Teaching and Researching Reading

Third Edition

William Grabe, Fredricka L. Stoller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317536420
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Now in its third edition, Teaching and Researching Reading charts the field of reading (first and second language) systematically and coherently for the benefit of language teaching practitioners, students, and researchers. This volume provides background on how reading works and how reading differs for second language learners. The volume includes reading-curriculum principles, evidence-based teaching ideas, and a multi-step iterative process for conducting meaningful action research on reading-related topics. The volume outlines 14 projects for teacher adaptation and use, as well as numerous new and substantially expanded resource materials that can be used for both action research and classroom instruction.

Part I

Understanding L2 Reading

Quote

Reading comprehension is widely agreed to be not one, but many things. [At a minimum, it entails] cognitive processes that operate on many different kinds of knowledge to achieve many different kinds of reading tasks. Emerging from the apparent complexity, however, is a central idea: comprehension occurs as a reader builds one or more mental representations of a text message. … Among these representations, an accurate model of the situation described by the text … is the product of successful deep comprehension.

Perfetti and Adlof (2012, p. 3)

Quote

In any domain that one can identify—whether it be medical diagnosis, flying an aircraft, or programming computers—it would be absurd to think that someone becomes proficient without participating extensively in the activity. … When it comes to teaching students to read in schools, however, little attention is paid to the amount that students read texts.

Hiebert and Martin (2009, pp. 3–4)

1 The Nature of Reading Abilities

This chapter sketches out an exploratory map of reading by providing the following:

• A description of the miracle of reading (Part I).
• An initial definition of reading.
• A discussion of purposes for reading.
• A definition of fluent reading comprehension.
• An explanation of how reading works.
  • Lower-level processing.
  • Higher-level processing.
  • Cognitive and neurolinguistic processing.
• A description of the miracle of reading (Part II).
• An introduction to frequently cited models of reading.

1.1 A Description of the Miracle of Reading (Part I)

This volume starts off from a somewhat unusual vantage point, but it is one that should be quite persuasive by the end of the chapter. Stated simply, the ability to read fluently is extraordinary; in fact, it is miraculous. Reading silently and individually became possible only about 500 years ago for a large number of people in Europe (Manguel, 1996; Pearson & Hamm, 2005). More broadly, it is only in the past 100 years or so that school expectations for many students included abilities to read a fairly large amount of text materials for content learning purposes (Pearson & Goodin, 2010). The recency of what we know as fluent reading for comprehension can mean only that reading for comprehension is an ability that is culturally transmitted from one generation to the next.

Humans are not biologically predisposed to become readers (Andrews, 2015; Perfetti & Stafura, 2014; Seidenberg, 2017). We do, however, learn to speak and listen to a language variety, no matter who the learner is, assuming normal environmental support and normal cognitive development in early childhood. We can say that humans are hard-wired to learn to speak a language variety. But reading comprehension abilities are not natural because they are not a part of automatic human maturation processes; instead, skilled reading must be taught by some person or persons because our brains are not designed naturally to be reading brains. We know this to be true at a basic level because approximately 14% of all humans aged 25–64 (690 million people) are not considered to be literate.¹ These non-literate humans are not somehow unnatural; rather, they just have not been taught to read.

Quote 1.1

Recent worldwide census data show … that the adult literacy rate has increased from 83% in 1990 to 89% in 2012. In the population aged 15–24, 87% of females and 92% of males now have basic reading skills. Despite these gains, more than 700 million adults throughout the world are still unable to read, with almost two-thirds being female (United Nations, 2014).

Verhoeven and Perfetti (2017b, p. 2)

Over the past 20 years, additional evidence has shown that reading is a culturally learned ability. As readers, we all learn to take visible graphic forms on a page and mentally interpret them into our own language, no matter what language we speak. We now know that part of the brain (the occipital cortex, at the back of the brain, that is used for visual form recognition) develops specific pathways for automatic word recognition that are not genetically hard-wired in human brains but must be learned (Dehaene, 2009; Seidenberg, 2017). Because the brain is flexible and can incorporate new uses into specific brain regions, we are able to expand the brain region for visual form recognition and facial recognition to also become a region for visual word form recognition (Schwanenflugel & Knapp, 2016; Ullman, 2015). This word form recognition region also begins a brain pathway through the lower temporal cortex region that allows for direct word recognition processes (e.g., sight word reading, from word form directly to word meaning, generating the phonological form at the same time).

Quote 1.2

Reusing structures to solve new problems occurs not only evolutionarily, but also developmentally, as we grow up. For example, reading seems to depend on previously existing brain circuitry that is coopted for this function as we learn to read.

Ullman (2015, p. 135)

As fluent readers, we engage in automatic word recognition without having to think about it, and we do it at a rate that is even faster than our fluent listening abilities. And we do this increasingly, as we read, to add more and more vocabulary words to our lexicon, including those that are not part of our speaking vocabulary (Seidenberg, 2017). We also then connect this very fast processing to comprehension skills (as explained below) for understanding information in texts (and using the resulting information for various academic and professional purposes). So, what is it that we do when we read, and how do we do this?

1.2 An Initial Definition of Reading

A common way to begin a discussion of reading is to provide a definition of the concept. However, this approach, while important for clarifying later discussions, is not so easy. We noted in the introduction that it is possible to present a single-sentence definition of reading such as the following: Reading is the ability to draw meaning from the printed page and interpret this information coherently, one of many possible variants. However, without quibbling over the exact wording of such a definition, it is nonetheless insufficient as a way to understand the true nature of reading abilities. There are four important reasons why this simple definition is inadequate:

• First, it does not convey the idea that there are a number of ways to engage in reading. A reader has several possible purposes for reading, and each purpose emphasizes a somewhat different combination of skills and strategies.
• Second, it does not emphasize the many criteria that define the nature of fluent reading abilities; it does not reveal the many skills, processes, and knowledge bases that act in combination, and often in parallel, to create the overall reading comprehension abilities that we commonly think of as reading.
• Third, it does not explain how reading is carried out as a cognitive process that operates under intense time constraints, yet these very rapid time-processing constraints are essential to understanding how reading comprehension works for the fluent reader.
• Fourth, it does not address the social context in which reading takes place or the reasons why texts will be interpreted and used in differing ways.

These four issues are addressed in this chapter as a way to describe the nature of fluent reading abilities. The chapter closes with brief comments on certain influential models of reading—models that try to synthesize what we know about reading (or some subset of reading abilities) and account for reading performance and reading development.

We would like to point out, at this time, that this chapter focuses primarily on the fluent first language (L1) reading process. One might ask why a book on L2 reading begins with a discussion of the fluent L1 reading process; there are a number of good reasons for adopting this approach. First, far more research has been carried out on reading in L1 contexts (especially in English as an L1; cf. Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2017a) than in L2 contexts. Second, students learning to become readers in L1 contexts usually achieve a reasonable level of reading fluency, usually by 5th grade in English (and earlier in several other alphabetic languages), but the same claim cannot be made for students learning to read in L2 contexts. Third, the ability to draw implications for instruction from research—including training studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of numerous instructional techniques and practices—is much more developed in L1 contexts than it is in L2 contexts. These factors suggest that we have become increasingly better at describing the reading abilities of students learning to read in their L1s. Even if many L2 students will never become fluent L2 readers, they can be taught in ways that lead them in the right direction and help them make as much progress as possible. This direction toward a successful end-point is what L1 reading research can offer us.

Our position on the value of L1 reading research is not meant to suggest that we ignore the significant differences between L1 and L2 reading contexts; in fact, these differences are addressed in Chapter 2. It is also the case that L2 reading research has expanded considerably in the past decade, so there is much new territory to discuss. However, at very advanced levels, it is still true that L1 and L2 reading abilities tend to merge and appear to be quite similar (Dronjic & Bitan, 2016; Verhoeven, 2017). So, to understand the endpoint of reading abilities, that of the fluent critical reader, research on L1 reading development offers us a much more complete understanding.

1.3 Purposes for Reading

Quote 1.3

Strategic readers begin with a purpose for reading and recognize that different goals require different types of reading.

Schwanenflugel and Knapp (2016, p. 219)

When we begin to read, we actually have a number of initial decisions to make, among them why we are reading and for what purpose (or purposes) (Britt, Rouet, & Durik, 2018; Schwanenflugel & Knapp, 2016; van den Broek & Kendeou, 2017). We usually make these decisions very quickly and, in most cases, unconsciously. For example, when we pick up a newspaper, we usually read the front page with some combination of search processing, general reading comprehension, and skimming. We may initially search the front page for a particular story that we expect to be there. If the headlines cue us in the right way, we may check quickly for the length of the article, and we may then read through a number of paragraphs for comprehension (appropriately influenced by the newspaper-story genre, a reporting of what, who, when, where, why, and how). At some point, we decide that we have enough information and either stop reading the article or skim the remainder to be sure that we do not miss some surprisingly informative part.

Alternatively, for many of us, we might pick up our cell phone, laptop, or tablet to look at news electronically or to check social sites. With the newspaper, we read partly for information, but we also read with a goal to finish the newspaper fairly rapidly. When we look online at social media platforms, we are maintaining social networks. We might move very quickly across media outlets to see who is out there and what they are saying. Our purpose is to stay connected. In other settings, typically academic or professional ones, we sometimes synthesize information from multiple reading sources, from both online and print sources, from different parts of a long and complex text, or from a prose text and accompanying diagram or chart.

Quote 1.4

A comprehensive theory of reading should account for the flexibility of reading behaviors as a function...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor Preface
• Authors’ Acknowledgments
• Publisher’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the 3rd Edition
• PART I Understanding L2 Reading
• PART II Exploring Research in Reading
• PART III L2 Reading Curricula and Instruction
• PART IV Investigating Reading through Action Research
• PART V Resources
• Glossary
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index