correspon-dences to relate the written and oral forms.

Many languages, including Arabic, Persian,Hebrew, Hindi, and Thai, are written with alphabetic

systems, but using non-Roman alphabets. The charac-

ters of these alphabets are very different fromthose of English. Numerous conventions of English,

such as capitalization, hyphenation, and spacing,are lacking or quite different in some of these lan-

guages. In addition, in Arabic, Persian, andHebrew, the direction of writing is from right toleft, the apposite of the Roman alphabet.

Examples:

Thai 1171)101M111014117t1111r1011114h

Arabic 4-1.s.rda;-02.0.4

4------

Although students whose native languages usenon-Roman alphabets are familiar with the concept ofsound-symbol correspondence, they must learn to

recognize a completely new set of symbols and toassociate these symbols with their respective soundswith a high degree of automaticity before they can

be expected to read English with facility. This canbe especially difficult in the case of letters thatshare a large number of visual features and are thusvery similar in appearance, particularly if the let-ters represent sounds that do not exist in thelearner's native Language.

In the historical development of Europeanalphabetic writing systems, all of which derivedfrom the original alphabet devised in Ancient Greece

on the basis of a syllabary introduced by Phoenician

seafarers, major differences came about principally

between the types of systems used by languages in

Eastern and Western Europe. Since they have commonroots, though, there are numerous similarities inindividual symbols among the quasi-Roman alphabets.The problems that learners encounter stem from the


fact that graphemes that are similar in appearancemay represent quite different sounds in two lan-guages, as observed in correspondences between Greekand English (H ~ E, ng ~ e, v ~ n, p ~ r, o ~ s,x ch, w ~ o) or between Russian and English(B v, H ten, p ~ r, y ~ u, x ~ kh). In earlystages of learning to read English, such - lilari-ties could be troublesome for students who havealready learned to associate symbols with soundsother than those they represent in English.

Ironically, students whose native languages usethe Roman alphabet may experience the greatest dif-ficulty in mastering English sound - symbol correspon-

dences since they have already learned to associategiven letters with sounds in their own languages,which may or may not be the same as the sounds theyrepresent in English. A Spanish speaker, forexample, would tend to pronounce unfamiliar wordsaccording to Spanish sound-symbol correspondencerules, potentially making comprehension more dif-ficult. In Spanish, the letter r is pronounced likethe tap sound of intervocalic d in English. A stu-dent may hear the word "kidding" and want to look itup in a dictionary. He may become quite frustratedtrying to find it with an r in the middle of theword. It should be noted, on the other hand, thatin the case of cognate words, there is usually moresimilarity in the written forms of equivalent wordsthan in their spoken forms, allowing ESL learnersto exhibit greater reading comprehension than theiroverall language proficiency would permit.

In light of these factors, it is apparent thatlearners' native languages will have some bearing onthe kind and degree of difficulty they experience inacquiring reading ability in English. It wouldtherefore be useful to take language background intoconsideration in an initial assessment of be,icdecoding problems and in the design of a beginningreading programs.

PROBLEMS IN READING ESL

4 00 p

19

Vocahnlary Problems

For students whose language is completely unre-lated to English, all the words will present more orless equal difficulty; therefore, some rationalmeans of presentation will have to be devised tohelp the students learn new words as quickly as pos-

sible. At the very beginning levels, the readingsshould reinforce in the visual mode the languagethat the students are learning aurally, so they will

be getting a double dose of the same words. Later

on, when the students can ;omprehend more difficultlanguage than they can produce, reading serves as a

primary source of new vocabulary.For students from Romance language backgrounds,

the Latinate vocabulary will be much easier thanwords with an Anglo-Saxon source. Demonstrate, forexample, is easier for them than show. They mayhave trouble with the pronunciation, especially withstress placement; but they will not have difficultywith the meaning. There are, of course, falsecognates, but these are limited in number and can be

given special attention when they arise.A more important problem for all learners

arises when the semantic field of the word does not

match in the target and native languages. The words

make and do in English are often represented by asingle word in many languages, and students havedifficulty knowing which to use. At the beginning

stages of reading In a new language, it is notlikely that the students would be reading texts inwhich this particular problem would affect compre-hension. The students probably translate both intotheir native language equivalent with little loss of

comprehension.Many individual words or phrases can have a

variety of meanings depending on the context, andstudents' individual knowledge of these r-ntexts

will affect their comprehension. Washington canrefer to a president, a city, a state, a government,a monument, a bridge, and various public and private

sca,,;:ls. It is not always easy for students todetermine which meaning to choose for a given word.


Morphology and Syntax Problems

Compared with many languages, English morphol-ogy is relatively simple. Students should learn itquite early since it often provides a redundancythat will help comprehension. The inflectional suf-fixes (-d for past, -s for plural, possessive, orthird person singular, for example) are few innumber and are usually learned as part of the gram-matical structure. The teacher of reading needs Fopoint out how the_ can be useful in deciphering atext. Learning derivational affixes (pre -, -tion,-cy) allows students to relate words to each otherand reduces the task of vocabulary learning.

The syntax of English is not particularlycomplicated, either, given the possibilities thatexist in the world's languages. While the produc-tive skills of speaking and writing can be difficultto master, students can use the receptive skills of

listening and reading to comprehend material con-taining syntax that is beyond their ability to pro-duce. The use of the past perfect tense, forexample, may come quite late in the sequence ofgrammatical patterns to be mastered for production,but it is fairly straightforward in meaning and canbe taught for recognition along with or shortlyafter the simple past. The same is true of pas-sives, relative clauses, and conditional pentencGs.

Comprehension Problems

Even for students who have thoroughly masteredthe basic features of the writing system, there maybe serious problems in reading comprehension due notonly to a limited knowledge of vocabulary or a lackof familiarity with the grammatical and rhetori...al

conventions of the language, but also to limitedprevious experience with the subject matter dealtwith in a reading selection.

It has been found that much of the difficultythat foreign learners of English experience inreading is due to the inability to relate what theyare reading to their own preexisting knowledge. As


28

Carrell and Eisterhold (1983) point out, comprehen-

sion involves not only the readers' language profi-

ciency, but also their background knowledge. Prior

knowledge of the world is seen as being organized

into cognitive schemata. According to schematheory, in order for efficient comprehension to takeplace, ongoing interaction must occur between thereader's existing knowledge, which is oftenculturally based, and new information presented in

the text. That is, much of the meaning conveyed by

a text depends on background information that the

author assumes the reader will share and that is

therefore not made explicit. The proficient reader

is expected to be able to make inferences and arriveat a fuller interpretation of the text than is

actually written down. If readers are unable to

make the necessary inferences due to a lack offamiliarity with the sociocultural patterns implicitin a text, they may not fully understand what theyare reading even though they know all the words and

have an adequate mastery of the grammar.Carrell and Eisterhold (1983), in their

discussion of schema theory, distinguish betweenformal schemata, including background knowledge thata reader has about linguistic and rhetorical struc-tures, and content schemata, which consist of priorknowledge about the specific content area dealt with

in a given text. Both kinds of knowledge can be

expected to influence a reader's understanding of a

passage. For example, someone with medical trainingwill be able to derive meaning from an article aboutsurgical techniques more easily than a person who is

unfamiliar with medical writing styles, technicalvocabulary, and operating procedures.

For students who are not only learning a newlanguage but also dealing with unfamiliar types ofrhetorical organization and cultural patterns thatmay be quite different from those of their nativelands, comprehension of a new piece of text can be

severely restricted. Carrell and Eisterhold (1983)

therefore insist that ESL teachers "must be particu-larly sensitive to reading problems that result fromthe implicit cultural knowledge presupposed by a

text."


29

Cultural Orientation to Reading

In general, ESL teachers view the purpose ofreading to be to derive knowledge or pleasure. Mostof the training offered to students in academicallyoriented programs concentrates on reading to gatherinformation. Such reading should be done silentlyand as rapidly as possible, and necessarily involvesgiving critical attention to the information andideas presented by the author. While teachers tryto teach this orientation, many students seem tohave trouble accepting it. In some cultures,reading is seen as an art form rather than as alinguistic tool. Furthermore, many students' pre-vious experience with reading has dealt mainly withreligious material, which is read aloud and withreverence. These factors may explai:i why some stu-dents seem to resist teachers' exhortations to speedup by giving less attention to individual words andmore to the development of ideas in a text.Critical reading is a new concept to many studentsbecause they have had no experience with questioningthe authority of the printed page.

LIMPROBLEMS IN READING ESL 23

Chapter 3Assessing Componentsof the Reading Skills

Accurate assessment of reading ability is essential

whether its purpose is to evaluate an individual'spotential for success in an academic program or todetermine the type and level of instruction that heor she needs in order to achieve the greatestpossible reading proficiency. This section willevamine various kinds of tests that have been usedto measure reading ability, discussing the appro-viateness of each for various situations. As will

be seen, while some tests may provide an accuratepicture of a subject's overall reading ability, mostof them do not give us a clear indication of thespecific problems that may be affecting that abil-

ity. Given the complexity of the reading process,

it is often not enough to know the percentage ofcorrect responses that an individual was able to

give on a reading comprehension test. To be of real

value, an assessment should provide detailed infor-mation regarding the source of the learner's weak-nesses by identifying deficiencies in one or more ofthe subcomponents of the reading process: letteridentification, word recognition, lexical access,

contextual interpretation, background knowledge,integration of meaning, retention of information,

and so forth.

TEST TYPES

All standardized tests of ESL include a test ofreading comprehension, but these tests do not

ASSESSING READING SKILLS 25

31

discriminate between nonreaders, people who read alittle, and very elementary readers. The readingsection is at the end of the test, as a rule, and ifstudents get a minimal score on that part of thetest, the evaluator cannot tell whether they couldnot read or they could not finish the test becauseof general proficiency problems.

The problem for the teacher is to learn exactlywhere the learner is in reading so that appropriatematerials and methods may be selected. Depending onwhich part of the reading skill is being assessed, anumber of tests may be administered fairly quickly.Most of the classroom tests have not been standar-dized, so it is difficult to use them for comparisonpurposes, but generally this is not the purpcse ofgiving such tests.

Cloze Tests

A relatively simple way to assess reading pro-ficiency is by means of a cloze test. This proce-dure involves presenting a reader with a passagefrom which every fifth to tenth word has been sys-tematically deleted, except for the first and lastsentences, which are usually left intact. Thereader is asked to fill in the blanks with appropri-ate words to complete the meaning of the text. Aproficient reader may be expected to know what partof speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) would bemost appropriate in a given context, and on thebasis of overall meaning should be able to provide eword that makes sense.

In the sentence, for example, The man foursandwiches because he was very , the first blankrequires a verb to connect the subject and objectand the second blank requires an adjective since it

is preceded by the modifier very. Furthermore, theverb must be a past tense form to agree with was inthe subordinate clause, and since the object is akind of food the most appropriate verb is probablyate, although consumed, ordered, devoured, and soon, would also be possible answers. The meaning of

26 ASSESSING READING SKILLS

32

the sentence calls for an adjective in the second

blank such as hungry.An entire cloze passage is normally long enough

to include a large number of blanks of varyingdegrees of difficulty so that a wide range of profi-

ciencies can be measured. The tests are scoredeither by giving credit only if the exact word thatwas deleted is given by the reader ( trict scoring),

or by allowing any semantically and syntactically

acceptable word to be inserted (lenient scoring).As Oiler (1979) notes, the choice of scoring methodis of little importance because the two methods havebeen found to produce highly correlated measures.For teachers who are themselves nonnative speakersof English, it would probably be more expedient to

use the exact-word method since it is more objective

and does not require any guesswork or use ofreference books on the part of the evaluator. In

interpreting the scores, however, it should beremembered that strict scoring yields substantiallylower scores than the lenient method. If a cloze

test is being used as a placement instrument, there-fore, score requirements should be scaled down

accordingly.As an alternative to this fairly open-ended

procedure, multiple-choice cloze passages have been

found to be much easier to evaluate, producingresults that correlate highly with other types of

testing instruments (Jonz, 1976). Using the same

example as before, a multiple-choice format wouldappear as follows:

The man (1) four sandwiches

because he was very (2) .

1. a. withb. couldc. ated. buying

2. a. yesterdayb. hungryc. muchd. taste

Of course, a complete passage would be much longer,containing a large enough number of blanks to allow


33

for a fairly wide range of scores. A multiple-choice cloze is more difficult to construct than anopen-ended test, since the distractors, or incorrectresponse items, must be chosen carefully. They mustbe syntactically or semantically incorrect but yetnot so ridiculous that they would never be selectedby a test taker.

The main drawback with multiple-choice tests ofthis kind is that they do not provide a clear indi-cation of the learner's ability to us' -1ntext topredict the missing words. Instead, tAt._. test taker

merely has to determine which of the alternativeresponse choices results in a meaningful and gram-matically correct sentence. The procedure does showhow well a student understands the syntactic andsemantic constraints of the language, however, andcan be used as a reliable instrument for placement,especially when rapid evaluation and ease of scoringare important.

ELI-Pitt Reading Assessment Test 1

Students who may not perform well enough on a

proficiency test to produce a reliable score exhibita considerable range of skills in both perceptualand cognitive reading abilities. Indeed, they mayspan a broad range of abilities in other languageskills as well. Many students are orally veryfluent, but cannot read or write at all. On theother hand, there are students who understand thewritten word very well, but who cannot speak anintelligible word. It is extremely important tobegin at the appropriate place with these students,to build on what they know and not to frustrate themby trying to teach what they already know, or allowthem to flounder in material that is beyond theirreach.

1

Most of the information in this section origi-nally appeared in an article in the TESOL News-letter, June 1982.


34

Goodman (1970) notes the difference between"recoding," or transferring language from one mediumto another, and "decoding," or extracting themeaning of the language. For example, reading aloudis recoding from the visual to the auditory medium,and can be done without decoding. People can do itin many foreign languages without a shred ofcomprehension; it is also quite common in a person'snative language when confronted with material out-side his or her field, such as when trying to read acontra,:t or any document in "governmentese." Here

is an example from the manual describing the wordprocessing program with which the manuscript forthis monograph was composed; you may be able tounderstand all the individual words, but anyone whohas not had a good bit of experience with such docu-mentation is defied to explain it to a novice:

The partial loading procedure used by Catalysthas an interesting consequence. Space must bereserved for the largest interpreter. When asmaller interpreter is loaded, it may not beable to effectively make use of some of thespace reserved for the larger interpreter.Most interpreters can use at least a portionof the space for file buffers. Catalyst willalso use this space for the drivers it loadsbefore using any other space. (Quark, 1983,

pp. 1-3)

It is important for the reading teacher to beaware of the student's code-cracking perceptualskills as well as comprehension skills. Four levels

of ability are identifiable in the process oflearning the reading code:

1. The students know nothing about the romanalphabet or the names or the sounds of the letters.Such students are always native speakers of lan-guages that use different writing systems.

2. The students, when asked to spell aloud,say the letter names in their native language, orsome other language that uses the Roman alphabet


that they may have studied, but they don't know thecode (sound-symbol relationships) for English.

3. The students have some knowledge of thesound-symbol relationships, especially the regularconsonant ones, but may have considerable troublewith the vowel relationships, which are rich andbothersome in English. (For example, ow has twopossible pronunciations, as in slow and cow, with noclue as to which is which.)

4. The student knows most of the sound-symbolrelationships and recodes with ease, but with the"accent" common to native speakers of his or herlanguage.

Three levels of comprehension are discerniblefor very beginning readers:

1. When the students have no knowledge of thecode, it stands to reason that they will not compre-hend anything they read. However, some students whocan recode with some facility cannot comprehend themeaning of the written word. These students comefrom all language backgrounds, even those with Romanalphabets.

2. Students at the second level of comprehen-sion can understand and answer questions that comedirectly from the text and have the same syntacticstructure. These students usually have a limitedvocabulary and knowledge of structure.

3. Students at the third level of comprehen-sion can not only answer direct questions about thetext, but can also draw inferences from t.he materialin a simple text. Despite a limited vocabulary,they possess the basic reading :.;:ills required by

most currently available "beginning" ESL texts.

A short, simple test (about 5 minutes' admin-istration time) can be used to sort out the differ-ent levels of abilities among beginning readers(Menasche, 1982). The procedures for giving the


36

test are part of the assessment, since they provide

additional information. The test may be adminis-tered individually during regular proficiencytesting or during the first reading class by the

teacher. The latter procedure is preferable, sincethe reading teacher can gain a sense of the stu-dents' ability from the outset.

Materials

The teacher has an answer sheet for each stu-

dent such as the following:

ELI Reading Test

Student

Comments

Paragraph I. Decoding to Sound

(unintelligible) 1 2 3 4 5 (very good)

Comments

Paragraph II. Comprehension

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Comments

The actual test is on another sheet, as follows:

ASSESSING READING SKILLS 3'7 31

Paragraph 1. Read the following passage aloud.

Peter wanted to buy a book for his physicscourse, so he called the Lazy Fox Book Centerto find out if they had it in stock. The per-son who answered the phone very quickly gavehim the necessary information. Peter's friendoffered to go to the store to get it for him,because he was going there anyway to buy a bookfor his English course.

Paragraph 2. ,dead the following silently andthen answer the questions.

It was a hot day and Jeanie was feelingthirsty. On the way home she stopped at thecafeteria to have something to drink. To hersurprise, she was told that there was only cof-fee available, so she decided to go home imme-diately, because she wanted a cold drink.

Questions. Read along as the examiner readsthese questions. Then answerorally.

1. Why was Jeanie thirsty?2. Why did she stop at the cafeteria?3. Did she drink coffee at the cafeteria?4. How long did Jeanie stay in the cafeteria?5. Did the cafeteria have many kinds of drinks

for its customers?6. What did Jeanie want to drink?

PROCEDURES

The students are first assured that the test issimply to help the evaluators know how well theyread, that it will not affect grades in any way, andthat they should do the best they can. (Since thetest is given during the first week, it is one ofseveral and does not usually cause much anxiety )


38

Then the first student la called to the teacher andasked to spell his or her name as the teaches writesit on the answer sheet. The student is encouragedto look on as the teacher writes, in order tocorrect any mistakes. In this way the teacherlearns whether the student knows the names of theletters in English and is naming them correctly.Many students at this stage try to take the paperand pencil from the teacher and fill in the namethemselves. If the teacher does not insist they tryto spell aloud, the initial sound-symbol informationwill be lost. If the student cannot do this step atall even with translation of directions into thenative language, it is safe to conclude that thestudent is at the basic beginning level and the testneed go no further.

TO test for the second level, the students readParagraph 1 aloud and are rated on intelligibility.A judgment is made about the students' knowledge ofthe sound-symbol relationships with this part of thetest. Students who read with an accent that is nor-mal for people from their language background, butperfectly comprehensible to nonteachers of ESL, geta 5. If the teacher cannot understand them, theyget a 1. (It is important to make the judgment interms of nonprofessional listeners since comprehen-sion would be harder for them. Thus the standard isstricter than if teachers were judging on th? 1..gt4sof their own comprehension of the students.)

In addition to the sound-symbol information,the teacher can attend to students' phrasing andintonation to determine whether they have any ideaof the structural elements in the passage. Studentswho pause appropriately at the end of sentences orphrases probably understand some of what they arereading. On the other hand, those who read in amonotone probably dc not have much idea of thegrammar.

Comprehension questions are not asked aboutthis passage, since it is perfectly possible to readaloud without understanding the content. (Considertnat you may read a beloved children's story aloudfor the tenth time while planning the next week'sclass in your mind. You would probably not be able

ASSESSING READING SKILLS3J

33

to answer a comprehension question on the spur ofthe moment.)

To test for the third level of comprehension,students read the second paragraph silently.Sometimes the teacher has to pantomime with a handover the mouth while moving the eyes over the pageto get the students to understand how they are toread it. While they are reading, the teacher shouldnote how long they take, whether they subvocalize,and how often they reread parts of the passage. As

a rule, the longer it take.; to read the passage, thepoorer will be the comprehension.

There is some controversy over the role thephonetic representation plays in reading comprehen-sion. While reading teachers generally hold thatsubvocalizing slows down the reading, some contendthat it serves a useful function in the early stagesof learning to read by allowing the student to makethe connection between spoken and written language.The teacher can also observe whether the studentsneed to

2keep their place by marking it with a

finger.

The teacher then reads the questions as thestudent reads along. The student should understandthe question if possible, since it is not a verygood measure of reading comprehension if the studentmisses because he or she did not understand thequestion. Poor readers will not get any of theanswers right, while beginners will probably answerthe first two with verbatim answers from the pas-sage. Notice that the last four questions requiresome inference and synthesis of the material in thepassage. Good readers at this level answer all thequestions quickly and with one- or two-word answers.The latter group of students is placed with con-fidence in regular beginning classes; the formerrequire more attention than is available in mostbasic courses and texts. Techniques and exercises

2While good readers use their fingers to keep

up their pace, poor readers hold their place in thisfashion.


40

to deal with these students' problems are discussed

in Chapter 4.

ORAL READING

Reading aloud is a principal technique ofassessment for some psychologists who investigatereading strategies. A method devised by Goodman and

his colleagues (Allen & Watr 1976; Buck, 1973;

Goodman, 1970, 1973; Goodka x Burke, 1973), which

has been used primarily to assess reading differ-

ences among native-speaking learners, is based on an

analysis of the kinds of errors that readers make inreading aloud and of the readers' attempts to

correct their errors. Since proponents of miscueanalysis, as the method is known, view reading as aprocess of sampling and predicting from the printed

page, they contend that mistakes made in oral read-

ing are indicators of the strategies an individualuses when reading for meaning. For each miscue made

by a subject, the investigators attempt to identifythe factors that may have contributed to itsoccurrence and to determine to what extent theincorrectly produced item conforms to the graphic,

syntactic, and semantic constraints of the text.Since this approach is based on the assumption thatskilled reading is largely a top-down process, usingas little graphic input as possible and supplying

semantic concepts and a sense of syntactic structureto predict meaning (Goodman, 1973), it is assumedthat errors will occur as a natural part of thereading process. If an error in the oral readingresults in an utterance being perceived as syntac-tically or semantically unacceptable, the reader mayattempt to correct it. An analysis of a reader's

strategies, using a specially designed taxonomy oferrors, takes into account the number and kind .f

errors made, the number and kind of errors that are

subsequently corrected, and the success of the

attempts at correction. Then these data are related

to overall reading comprehension as measured through

the reader's retelling of the content of the text.


When assessing non-English speakers' readingability through reading aloud, the ability to recodewithout comprehension should be 1.-+rne in mind.Although miscue analysis is svpposedly applicable to

foreign-language learning situations as well as tothe first-language reading for which it was origi-nally designed, a number of problems are apparent inthis regard. While oral reading may represent atransformation of printed langwre to a familiaroral form for children learning .o read their nativelanguage, speaking skills are often as under-developed as reading skills for students of aforeign language. Not surprisingly, then, attemptsto evaluate reading ability in a foreign languageusing the miscue-analysis approach (e.g., Cziko,1980, looking at English-speaking students ofFrench; and Folman, 1977, dealing with Israeli stu-dents of English) have not found any significantdifferences in subjects' ability to us, ontactic andsemantic constraints, regardless of taeir l'vel ofproficiency in the language, due to their preoccupa-tion with the graphic input.

There is one instance, however, when readingaloud can reveal a great deal about the students'reading ability. Using a technique called "read analook up" (West, 1960), the student looks at a sen-tence or part of a passage, says it silently, looksup from the page and says the sentence aloud.Unless the student underatands the grammaticalstructure and the message of the sentence, it isimpossible to remember the string long enough torepeat it back. We frequently use the technique atbeginning and intermediate levels to check compre-hension and strengthen short-term memory.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE CLASSROOM

Once the teacher has determined students'reading abilities to be minimal, he or she mustselect classroom procedures for teaching the basicreading skills--how to crack the code of English,


42

learn the sound-symbol correspondenres, and thenlearn the traditional skills of decoding grammar,developing word-study skills, guessing meaning fromcontext, and using a dictionary. For students who

start at zero proficiency in reading English, theearly skills must be learned quickly so that thesestudents can keep up with students of higher profi-ciency and so that they do not become discouraged.Some steps toward achieving these goals are outlinedhere, along with examples of exercises that can be

used and adapted for classroom use.

CRACKING THE CODE

It is very beneficial for readers, especiallyat beginning levels of study, to be able to relatethe written and spoken forms of the language. This

is particularly true for native speakers, who inessence are faced with the challenge of associating

what is written on the page with their alreadywell-established knowledge of the spoken language;it also applies to foreign-language learners, whoseoral skills are more highly developed than theirreading ability, or indeed to any student who wishesto gain proficiency in the use of both spoken and

written language. Since there is a close relation-

ship between the way words are pronounced and theway they are spelled when dealing with an alpha-betically represented language such as English,it would be highly inefficient to neglect the cor-respondences that exist between sounds and graphic

symbols. However, in light of the abundance ofirregularities in the orthographic system of Eng-lish, it is especially essential that concentratedtraining and practice in both r gular sound-symbolcorrespondences and except ,na be provided as an

integral component of the curriculum. This

procedure will enable students to guess with someaccuracy the pronunciation of new words theyencounter as well as teaching them to guess the

spelling of new words they hear.

ASSESSING READING SKILLS43

37

RECOGNITION OF CAPITAL LETTERS

Learning Sound-Symbol CorrespondencesThrough the Use of Iconic Devices

In order to begin to read in English, a stu-dent's understanding of the relationship of soundto symbol must be automatic. It seems easier ifthere is some device that can be used in case thestudent forgets. The most common device is a pic-ture or word associated with a specific sound, aswith B is for baby accompanied by a picture of ababy, very similar to beginning reading books fornative-speaking children. Care must be taken tochoose pictures that are simple, clear, consistentwith the culture of the students, and not insultingto adults. Line drawings are often the best if theteacher can create them, or has a source. (Some

children's books have good clear drawings, as dosome illustrated beginner's dictionaries.)

The picture must portray the vocabulary itemunambiguously. For example, rather than illus-trating L is for letter with an addressed, stampedenvelope, using a drawing of a piece of paper withhandwriting on it, along with an envelope, is muchmore effective. Also, words that play an importantrole culturally are sometimes difficult to portray.Rice is an example. Sensitivity to cultural mattersis especially difficult when presenting materialsfor a heterogeneous group. Avoid the obvious, suchas using dogs and pigs when the aterials will beused by Moslem students; and have all materialschecked for cultural content with native speakers ofthe languages, if possible. One further caution

regarding the use of pictures: Cartoons should beavoided since some cultures regard them as childishand therefore insulting in materials for adults.

The following list of words has been tested andrefined over the past several years. They seem tobe both inoffensive and clearly ilustratable (Bruder& Williams, 1982). Note that illustrations for thename and base sounds of the vowels are given, andfor the consonants with more than one sound, as

38 NSSESSING READING SKILLS

44

well as some common digraphs. Other vowel sounds arenot introduced in the initial presentation to avoid

confusion. The student who has mastered the listshown in Figure 1 (page 40) knows most sound-symbolrelationships for English.

Note that the list contains all the lettersand significant sounds (phonemes) of English except/ 3/ as in ball, /0.0/ as in house, / DI/ as in boy,

/u/ as in moon, /0/ as in book, /iT/ as in bird.The key words have proved to be sufficient for thestudents to learn the names of the letters and the

sounds in a fairly straightforward manner. The

remaining six are all spelled with the same lettersas are found in the key word list, and may be

learned later.The following steps may be used to teach stu-

dents to "crack the code." First it is useful tohave an explanation in the native language wherepossible. If not, the letter A and the two keywords apple and ape may be used, since most studentscan hear the difference in those vowel sounds, andthus understand the concepts more readily. It is

important to remember that the students will havedifficulty hearing the differences in borne of the

vowel pairs, as well as among the unfamiliar conso-nants. If they can hear the difference in one pair

they tend to believe that there is a difference inthe others, which is good because they will even-tually be able to discern the difference even if

they cannot do so at first.

Learning the Names of the Letters in Sequence

The students will have to spell aloud on a

number of occasions, giving their names and othertypes of information; and they will eventually have

to learn to use a dictionary. Learning the letter

names also gives some clues to their sounds. Eachvowel name is also one of the sounds the vowelrepresents, for example.following lettere is atB, C, D, G, J, K, P, Q,following letters is at

The sound of each of the

the beginning of its name:T, V, Z. The sound of thethe end of the name: F, L,


4 5

Letter Sound Word

A / e / apeA / w / appleB / b / babyC / k / catC / s / cityD / d / doorE / i / sheepE / E / eggF / f / fishG / g / boatG / j / _giraffeH / h / hatI / ai / riceI / I / sixJ / 5 / letK / k / kingL / 1 / letterM / m / manN / n / noseo / 0 / cokeo / a / stopP / P / pencilQ / kw / queenR / r / ringS / s / sunT / t / telephoneU / Yu / cubeU / 9 / bus

/ v / vaseW / w / womanX / ks / exitY / Y / yearZ / i / zeroCH / 6 / chairTH / 0 / thumbTH / / motherSH / 6 / shoe

Figure 1. Key word list.


46

M, N, R, S, X. Only three letters do not containtheir sounds in their names: H, W, and Y (Bruder &

Williams, 1982).Using flashcards, the teacher may say the name

of each letter and have the students repeat. The

teacher should say the letters in groups for repeti-tion, first two, then three, and build up to four or

five as the students' memories increase. The

teacher may hold up a card and ask the students tocall out the letter that follows in the alphabet.The teacher may hold up two cards and have the stu-dents call out the letter or letters that fall inthe middle. The class may have a race around theroom, starting with one student and continuing untilall students have given a letter in oLder. The

teacher can time the exercise ,Ad note how the timedecreases from day to day.

Teachers working with students of this level ofproficiency will come up with many tricks to keepthe students learning. However, such memory work isinherently boring, and students progress much morerapidly if production of the letters is introducedearly, around the second hour of instruction.

Production of the Capital Letters

Literate adults seem to rely on the writtenword for remembering things (visual memory). As a

result, ESL students are frustrated when they cannotwrite things down. Learning to produce the lettersright away relieves some of this frustration, andallows for a wider variety Jf exercise types. Thussome of the boredom that may accompany the cracking

of the code is alleviated. In addition, producing

the letters in writing reinforces the auditory andvisual presentation. The students produce only thecapital letters because those are the main printedforms of the letters that will be needed--forfilling out forms, and so on. Later on they willproduce handwritten (cursive) capital and smallletters, because that style of writing is fasterthan printing.


47

There are many exercise books and worksheetsmeant for children learning to write that areappropriate here (as long as they are not accompan-ied by childish illustrations, etc.). The studentsneed enough practice to be able to produce the let-ters rather automatically, and they should say thename of the letter as they trace or produce it.

In order not to overload the students' visualmemories, the alphabet should be divided into groupsof four or five letters, and the production can bereinforced by other activities such as dictation("Copy the letters in the order the teacher saysthem"); and sound to symbol ("Write the first letterof the word your teacher says").

Recognition of the Small Letters

The use of the terms capital/small or uppercase/lower case seems to depend on the writingmethod a student learned as a child. The materialsshould be consistent in using one or the other;although since most of the students will recognizethe term small, using that set will require learningonly one new term.

The students are required to notice the dif-ference between capital and small letters, to beable to associate the small and capital of the sameletter, and to distinguish among similar small let-ters. The students should see the whole alphabet incapital and small letters (A a, B b, C c, D d,etc.). The teacher should help the students seesimilarities as well as the differences in theshapes of the letters. For example, show them howthe bulge of the B goes the way from the ver-tical line for both the capital and the smallletter, but the bulge of the D is in opposite direc-tions for the capital and small versions.

The following exercises can be used to teachcapital and small letters.

1. To distinguish between capital and smallletters, students may be given a list sich as thefollowing and asked to circle the small letters:


48

1. D c0 ED F

2. r W v 1 L

3. N m n u U etc.

(Bruder & Williams, 1982, p. 15)

Then students may be given a text of five or sixlines, and asked to circle the capital letters.

Depending on the proficiency of the students, theymight be led to the generalization that sentencesbegin with capital letters in English. They can

look "sentence" up in their bilingual glossaries.

2. To learn to associate capital and smallversions of the same letter, students may be askedto connect the capital and small letters in adisplay such as the following:


Next, ask them to circle the small letters that arethe same as the capital:

q 0 j1. P

2. T t f r f t r

3. U v u w n u r etc.


ASSESSING READING SKILLS 49 43

In the following exercise, have the students make acheck mark ) if the letters are the same:

1. A e

2. A a 1.7

3. B b

4. D b etc.


Then have them write the capital letter and say itat the same time, with a list such as the following:

1. a A

2. e

3. i

4. d

5. b

Finally, ask the students to identify the smallletter in the following display:

1. N: m nO r p c v

2. R: z s a r v n

3. B: b p s e d f

4. Y: a 1 v f y j etc.

(Henderson, 1983, p. 16)

3. To help students distinguish among similarsmall letters, first have them circle the small let-ters in each line that are the same as the ones onthe left:


1. b d p Ob d

2. d b p d g

3. f t f r f

d b

1 t etc.


Then have them connect the letters that are the sameand fall in a row in displays such as the following:

a o a

o a a

a a o

n m m

n n m

n m n

All the exercises can be adapted to the variousaspects of cracking the code, handwriting capitalsand small letters, distinguishing words, and so

forth. Focus on problem areas for each group ofstudents in constructing the exercises; students mayresent having to do many exercises that are extreme-ly easy.

Production of Small, Handwritten Letters

Practitioners disagree on what the next stepshould be after students learn to recognize printedcapital and small letters and to produce the capital

letters. One option is to go on to beginning

reading exercises, have students complete theirmastery of sound-symbol correspondences, and thenprogress to more complex reading. Some students do

not make this transition easily; they need more timeto digest the basics. For these students, all thematerial may be recycled through the task of pro-

ducing the small, handwritten letters. It is up tothe teacher of the individual student or class todecide the most appropriate sequence. Incidentally,


the term handwritten is easier to grasp than theterm cursive.

First, the students learn to produce the let-ters in isolation, tracing and then producing themfreehand. Key words (if they have been presented)may accompany each letter to remind the students ofthe sound, but the students are not asked to producethe key words in writing until the letters have beenpresented individually. Once they have practicedthe letters in isolation they are instructed to con-nect them in sequences found in English words.

Once the students have mastered the vowels, theconsonants may be presented in alphabetical order,using simple words that the students can pronounceand learn, in some cases, by looking up the meaningsin their glossaries. Dictation of letter sequencesis a useful exercise at this stage. It should beemphasized that the students are to say the names ofthe letters and the words as they are produced. Thefollowing exercises are recommended.

T t Identify and print the letter:

IMMIIMED

2

1

ltirtdflx(etc.)

(Henderson, 1983, p. 2)

Identify the letter combinations:

at of to al of to of

ga go qa ad bo ga go ag ga

st sl st is at et sf zt st

(etc.) (Henderson, 1983, p. 3)


52

Print the letter combinations:

cob(etc.) (Henderson, 1983, p. 3)

Leaving Spaces Between Words

After the practice with the small letters,

before going to the handwritten capitals, introduce

the idea of putting words together into phrases with

spaces between the words. This is a crucial concept

for students with non-Roman-alphabet backgrounds.

The students may be asked to copy printed phrases by

hand, and dictations are again useful here. Stu-

dents may also be given boxes in which to copy the

words in order to reinforce the idea, as follows:

The woman is going to work.

The v.10,010.Y1 9 goY1 [ it) work.

She has a red and blue blouse.

ASSESSING READING SKILLS

(Hershelman, 1979, p. 12)

5347

Production of Handwritten Capital Let...ers

The students need to know when capital lettersare used, which ones connect with the following let-ters (as a rule), and how to differentiate betweenr eital and small handwritten letters. First givesimple rules for capitalization and then introducethe days of the week, months of the year, and so on,as appropriate in the e ercises.

Bruder and Williams (1982) have divided thecapitals into three groups: easy, those whosehandwritten small letters are virtually the same asthe ai d Cid ?tint I , ,4/ , 2044 , 76/ 3. /.."); hard,whose capital and small letters are similar in soaerespects k/k ora, 71"ilo Vif,v) or thehandwritten letters are similar to the printed ones(B /e, D/49-, E/6., mg.); and tough, whose capi-tal and small letters do not resemble each other atall (F/1/1i, G/4/t, 11/41,14, Q/A/lit,T / /t). Henderson (1983) presents the lettersgrouped by similarity of form (A, 0, Q, D, forexample). The letters should be organized to allowthe students to concentrate on those that are themost difficult for them. At this stage the studentsshould be copying from printed models and writingsimple sentences from dictation using the words andsounds they have already learned; spacing and endpunctuation should be emphasized.

Learning Alphabetization

Learning to alphabetize words is a good way toreinforce the skills learned thus far and a goodir. -Auction to using the dictionary in English.Alphabt ization is straightforward in English, andthe rules are easy to learn; all the students needis practice in the increasing complexities as thewords to be alphabetized are increasingly similar atthe beginnings. Students whose languages are notalphabetic will need to pay special attention to therules; students whose languages are alphabetic, butnot tie Homan alphabet, will need to understand how


54

the organization of the dictionary in English isdifferent from their own.

An example exercise by Henderson (1983) can beadapted to the vocabulary that the students havelearned. The complexity increases as the activityprogresses.

Have the etude print the words in alphabeti-cal order:

1.

2.

9.

11.

26.

givn/bottle/picture botile0?).1 4111k11

always/listen/another

speak/station/serve

there/table/their

weather/welcome/well

(etc.) (p. 19)

In conclusion, for students to learn to crackthe code of English, teachers must examine thesys+-ems of the students' native languages. Theymust consider how to nresent the material, as wellas the students' rel Ave proficiency in English.For examIlt, SpaniF,1 speakers will need to yearn the.Josic sound - symbol correspondences with special

attention to the vowels, but they need not spendmuch time with handwriting or aiohabetization.Students who use similar alphabets, such as theSlavic languages, need to concentrate on the sound-symbol correspondences of similar letters that havevery different sounds; then they need to learn newletters and their correspondences. If the studentsuse an alphabet, but not the Roman one, they willprobably need tJ go through the cs.aplete series ofsteps outlined earlier if they are at the beginningreading level as defined here. Academicallyoriented students from languages that do not use theRoman alphabet are already knowledgeable aboutEnglish; it is up to the teacher to decide where onthe continuum a student's abilities 1

ASSESSING READING SKILLSb

495

EYE MOVEMENT TRAINING

A major problam of many students is lack ofspeed in moving their eyes over the page. Speed-reading techniques should not be taught at thislevel of proficiency; only fluent readers can bene-fit from such training. Students can, however, betrainn.1 D move their eyes faster and to pick outcertain features. The exercises should be timed, atfirst liberally, then faster and faster to create a

sense of competition (friendly) and a gamelikeatmosphere.

A reader develops an effective pattern of sac-cades, or eye movements, by learning to pick up asmuch graphic information as possible from each fixa-tion, thereby reducing the number of fixationsneeded to read a line of print. This entails beingable to perceive words and phrases as visual unitsrather than having to pay attention to individualletters. At beginning levels, rapid discriminationexercises with words of increasing length, such asthe following, will help students become accustomedfrom the outset to focusing on words and commonletter sequences.

Circle the words that are the same as the given word.

me em ma ne we

id

ew om

bi id di ld id ib pi

nc

ig jd di id ib

dim bim dim din mid dim dem din aim biddim dim

dits dine bime dime lime bine time dime tinedime diem

.find mine nind dime line bine time dime timedime diem

send send send sand sent cend sind send semdsend senf


bends bends dends bendz bandz bends bends

henas denbs

timed tined timed dimed timea timed timed

fined timed

',Henderson, 1983, p. 7)

A similar type of exercise requires that stu-dents find words as they are read at increasingly

rapid rates. In order to complete the activity suc-cessfully, the reader must be able to recognize at aglance whether a given word is the one he or she is

looking for. The following example is used in

Barnard's (1971) advanced vocabulary workbooks:

Number the following words in the order in which youhear them (the teacher reads them out in any order):

paper study /desk

class room .3 book pencil

J2 chair good table

The choice of words for any such activitydepends on the proficiency level of the students.It is preferable to use words that the students know

so that they can become accustomed to thinking of

the words as meaningful units. In the Barnard work-

books, the words are taken from a reading passage

that has been presented earlier in the lesson.Another useful activity involves determining as

quickly as possible whether the members of a pair

are the same or different:

Circle S if the following phrases are the same;circle D if they are different

take a look

go to town

take a book S D

go to town S D

To make these activities more meaningful, stu-dents can be asked to find words that are synonymous


57

with given wor(s. This will take longer, of course,since it will not be possible to rely on a visualmatch.

Underline the word that has the same meaning asthe given word:

1. shut watch close sleep need2. speak point talk hope see3. purchase step buy listen dream

(Norris, 1972, p. 195)

VOCABULARY LEARNING

In a foreign language class, the teacherusually has the luxury of being able to limit theamount of vocabulary introduced to the students andthe possibility of using the students' nativelanguage for the presentation. On the other hand,the foreign language student may not see the need oflearning new words when the native language onesseem to suit perfectly. As a result, the teachermay have a motivation problem. In the ESL class-room, the teacher is confronted with students whose

vocabulary needs are enormous and immediate, bothfor academic study and for normal living arrange-ments; but the teacher lacks the ease of nativelanguage use in explaining the words and themeanings.

There are probably no new gimmicks for teachingvocabulary at the beginning level; many teachershave been using the same techniques for years. How-ever, some of the general principles might usefullybe discussed here. Since appropriate readers ormaterials may be difficult to find for a targetgroup, the best approach is to cull reading textsfor exercise types that can be adapted to an in.-vidual class.

At the basic level, the vocabulary the studentsneed is mostly concrete, and thus picturable.

Pictures and illustrations, if they are clear, are


58

very helpful, but they should leave no room fordoubt. (One language class spent several hourslearning color words illustrated by sticks of dif-ferent lengths. At the end of the lesson, one manexpressed amazement at how the students had suc-ceeded in learning the words-- he though` the wordsreferred to the lengths of the sticks.)

Vocabulary at this level is best learned in thecontext of a commonplace situation--the supermarket,an apartment, a kitchen--but care should be takennot to overload the students with extraneous vocab-ulary; for example, whisk is probably a useless itemfor beginning students. One way to handle thissituation is to collect a series of pictures, pre-sent the basic series in the first week or two andthen recycle them, adding vocabulary that has comeup in readings or elsewhere and letting students askfor specific words to fit the contexts they havecome to need since the last presentation.

The vocabulary of classroom management shouldbe carefully thought out, since it constitutes alarge portion of early vocabulary input. Theteacher can even write down the routine commandssuch as Open your books to page and Hand in thehomework so that the students can look up the wordsin bilingual glossaries. The teacher should be verycareful to monitor the syntax and lexical complexityof his or her speech, so that the students hear thesame phrases repeatedly; this practice will helpwith listening comprehension and make life mucheasier for students while they gain confidencethrough knowing what to expect and being able to dothe right thing. For example, the teacher mightwant to avoid the idiomatic hand in and substitutegive me for the first few weeks.

Some students want word lists, but most teach-ers are reluctant to give out lists that presentwords in alphabetical order ort of context and oftenwithout designation of part of speech. They fear,rightly, that students will not be able to use thewords correctly or even be able to tell which mean-ing of the word to refer to when they see the wordin a text. For the students who insist, however,basic word lists make them feel better; for some


53

students, memorizing lists is a common way of learn-ing. As long as learning the list does not inter-fere with the accomplishment of the other learningtasks, it seems harmless enough.

A very good technique for explaining vocabu-lary, especially in a heterogeneous classroom, is toask if any of the other students knows the meaningof a given word. Students with their limited vocab-ulary and grammar are often better able than theteacher to explain things simply and in terms other

students will comprehend. One class was doing areading in which someone had fainted, and the wordunconscious came up. The teacher, obviously unableto think of a good clear explanation, called on oneof the students, who promptly saio, "It's when youreyes are closed and you're not asleep and not dead."

It is very common at beginning levels to teachvocabulary items in pairs of opposites: good/bad,tall/short, fat/thin, and so on. This is not recom-mended, since the learner may remember the words,but not which attribute is associated with whichword, and get them mixed up. Only after the wordshave been learned separately should they be broughttogether as an aid to the memory.

Following are four general types of exercisesfor beginning-level vocabulary.

Copying

Many vocabulary exercises at the beginninglevel involve copying of some kind. While this maynot seem like a very interesting task, it is, infact, very useful for reinforcing beginning readingskills. Besides, the students' vocabulary is solimited that getting them to produce vocabulary frommemory is virtually impossible.

In one exercise, the student practices puttingthe same word into several sentence contexts:

perfect A thing is perfect when it is complete andhas no fault; when it is the best of itsown kind.


Examples: It is very difficult to draw a pcircle. Your work is good, but no one cancall it . They found aplace for their holiday.

(Barnard, 1971, Vol. 1, p. 3)

In the next exercise, after reading a passage,the student writes the correct words in the blank:

Avenue good bad Street

This is 88th between Second Avenueand Third . It isn't a very

block. It isn't a very block.

(Bodman & Lanzano, 1975, p. 18)

Synonyms/Antonyms

In this exercise, the student is asked toselect from the list the word that has the samemeaning as the phrases given.

Final baby guy

1. the last2. a man or boy3. a very small child

Guessing from Context

(Bodman & Lanzano, 1975, p. 37)

Frtdm the outset, exercises should encourage

students to guess meanings from the information theyhave, and they need to be taught how to use thatinformation. The teacher might construct simple

sente'ces using the grammar and vocabulary familiarto the students to introduce new words. For

example:


The man has an . He thinks it will rain.

In this instance, the students may be led to saythat a noun is needed and that it will begin with avowel. Further, the item is something that is usedwhen it rains. If the students think they know whatthe word is in their native language, they can lookin their glossaries and find the English word. Thiskind of exercise draws on their past experiences andteaches them the skills they will need to becomebetter readers.

Comprehension Questions

Two types of comprehension questions can beused at the basic levels of reading ability. Themost common are the ones typically found afterreading passages and illustrated on page 3 in theMenasche (1982) test of reading comprehension. Evenat the beginning levels, questions should requirethe students to make inferences. A second type,usually called "True or False," gives sentences thatstudents can label correctly if they know themeanings of the words. A pair of sentences such asStamps like to eat pizza and Politicians like to eatpizza requires only that the students know thatpoliticians are human and stamps are not in order tocomplete the exercise correctly. Such sentences areeasy to construct using known vocabulary and grammaras a review, or with new vocabulary for presentationpurposes.

Basically the same types of vocabulary exer-cises that are available in most beginning readingtexts may be adapted for beginning readers. Caremust be taken that the syntax and the core vocabu-lary in the sentences to be read is not beyond thebeginners.


62

GRAMMAR

Learning to read requires more than crackingthe code and learning words. The students mustrecognize the relationships among the words--thegrammar. At the very basic levels, teachers shouldhave students learn to read the same structures theyare learning to produce orally; this minimizes con-fusion, and the visual reinforcement speeds orallearning. The grammatical patterns should also belimited at first, so that the students can learn asmuch vocabulary as possible in the first few weeks.(It is ironic that in the late 1960s when audiolin-gual methodologies held sway, teachers limited thevocabulary and pushed the grammar, much to thedismay of students, who wanted "words, words,words." It turns out they were right; words withoutgrammar can get you quite far, but grammar withoutwords is useless in the real world.)

Academically oriented students usually know themetalanguage for talking about grammar: noun, verb,adjective, present tense, and so on. If they do,then the labels can conveniently be used to analyzethe reading passages. Students should be asked toidentify sentences in context that exhibit certaingrammatical features. They can also be givensentence-matching exercises: The teacher writes asentence on the board and the class is given alimited time to find a sentence with the samestructure in the reading. Students can be asked tofind similar structures in the local or studentnewspaper. It is important to stress that thestudents should work mainly on recognition ofgrammar patterns in reading (and copying exercises,if used); production of even simple sentences inwriting is extremely difficult at the beginninglevels.

An interesting exercise that was developed inwork with native speakers of English ].earning towrite can also be used with foreign students. The

students construct an oral narrative, which iswritten on the blackboard by the tcacner. Since thestudents have limited grammatical structures, they


will not make the story too complex; the teacher canremedy any major problems, and then the narrativemay be used for reading material for the class. It

may be amended on a regular basis and makes a goodrecord of class achievement over the course of aterm.

WORD STUDY

Just as a knowledge of the grammar makes read-ing easier, a knowledge of the way words are formedusing prefixes and suffixes and so on helps studentsguess more intelligently when faced with unknownvocabulary. Many current beginning reading bookscontain exercises in word study, and once the stu-dents reach the level of proficiency of beginningreading, they can progress without special exer-cises. It is important to ensure that the exerciseconcentrates on recognition rather than productionof the word forms. Very beginning students shouldbe taught the inflections for plurals, past tense,

progressives, and common prefixes that occur in thereadings, such as un-. Word study beyond the veryelementary is better left until the students' profi-ciency permits easier comprehension.

MEANING FROM CONTEXT

Due to the large amount of redundancy that isalmost always present in extended discourse, it isusually possible to understand a reading passageeven though some of the words are unfamiliar.Skilled readers use cues of various kinds to antici-pate what is likely to be encountered on the pageand are thus able to read quickly, using as littlegraphic input as possible to confirm their expec-tations. When faced with an unfamiliar word,readers use syntactic cues to determine the part ofspeech and grammatical function of the word, and can


64

usually guess at its meaning on the basis of seman-tic information presented in the rest of the sen-

tence or in other parts of the passage. Proficientreaders very seldom take the time to look up newwords in the dictionary, since the meaning isusually evident from the context in which they are

found.Beginning readers, on the other hand, may

struggle so much with individual words or even morebasic units of language that they are not able toprocess the overall meaning of a sentence; by thetime they reach the end of the sentence, they mayhave forgotten information from the beginning andthus have difficulty interpreting the sentence as a

whole. In a consideration of ESL reading problems,Norris (1972) makes note of this difficulty,observing that students who can focus on only oneword at a time "will usually be unable to put thewords together and understand the sense of thesentence" (p. 190). It is equally unlikely thatsuch learners will be able to retain the meaning ofone sentence long enough to integrate it with themeaning of subsequent material in order to followthe development of the message intended to be con-veyed by the text as a whole. It is important,therefore, that from the beginning stages of read-ing, learners be trained to think about the globalmeaning of what they are reading and not get un-necessarily bogged down in word-by-word detail.

As Grellet (1981) proposes, it is advisable tohave students look first for the overall gist of atext and then to give attention to details, bothbecause in this way students will gain confidence intheir ability to understand what they are readingand because such an approach will help learnersdevelop an ability to infer meanings and anticipatewhat they are likely to encounter in the text.

One way of convincing students that they reallydo not have to understand every word in order toextract meaning from a passage is to eliminate someof the words. While this is similar to the clozetest procedure, the objective is quite different;the reader is not asked to supply the missing wordsbut to try to understand the text in spite of the


omissions. Once they see that this is possible,

students overcome much of their preoccupation withindividual words.

There are various ways in which context canprovide clues to the meaning of a word. It is use-ful to give learners practice in using contextthrough exercises of the following sorts.

Finding Synonyms, Definitions,or Equivalent Expressions

Writers often avoid repeating particular wordsby expressing the same meaning in another way.Students must become aware of the possibility ofusing such equivalents to grasp the meaning of a

given word, as is demonstrated in the followingexample:

The students lack time for sports. They don'thave time for anything but homework.

lack means . (not have)

At beginning levels, it may help to provideseveral options from which the students may choosethe one that is closest to the target word:

I want to buy a new car, but I can't afford itnow. I don't even have enough money to buy amotorcycle.

to afford means

a. to drive a carb. to have enough money to buy somethingc. to want somethingd. to save money

Finding Antonyms or Contrasts

Other words or expressions in a text often mean

60 ASUVING READING SKILLS

the opposite of the word in question, as shown inthe following example:

It is interesting to travel in your country,but it is more exciting to travel abroad.

Abroad means

a. travelb. in your countryc. excitingd. outsLde your country

Finding an Example or Explanation

7n many cases a text will explain a term orprovide examples that help make the meaning of aterm clear, as in the following sentence:

The store sells many kinds of small appliancessuch as toasters, coffee makers, and irons.

To better enable students to use this strategy,it is valuable to teach expressions such as such as,including, for Jxample, for instan'e, and so on.

Finding Cause-and-Effect Relationships

The meaning of a new word can sometimes beunderstood if the context indicates what caused itor what resulted from it:

The child was scalded when he spilled theboiling water on himself.

The speech was so boring that many people inthe audience fell asleep.


USING A GLOSSARY/DICTIONARY

The term glossary refers here to the English/foreign language dictionaries from which studentsare inseparable. They are basically lists ofsynonyms or elaborations of phrases, but are not, inthe traditional sense, dictionaries. A dictionary,on the other hand, is in one language, givesmultiple meanings of the words, synonyms, antonyms,historical information, and possibly, examples insentences.

In the past, advocating the use of bilingual

glossaries by beginning readers was consideredheresy. The argument went something like this: Thestudents get dependent on the glossaries and do notlearn to use dictionaries; and there are so manysynonyms, the student might get the wrong one andthen the teacher would be powerless to controlerrors. The counterargument is based on practical-ity as well as concern for the student. While glos-saries must be given up for dictionaries at somespecified point in the reading program--about theintermediate level where there are exercises and acarefully thought-out unit on the use of the dic-tionary. Beginning readers have scarcely learnedthe alphabet, and it seems ludicrous to force themto try to wade through a wordy definition in alanguage in which they hardly know any words. As tothe matter of choosing the wrong word, the teachercan help the students learn how to use the glossaryto good effect. At the beginning of the term all ofthe students should bring their glossaries each dayso that they can look up the basic key words. Therewill not be many problems with misinterpretation orambiguities in the core vocabulary; and if onestudent's definition of "king" includes "a constitu-tional monarch" while another's rules by divineright, it is a small mismatch that is not like-y tocause reading problems at this level.

After a certain amount of vocabulary and gram-mar has been presented, the teacher can do aglossary exercise. A series of sentences may bepresented with words missing, accompanied by a list

62 ASnSING READING SKILLS

of those worda plus two or three extras. The

teacher and students read through the sentences, ifnecessary, making sure there are no unfamiliarwords. Then the students look up the meanings intheir glossaries--in class--and fill in the blanks.(It turns out to be a lesson in getting meaning fromcontext as well as a glossary exercise.) The

teacher circulates to make sure everyone is on the

right track. Students who have difficulties may bereferred back to the glossary and helped to see whythey made the wrong choice. The teacher should haveon hand a glossary in his or her best known foreignlanguage so that he [or she] can check which mean-ings are likely to be included. To be sure, itemsthat appear in an English/French glossary e-e notguaranteed to be the same as those in an Arabic/English version, but it is one measure that shoL.Anot be overlooked.


63

6

CONCLUSION

The experience over the past few years of trying toteach nonreaders in English has been both trying andexciting. The frustration of failure with tried-and-true techniques gave way to elation upon findingsomething new that seemed to work. No doubt in thenext few years, both teachers and psychologists,working together, will have a better description ofthe reading process, and the techniques may befurther refined.

In order to fully comprehend what the studentsare faced with, any teacher who has not recentlylearned a foreign language should begin the study ofone whose writing system is very different fromEnglish. Even a few weeks' study will give theteacher insights that will be especially valuable tothe teaching of reading. It is a most challengingand humbling experience.

6470 CONCLUSION

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Additional Reading

Bruder, M.N. (1982, June). Assessing readingskills of beginning EF/SL students. TESOLNewsletter, pp. 13-14.

Coady, J. (1979). A psycholinguistic model of theESL reader. In R. MacKaj, B. Barkman, & R.R.Jordan (Eds.), Reading in a second language:Hypotheses, organization, and practice(pp. 5-12). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Croft, K. (Ed.). (1972). Readings on English as asecond language. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.

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Henderson, R.T. (1983). Basic perceptual andcognitive processes employed IT Arabic-speakingstudents in the development of reading skillsin English as a second language. Unpublisheddoctoral dissertation, University ofPittsburgh.

Henderson, R.T., & Vernick, J.A. (1979, March).Problems in learning English as a foreignwriting system. Paper presented at the meetingof Teachers of English to Speakers of OtherLanguages, San Francisco.

ADDITIONAL READING71

69

Lesgold, A.M., & Perfetti, C.A. (1981). Interac-

tive processes in reading. Hillsdale, NJ:Erlbaum.

Mackay, R., Barkman, B., & Jordan, R.R. (Eds.).(1979). Reading in a second language:Hypotheses, organization and practice. Rowley,

MA: Newbury House.

Oiler, J.W. (1972). Assessing competence in ESL:Reading. TESOL Quarterly, 6(4), 313-23.

Paulston, C.B., & Bruder, M.N. (1976). TeachingEnglish as a second language: Techniques andprocedures. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop.

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Perfetti, C., & Roth, S. (1981). Some of theinteractive processes in reading and their rolein reading skills. In A.M. Lesgold and C.A.Perfetti (Eds.), Interactive processes inreading (pp. 269-97). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Williams, D. (1981). Factors related to perfor-mance in reading English as a second language.Language Learning, 31, 31-50.

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About the Authors

Mary N. Bruder (Ph.D., University ofPittsburgh) has taught French and Englishas a second language since 1961 and hasworked with teachers in Yugoslavia, Egypt,Morocco, and Senegal. She is currently alecturer in linguistics at the Universityof Pittsburgh.

Robert T. Henderson (Ph.D., University ofPittsburgh) has taught linguistics andEnglish as a second language in thiscountry and in Latin America as well asworking as an editor and consultant inESL/EFL both here and abroad. He iscurrently director of the ELI-Pitt Programin Tokyo, Japan.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS 77 71

Beginning Reading in English as a Second Language.

Documents

Transcript of Beginning Reading in English as a Second Language.