English L2 Reading

Getting to the Bottom

Barbara M. Birch, Sean Fulop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000095692
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

English L2 Reading: Getting to the Bottom uses research-based insights to examine bottom-up skills in reading English as a second language. This fourth edition clearly presents core concepts alongside their practical applications to teaching contexts, with updated research findings, a new focus on metalinguistic awareness, and new resources for students.

The text's pedagogical features help readers connect linguistic details and psycholinguistic theory with practical explanations and teaching suggestions. Pre-reading Questions challenge readers to analyze their own experiences. Study Guide Questions allow readers to review, discuss, and assess their knowledge. Discussion Questions elaborate on themes in each chapter, while the new Language Awareness Activities help develop metalinguistic awareness. Three Appendices provide tables that list the graphemes and the phonemes of English, as well as a brand-new dictionary pronunciation guide.

New to the fourth edition:

• Substantially revised and updated research on linguistics
• New, evidence-based models on the reading process
• Language Awareness Activities that highlight metalinguistic awareness
• Word study examples in each chapter

For teachers, teacher trainers, reading researchers, or anyone interested in teaching reading, this popular, comprehensive, myth-debunking text provides clear and practical guidance towards effectively supplementing top-down teaching approaches with bottom-up reading strategies.

1
The Beginning Reader

Prereading Questions. Before you read, think about and discuss the following:

1. How do people read? What are you aware of while you are reading?
2. Do you remember learning to read as a child? Was it a positive or negative experience?
3. Do you enjoy reading now? Why or why not?
4. What do you have to read? What do you like to read? How are these reading experiences different for you?
5. If you are a non-native speaker of English, do you like to read English as well as your native language? Why or why not?
6. What problem(s) do you have with reading? What is the cause of the problem(s)?

Study Guide Questions: Answer these questions while or after reading the chapter. Try to put your answers into your own words.

1. How is learning to speak and understand oral language different from learning to read and write?
2. What is implicit language awareness? What is explicit language awareness? What is the relationship between these types of language awareness and learning to read?
3. What types of memory offer the foundation for reading? How do they differ from each other?
4. What is the difference between cognitive strategies and linguistic strategies? Why are the terms “top” and “bottom” used?
5. What is priming?
6. What is whole language instruction? What is the phonics approach? Why does this text advocate a balanced approach?
7. How do the three models of the reading system relate to each other? How are they different from each other? Why are the terms strategic system, networked system, and convergent system used?
8. In specific terms, what is Linguistic Infrastructure? What are the strategies needed in working memory? What unanswered questions does this model leave?
9. In more specific terms, what are neural networks? How does usage and exposure to written language create cognitive architecture? What are the layers in a neural network? What are the unanswered questions?
10. In more specific terms, what are codes? Why are they at the convergence of Linguistic Infrastructure and neural networks? What is the difference between the pre-literate code and the (post-literate) basic code? What are other types of codes?
11. What is metalinguistic awareness, and how does it relate to implicit or explicit language awareness?
12. Describe each of Chall’s reading stages.
13. What is the psycholinguistic grain-size hypothesis? What does it imply about learning codes?
14. Review the issues that are important in English L2 reading development.

Most children learn to speak and understand language without direct instruction because those skills emerge naturally in a social environment where children interact with others verbally. Because they want to communicate and socialize, children learn pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar in fairly predictable stages merely through usage and exposure to language as it occurs around them, because they have a cognitive capacity for learning. Along with early verbal and auditory abilities, children add an abstract language awareness system to their cognitive system. That abstract language awareness system supports further learning of sounds, words, phrases, and sentences so that children can understand and communicate better and better as time goes on. That is why speaking and listening with comprehension are emergent language abilities: the skills for oral language and the abstract language awareness that supports them emerge no matter what, as children go about their business being children.

Emergent language awareness is the theory that the knowledge of language and the ability to use language both form slowly from repeated exposure and usage along with general learning capacities such as the ability to generalize from similar experiences (Behrens, 2009, p. 384). There is no need to assume a specialized language acquisition device in this approach. In contrast, reading and writing are plainly not emergent abilities because most children require some deliberate instruction and practice in order to learn to communicate and socialize through written language. Once children are literate, their eyes move across and down the page, easily understanding the message that the text contains without apparent effort. At that point, they don’t always remember the classroom teaching and the practice they needed to acquire reading and writing. Thus, literacy is not natural in the same way that speaking and listening are. However, speaking and listening provide the crucial framework for the language awareness system, and this system scaffolds reading and writing also.

Word Family: emerge (v), emergence (n), emergent (a)

Emerge (v) From emerge ‘to come into being’ from Latin emergere from e- (or ex-), ‘out, forth’ + mergere, ‘to dip’

Emerge + ence (n)
+ence (abstract noun-forming suffix)

Emerge + ent (a)
+ent (adjective-forming suffix)

This chapter deals with several introductory topics necessary to understand the reading process and its relationship to language awareness in beginning readers. First, it is necessary to explore a general idea of what the organization of the brain is because it is the foundation for reading. Second, given this foundation, researchers propose different models for reading because complex mental processes seem simpler if they can be compared to systems that are easier to understand. Models provide coherent frameworks on which to arrange the linguistic information that teachers need to know and that beginning readers need to learn. Each model explains something about the language awareness system that supports reading. However, models must always be used with caution because they oversimplify the cognitive structure and brain activity that underlie reading. Third, this chapter explores the stages that English-speaking children go through as their ability to read develops. These stages are a starting point for examining English L2 (English as a second or foreign language) reading. English L2 readers have speaking and listening and possibly reading abilities as well as language awareness from their first language. They face some special circumstances when they learn to read English, such as interference from their first language, incomplete knowledge of English, and missing processing strategies for English. These topics are taken up in further detail in later chapters.

Brain Organization

As speaking and understanding emerge in infancy and early childhood, a system of language awareness forms in the brain, with organizing principles, components, structures, and functions. Children develop cognitively as well, and their cognitive development influences their language awareness system, and equally, their language awareness system influences their cognitive development. Generally, the more language awareness children have, the better their potential for success in school because it supports reading and writing.

Language Awareness

Researchers distinguish two types of early language awareness, implicit and explicit. Implicit language awareness is what children know about language as they learn to use it. They can manipulate and make some judgments about language without knowing or being able to articulate what they know in exact terms. For instance, they might say That sentence sounds funny or That man sounds different. Their language awareness is unconscious and acquired through usage and exposure, not from schooling necessarily. Implicit language awareness is largely emergent. However, as children are exposed to comments about speech, a different kind of language awareness is detected.

Word Family: imply (v), implication (n), implicit (a)

Imply (v) from French emplier from Latin implicare, ‘involve, enfold’ from assimilated form of in-, ‘into, in’ + plicare, ‘to fold’ from the Proto-Indo-European root *plek-, ‘to plait’

Implication (n) from Latin implicationem, noun formed from implicare, ‘involve, associate’

Implicit (a) from Latin implicitus, a form of implico, ‘I infold’

Explicit language awareness means that children are better at putting into words what is wrong or strange when people mispronounce words, use the wrong word, or say sentences that don’t make any sense. They make comments about things they observe about language, saying, Sabid is not a word or Smile and pile rhyme. Explicit language awareness is emergent only if the linguistic environment around the child promotes it, because emergent abilities only come from usage and exposure, not from direct learning. Explicit language awareness develops when children start preschool because they start learning new vocabulary and linguistic concepts intentionally presented to them. Preschool or an enriched linguistic environment at home is a good background for learning to read because explicit language awareness is an excellent foundation for learning to read and write.

Word Family: explicate (v), explicit (a)

explicate (v) from Latin explicates, a form of explicare, ‘unfold, explain’ from ex ‘out’+ plicare ‘to fold’ from the Proto-Indo-European root *plek-, ‘to plait’

Explicit (a) from Latin explicitus, a form explicare from ex- ‘out’ + plico, ‘to fold’

Types of Memory

Memory structures emerge in infancy from experience, exposure, mistakes, and feedback; they offer a cognitive foundation for later learning, including reading and writing. Once the cognitive organization acquires expertise, it operates noiselessly with automaticity and efficiency. Memory is divided into two main types (Baddeley, 2003), as shown in Figure 1.0. Long-term memory (LTM) is a dense network of both general world and cultural knowledge and implicit and explicit language awareness. Working memory (WM) refers to the cognitive and linguistic processing strategies that interact between LTM and what is happening in the world in the moment. Baddeley (2003) proposes that WM contains four components: a phonological component, a visual sketchpad, a control system that manages attention, and a buffer that briefly combines visual and phonological inputs in order to access LTM. In WM, cognitive strategies function at a high level (e.g. the top) to build the LTM network for world knowledge. That is, they create an interconnected web of information packaged as memories of people, episodes, images, places, things, events, activities, and so on.

Linguistic strategies function at the level of sound, spelling, word, and grammar (e.g. the bottom) to build the LTM language awareness system. They process raw linguistic data from utterances and print sentences, repackage the data as codes, and then connect the codes in a network so they are retrievable on demand. Codes are packages of linguistic information (pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, meaning, grammar) in LTM. Codes organize linguistic knowledge into usable and retrievable chunks. (Birch (2013) uses the term construction for linguistic packages. Here, following Seidenberg (2017), the term code is used.)

In successful readin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Beginning Reader
• 2 Writing Systems
• 3 Interlanguage Reading and Transfer
• 4 Listening Skills in Reading
• 5 Processing Letters
• 6 The English Spelling System
• 7 Approaches to Phonics
• 8 English Morphophonemic Spelling
• 9 Spelling Development
• 10 Vocabulary Acquisition
• 11 Getting to the Bottom of English L2 Fluency
• Appendix A English Graphemes
• Appendix B English Phonemes and Their Principal Spellings
• Appendix C Dictionary Transcription
• Index