Reading as a Second Language: L1 and L2 Processes

Reading as a Second Language: L1 and L2 Processes

1. Bottom-Up Approaches

   • Reading is generally viewed as a decoding process whereby meaning or comprehension is reconstructed from the smallest textual units

2. Top-Down Approaches

   • Readers bring in general knowledge of the world and carry out intelligent guesses about what might come next in the text. These guesses are then confirmed or rejected through sampling the text.

3. Interactive Approaches

   • Reading process is an interactive process between the reader and the text and that it is bi-directional in nature involving both bottom up processing and top-down processing

4. Application of L1 Reading Models to L2 Reading

   • Reader's background knowledge interacts with conceptual abilities and process strategies to produce comprehension.
   • Schema theory
     • Abstract knowledge structure
     • Process of relating information (text) with the existing schema in a reader
       • Bottom-up processing
       • top-down processing

5. Differences between L1 and L2 Readers

   • L1 reader have good intuitive sense of grammar of the language, while L2 reader have more factual knowledge of the world and thus able to make logical inferences from the text
   • L2 readers already have acquired their L1 to a certain degree before they begin reading in the L2
   • L1 context cannot always be applied directly to the L2 context.
   • Different word recognition strategies