III - INTERACTIVE APPROACHES TO SECOND LANGUAGE READING – EMPIRICAL STUDIES

Summary

The chapters in this section present a number of empirical studies which have been conducted investigating various aspects of interactive second language reading. Devine's chapter investigates a theme presented in Carrell, Chapter 7, namely the role of the second language reader's conception, or “model,” of reading and its relation to reading performance. Her study shows how the way a reader conceptualizes the reading process is directly related to different types of reading performance.

The chapter by Steffensen investigates the relationship between cohesion and coherence in terms of second language readers‘ recalls of culturally familiar and unfamiliar texts. The question explored is whether coherent recalls, based upon relatively secure reading comprehension of a culturally familiar text, are necessarily more highly cohesive than less coherent recalls, based upon less secure reading comprehension of culturally unfamiliar text. Steffensen's negative findings suggest that although there are differences in reading comprehension due to the interaction of readers’ prior cultural familiarity, these are not necessarily revealed by tallying explicit cohesive ties in the surface structure of recall protocols. Explicit cohesion is not necessarily an indication of comprehension. Rather, Steffensen's findings suggest that other means of text analysis are called for in order to measure the “coherence” of reading comprehension as revealed in recall protocols.