Please note: this post was authored in collaboration with Steve Smith of The Language Teacher Toolkit and Dylan Vinales of Garden International School 

Introduction

Reading texts are often under-exploited in most current published materials and typical Modern Language lessons. Moreover, the type of activities, the way they are sequenced and the levels of the text they address often seem to be chosen and planned haphazardly. In addition, the texts chosen for pre-intermediate to intermediate learners are not usually constructed in a way which is conducive to learning as they lack the sort of repetition and linguistic patterning that facilitate the noticing and uptake of new L2 items. Finally, no pre-task and post-task activities are typically carried out, which means that students come to the text not sufficiently prepped and that much of the newly processed language is lost.

Eleven tips for enhancing the impact of reading tasks

Here are eleven tips to address the above issues with novice-to-intermediate students through low-prep/high-impact activities that I use day in day out in my lessons.

1.Create the need to read – the most potent motivator in language learning is the need to understand and to communicate a message. Hence in selecting or designing written or aural input one should ask oneself: how can I make the students WANT to read on? What title, picture(s), first line or paragraph of a text can I come up with in order to get the students to want to read on the rest of the story, article, poem or lyrics of a song? For instance, last week I used a few – very dramatic – scenes from the video-clip of Kenza Farah’s song ‘Coup de Coeur’, as a teaser for my year 10 students. I then played the song to them and used the lyrics for a set of reading tasks. I have rarely seen them so motivated – they really could not wait to understand what the song was about.

Creating the need to read is not easy and I cannot say that I have fully cracked it; but I am trying and I think every language teacher should, considering that arising cognitive and emotional arousal of this sort is highly conducive to learning.

2.Ensure the students can recognize at least 90 % of the items in the text they are reading without having to resort to the dictionary (flip the learning of the key vocabulary prior to the reading of the text) – We often advise our students to read more in the belief that this will definitely help learn more vocabulary. However, it is not simply how extensively they read which will make a difference, but also what  and how they read. Research clearly indicates that for L2 reading to be an effective catalyst of vocabulary acquisition, the to-be-read material must be 95% comprehensible without much effort. This can be attained by using, besides words that have already been learnt, cognates, predictable contexts and repetition (see point 3 below).

Enabling the students to understand the gist or the main message of the text-in-hand or training them to answer a few reading comprehension questions does not enhance vocabulary acquisition. The students need to understand as much as possible of the linguistic environment surrounding the target lexis if we want them to acquire it.

This entails often having to alter authentic materials when dealing with novice-to-intermediate students and occasionally even the reading passages found in textbooks. In order to avoid having to modify the texts, what I do is flipping the learning of the more challenging vocabulary they contain prior to reading them; so, for example, knowing that my year 8 will read text ‘X’ on Monday next week, I will set vocabulary-building homework the Friday. before

3.Ensure there is a lot of repetition and highly patterned language – Repetition of words and patterns in texts is crucial and the lack of it is possibly the greatest shortcoming of most of the published Modern Languages reading materials currently on the market. Exposure to the target vocabulary and grammar through receptive processing being essential for effective acquisition every reading text we use in class should include as much repetition as possible on at least three levels: (1) the target lexical items (be them words or phrases), (2) the target grammar structure(s) and (3) syntactic patterns (e.g. the same sentence stem or slight variations of the same sentence stems as in: I live in a city called Paris ; I live in a village called Cagnes-sur-mer).

Sadly, one of the damages done by the Communicative Language Approach to Modern Language education is the notion that L2 students ought to read only or mainly authentic texts. However, I do not believe this to be always ‘healthy’ practice with novice-to-intermediate learners.as repetitions of words and patterns even when sounding redundant and artificial do scaffold learning.

Songs and poems are often more memorable because they use frequent repetitions and come in handy in the reading sessions; narrow-reading texts , many of which I have published (free) on www.tes.co.uk , are rife in recycling of words and patterns too.

4. If you do include the L1-translations of the challenging words, place them in a box in the margin of the page (not in brackets, next to the words) – Research evidence indicates that a gloss located in the margin of the text (where the L1 translation is provided) is more likely to facilitate future recall than placing the translation in brackets next to the unfamiliar word (within the text). I usually highlight or underline any unfamiliar words in the text that I have included in the gloss in order to signal to the students that it has been translated for them.

5.Before staging the reading do some work on decoding skills– Research by Walker (2009) indicates that learner issues with L2-decoding of the text-in-hand, especially when different L2 items may be pronounced by the students erroneously as homophones (i.e. phonetically identical) may hinder reading comprehension. Think about ‘je parle’ and ‘j’ai parlé’, for instance that many pre-intermediate learners of French pronounce identically. This phenomenon is caused by the fact that even when we read silently, the instant we process a word we activate its sound by engaging the phonological loop in our Working Memory. What I do, prior to engaging my students in reading, is to focus my students on the pronunciation of specific combinations of letters which I predict might cause them issues in processing the text-at-hand; for this purpose I use a range of my MLEs (Micro-listening enhancers).

 6.Warm the students up prior to the reading through work on top-down processing skills – this is as important as the work on bottom-up processing skills recommended in the previous point. The easiest zero-preparation way to do this is to tell the students the title and the topic(s) of the text and ask them to brainstorm as many words as possible in the target language which they associate with them. Alternatively or additionally you could give them a few pictures which refer to the content of the text and ask them to do the same – the pictures could be used to create the need to read alluded to in point one. Another minimum preparation strategy which involves writing (and even speaking if done in a group through a discussion) is to ask them to jot down a few sentences predicting the content of the to-be-read text.

7.Create several short tasks rather than one or two long ones  – in a very small-scale research of mine carried out a few years back I found that my students found more enjoyable and useful to carry out several short tasks with four or five questions rather than one or two longer tasks with eight to ten questions. This was particularly true of lower ability students. Several shorter tasks provide more variety, and a sense of having completed more challenges. Moreover, one can address more levels of the same texts and recycle the same items through different questions, which will facilitate acquisition.

8.Design tasks with varying foci – It always baffles me how limited the number and range of tasks that published materials associate with each of their texts are. When I design or plan reading activities I endeavour to address points (a) to (f) below, usually one per task; the fact that the tasks are many but short pre-empts the work from being tedious and time-consuming. Moreover, sequencing the task in ascending level of difficulty allows for effective differentiation.

(a) reading for gist – tasks that require the students to pick out the text’s key message/details (e.g. list the five main points made in the text about what constitute a healthy lifestyle);

(b) simple reinforcement of key words in the text – tasks that only aim at recycling the key items (e.g. translate the following French words/phrases in the text you have just read) and are not designed to ‘quiz’ the students, but merely to get them to re-visit the text and re-process it. This means that these tasks need not be particularly challenging as they serve the purpose of modelling; this is why I usually put this tasks as first or second in my reading-tasks sequence;

(c) fostering noticing of lexical/grammar structure– these are questions which promote the noticing of a specific L2 grammar items of syntactic structure (e.g. why does line 20 read “if I had gone’ and not ‘If I went’?);

(d) promoting use of inference strategies – these require the students to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words using context;

(e) practising using dictionaries/reference materials;

(f) L1-to-L2 translation skills.

9.Stage a read-aloud session – Staging a read-aloud session after performing the above tasks provides a cognitive break and gives you an idea, whilst you are walking around the class monitoring student-pronunciation, of how the acquisition of decoding skills is proceeding. This will inform the planning of any subsequent delivery of decoding-skill instruction.

10. Follow-up with one or more listening tasks – A follow-up through listening-as-modelling and listening-comprehension activities helps reinforcing the vocabulary and, more importantly, focuses the students on pronunciation. The easiest listening-as modelling activity to prepare is obviously dictation of sentences taken from the just-read-text containing the key-items you set out to teach (with or without L1-translation). Partial dictations require very little preparation too. Jigsaws are a bit more time-consuming but students enjoy them a lot.

11. Recycle key lexis in subsequent lessons – after reading a passage, some really nice idioms, structures or other interesting and useful lexis found in that text get left behind and often lost for ever. I do attempt to make sure that that does not happen, by: (a) setting it as homework using language-gym.com – but one can use Memrise or Quizlet instead; (b) creating a new reading text (my favourite strategy) which include those items; (c) devising a nice starter with which to begin the next lesson; (d) recycling the items alongside any new lexis you are planning to teach in the next lesson

Concluding remarks

Much too often the reading passages used in the ML lessons are under-exploited and a substantial part of the valuable material they contain gets ‘lost’ in the absence of adequate and consistent recycling in subsequent lessons. At present, I am not aware of any published material which effectively addresses all of the levels of exploitation of a text I outlined in the above post, which is appalling. This is due too many factors, one of which refers to the fear that the students might get bored, a concern I sympathize with to a certain extent; this issue can, however, be partly controlled for by providing several shorter tasks with varying foci.

The most important message this post purports to convey is that reading tasks should try to squeeze out as much learning out of any text-at-hand as possible; students should be prepped both in terms of bottom-up and top-down processing skills (especially decoding skills); they should also be encouraged to notice  new items through activities which engage them in deep processing; finally, unless we are merely equipping students with survival skills, limiting the focus of receptive processing (not simply reading but listening, too) to the understanding of the main points contained in a text has very little surrender value in terms of the enhancement of reading fluency and the acquisition of vocabulary, morphology, syntax and any other aspect of L2 competence.

Creating the need to read or understand should also be an important concern of ours as way too often the texts students work on in ML lessons are rather dull. Whilst this is quite difficult to do with the texts we give novice-to-intermediate learners, when working at higher level of proficiency it should not be an impossible task.

As far as point 2 to 11 are concerned, our frustration with the current lack of resources which address all of the above has led Steve Smith and myself to creating reading material and associated tasks which we are writing as we speak and whose first instalment is published here. The aim: to create a resource which enables intermediate learners of French to learn as much as possible from L2 written texts to the point of allowing them to translate short English passages (GCSE style) into French off the top of their head by the end of each unit.

As for point 1, i.e. ‘creating the need to read’, Steve and I are both working on developing a set of strategies which we intend to share with our readers in a future post.

To find out about our ideas on reading instruction, get hold of ‘The Language Teacher Toolkit’, the book Steve Smith and I co-authored .

Co-authored with Steve Smith of http://www.frenchteacher.net

Introduction

As a teacher/researcher, I occasionally ‘use’ my students as ‘guinea pigs’ to test new methods and teaching strategies I come up with and to test my ‘hypotheses about language learning. They have become so used to it that some of them are now very proactive in volunteering information about their thought processes, learning problems and successes and have become eager game to my ‘experiments’.

In the last few months, ten of them have helped me figure out the main comprehension problems year 9 students experience when they read and translate L2 texts, in the context of a little piece of qualitative research into their thinking processes.

Difference between translating and comprehending L2 texts

Obviously, comprehending an L2-text and translating it involve different processes and outcomes. Comprehension entails, as an outcome, the understanding of the message conveyed by the text at different levels; translation involves not only the understanding of a text, but also the ability to put every single word into the correct L1 equivalent, in some cases ensuring that subtle nuances are expressed accurately in the translation.

In the typical CLT (communicative language teaching) approach to language teaching adopted in many British schools, students are not asked to translate word-for-word when grappling with a text; and this is understandable if teachers are involving students in reading practice which aims at developing effective comprehenders of written L2-texts.

However, if teachers are using reading to model the use of new language and teaching new words – which is what I believe reading activities should also be about – simply training students in being able to guess intelligently or infer the meaning of a text may not always be an effective approach, for the following reasons:

(1) it may not explicitly focus students on useful/important details of grammar, syntax and lexical usage;

(2) students may understand what a sentence conveys, but not necessarily what each and every word it contains means (as this may not be necessary to answer five or six comprehension questions).

For comprehensible input to significantly enhance acquisition, it would be desirable for students to be able to translate as many words in a text as possible. Moreover they should be focused on any grammatical or lexical details in the written input worth noticing and learning that they are developmentally ready to acquire. However, much reading instruction carried out in UK secondary schools these days does not encourage this.

Take the typical reading comprehension exercise we give our students. The students are required to read a text and answer a few comprehension questions or ‘true or false?’; then the answers are marked and unless the student is inquisitive and asks questions to teacher or peers or uses a dictionary or other resources, not much will be learnt in terms of vocabulary or grammar – especially in the absence of follow-up which recycles the lexis or structures contained in the text.

Thus, the big decision a teacher has to take is: am I to use a reading comprehension to train students in simply comprehending texts or to learn as much as possible in the process? Or both?

In the little ‘experiment’ I discuss below I wanted to find out what problems students experience as they attempt to comprhend a written text and how accurate their translation of the unfamiliar words in the text was. The findings would inform aspects of my approach to reading instruction.

The ‘method’

The subjects

My ‘subjects’ were ten year 9 students of Spanish of mine grouped, based on their general attainment in Spanish, in 3 High Achievers (HAs), 4 Average Achievers (AAs) and 3 Low Achievers (LAs).

The task

The students were asked to answer 8 comprehension questions on a Spanish text. After answering the questions, they were asked to translate the text word for word.

The text is actually the transcript of the voice-over to a level-B1 video entitled ‘Un dia en la playa’ found at: http://videoele.com/Archivos/B1_Un_dia_en_la_playa_Transc.pdf  .

I chose this text because I was looking for a passage of medium difficulty which would contain quite a few unfamiliar words whose meaning could be fairly easily worked out by the students based on their background knowledge (i.e. what one does normally at the beach) and several contextual cues present in the text (e.g. a fair number of cognates, fairly linear sentence structure, predictable linguistic contexts and clear cohesion devices).

The students could read the passage on my laptop and – during the translation task only – had access to an online dictionary, wordreference.com, open on another tab.

The procedure

The ‘method’ I chose to investigate my students’ reading process was a technique, called ‘concurrent think-aloud’ with introspection, which requires the students to verbalize their thinking as they interpret a text; the teacher can interrupt at any time in order to probe into their thought processes with open or less open questions (e.g. what is the problem you are experiencing here? Why did you translate this word as ‘hat’? Can you think of any other way to work out the meaning of this word? What if you read the whole sentence rather than stopping here?).

This investigative method is far from being scientifically valid in terms of portraying what happens in a student’s head, as a lot that our brain does bypasses consciousness; however, it usually yields some very useful – and often unexpected – information. Every time I have used it with my students it has provided me with a valuable insight into my students’ problems.

The findings

The students did very well in terms of comprehension and managed to translate most of the text correctly. As predictable, the HAs (high achievers) did better than the rest but the other subjects did very well, too, with only two of the LAs (low achievers) experiencing some serious mis-comprehension problems. Most of the comprehension issues occurred at word or phrase rather than sentence level.

Problems identified with the text comprehension and  translation

1. Misuse or insufficient use of bilingual dictionaries – one set of problems related to the misuse and/or underuse of the dictionary (www.wordreference.com). Here they are:

1a. Not checking the ‘grammar’ of challenging words – Students rarely checked the word class of the word they were looking up. This led occasionally to incorrect interpretations of the sentences they were processing. When asked what the word-class of the word they had problems with was, they were often (60 % of the time) unsure or took them quite a bit of time to figure it out. I will go back to this issue below

1b. Superficial handling of dictionary entries – The LAs and AAs did not often go beyond the first translation option offered by the dictionary and rarely looked at the examples provided. This also led to occasional misunderstanding of the text. The HAs were more thorough and explored the various options sometimes even referring to the wordreference.com forum threads to confirm their hypotheses.

1c. Reluctance to use dictionary – Although www.word-reference.com is very easy to operate and the computer was right in front of them, the students, especially the LAs exhibited a general reluctance to using the dictionary, thereby relying almost entirely on their instinct. This occasionally led to mistakes in the interpretation of the text or to a correct overall understanding of the meaning of a sentence, but wrong translation of one or more words. (30 % of the time).

1d. Inputting inflected forms of the verbs in the online dictionary – Some of the students – 3 out of ten – attempted to translate verbs they could not work out the meaning of by entering the verb form they found in the text (e.g. apetecía)– not in the infinitive (apetecer). This led to confusion and occasionally to error.

2. Problems reconstructing the meaning of individual unfamiliar words – Overall, the students exhibited a very good grasp of most of the text and most of them answered all eight of the comprehension questions I asked them correctly. However, when asked to translate the text, their inferencing skills let them down in several contexts in which with a bit more creativity, use of their background knowledge and an analysis of the morphology of they might have guessed intelligently what the words in question meant. The less able students were the ones who particularly struggled in this sense. These were the main issues noticed:

2b. Overly-narrow focus – The AAs and LAs often did not read the whole sentence in order to infer the meaning of the challenging unknown word(s). They only focused on the words immediately surrounding the challenging item; when encouraged by me too look at the sentence as a whole, they managed to work the sentence out 90% of the time.

2c. Inadequate use of L1 words in order to guess intelligently meaning of L2 unfamiliar words of similar etymology- Unless the words were obvious cognates, only two of the learners (both HAs) used English words which shared the same etymology with the Spanish words in the text-at-hand that they were having issues with. So, for instance, when faced with the word ‘crucero’, most of the students failed to relate it to the word ‘cruiseship’; the same happened with the verbs ‘tumbarse’ (to lie down) which only two students related to the English word ‘tomb’and ‘apetecia’ (I wanted; felt like) which was associated with the English word ‘appetite’.

2d. Infrequent use of knowledge of previously learnt L2 words -Only half of the students used their knowledge of Spanish words they already knew to interpret any unfamiliar lexis found in the text. This happened with ‘algunas’ (some; any) and ‘secarse’ (to dry oneself) which was translated successfully by five of the students using the words ‘algo’ (something) and ‘seco’ (dry) to reconstruct their meaning.

2e. Accurate interpretation vs inaccurate word-for-word translation – Students often inferred the general meaning of sentences or phrases correctly; however, the inferences led to the wrong translation of some of the constituents of those sentences or phrases. The best example of this is the sentence: ‘Es necesario ponerse crema para que el sol no queme la piel’. The sense that one should put the sun-cream on in order to protect one’s skin from the sun, was grasped by everyone. However, only one student understood that ‘queme’ means ‘burn’; moreover, none of the students noticed or queried the unusual construction of the sentence (para que + noun + subjunctive) and the unfamiliar subjunctive ‘queme’.

Whilst on a communicative level this may be viewed as an effective handling of the text from an interpretive point of view; in terms of learning this way to go about understanding a text does not lead to much learning, especially considering that only one of the students double-checked their translation of the sentence using the online dictionary.

This impressionistic guessing should be encouraged as a survival and/or test-taking strategies; however, as a learning strategy, teachers should encourage students’ double-checking through dictionary or expert help.

2f. Superficial, insufficient or inaccurate structural analysis – the above problems were compounded by the lack of structural analysis alluded to in the previous paragraph. Only five of the students used their knowledge of grammar (e.g. looking at word-endings, agreement, word order and using dictionary to check word-class) to help them reconstruct the meaning of the challenging words. When structural analysis was used it was successful 80% of the time overall (group mean) but only 60% of the time with the three LAs.

One set of comprehension issues related to small functions words (prepositions, connectives and pronouns), even though in certain instances their meaning seemed pretty obvious, e.g. the word ‘como’ (as, since). Pronouns appeared to be amongst the most challenging elements due, I suspect, to their position in the sentence (different to English) and the absence of the personal pronoun (in Spanish, one would say: ‘it put’ meaning ‘I put it’)

The above are very common issues which are not every easy to address as they require a lot of practice and often of the one-to-one session sort

3. Superficial approach to cognates – To my disappointment, most students were all too happy to translate the more obvious cognates found in the text with the English word they immediately evoked. For instance, ‘precioso’ was translated with ‘precious’ where it actually meant ‘beautiful’ in the text; the same happened with ‘arena’ (= sand) which was translated initially by all of the students as ‘arena’ and rectified only by five of them thanks to the dictionary. Other words this happened with included: ‘flotador’ (translated as ‘floater’ in both instances), ‘algo’ (associated by some with ‘algae’ due to the context, too) and ‘falta’ (associated with ‘fault’).

This is a very common issue which may have to be dealt with at the very beginning of instruction to ensure that student understand the differences between the native and the target language from the very outset of L2 learning. L2 learners must be made aware of the existence of false friends and of the semantic and cultural differences that cognate words often carry.

4. Cross-association of homophones – This is a very minor issue, but one which may require some attention as it may have repercussion for learning if it is not dealt with. ‘hambre’ (hunger) and ‘hombre’ were cross-associated by the weaker learners, thereby creating some initial confusion which was eventually resolved without my intervention. Homophones (words sounding similar) or near homophones co-existing in the same text can cause issues in terms of interpretation giving rise to errors or slowing down comprehension. This is a more important issue in L2 French or English learning where this phenomenon is more recurrent.

 IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHERS

The above findings cannot be generalized to the whole L2 student population and it would be interesting if other teachers had a go at trying my little ‘experiment’ out to see if they observe similar phenomena. In my experience, though, what I found points to issues that are very common amongst L2 learners of this age and proficiency level and that language teachers, myself included, do not tackle systematically enough. For teachers who may have students who experience similar issues, these are my recommendations.

(1) Through the use of think-alouds or other modelling techniques, teachers may want to train students in the use of bilingual dictionaries, targeting in particular the areas (1a to 1d) identified above. A non-time-consuming way of doing this involves the use of checklists reminding the students to:

– use the dictionaries as often as possible ;

– look at the word class of the target word;

– examine the examples provided by the dictionary;

– check the meaning of a verb using its infinitive form.

Obviously, teachers need to ensure that they do model the use of any checklists they devise in order to scaffold the process and reward every instance in which the students demonstrate their use.

(2) teachers may have to train students in the deployment of the following inferencing strategies:

– Applying structural analysis to challenging words and surrounding linguistic contexts (e.g. What word class does this word fall in? Is this an adjective or an adverb?)

– Searching the whole sentence in which the challenging item is located for cues to its meaning (not just its immediate vicinity);

– Creatively using their knowledge of the L1 to infer L2 words (if the two languages share common etymologies);

– Using other previously learnt L2 words to draw inferences about the meaning of an unfamiliar L2 lexical item.

Such training should occur in frequent sessions for it to pay dividends and impact students reading strategies. One-off sessions don’t result in strategy uptake.

(3) students should be made aware of how ‘tricky’ cognates can be and teachers should attempt to provide regular exposure to ‘false friends’ from the early stages of instruction to drive home and reinforce this awareness.

(4) Teachers ought to ensure that reading tasks do not stop at comprehension questions but regularly feature

– requiring students to translate the meaning of individual words (e.g. what does word X on line 4 mean?) or match a set of L1 words to their L2 equivalent in the text-at-hand;

– analysis of the grammar of the words and sentences in the text (e.g. identify the adjectives and adverbs found on line 3? Why does adjective X have a plural ending? Why is verb Y in the subjunctive?). These ‘old school’ questions get the students in the habit of analyzing the way words relate to one another and how they affect each other;

– ask them to identify L2 words in the  text that resemble L1 words that they may relate to semantically (e.g. find a word in the passage that reminds you of ‘cruise ship’. Answer: ‘crucero’).

(5) instruction should focus much more on the teaching of function words, especially connectives and pronouns in general. Connectives often cued the HAs and AAs to the understanding of unknown words. Unsurprisingly so, as they direct and signpost discourse.

Finally, teachers may want to prep students prior to reading the text-at-hand by designing tasks which, with the above issues in mind, activate any necessary knowledge of the world thematically related to that text. With the reading passage used in the experiment in mind, for example, one could ask them to brainstorm in Spanish as many activities people carry out during a day on the beach as they can think of. How many L1 cognates of the Spanish words they have just brainstormed can they come up with? How many objects can they think of in Spanish that one would bring along to the beach?  Can they think of any other objects that they would need but they do not know the Spanish equivalent of and look them up using an online dictionary? Etc.

Concluding remarks

My little ‘experiment’ identified some of the typical problems L2 intermediate students encounter in grappling with texts which contain a fair number of unfamiliar words. The lesson I learnt from my findings is that inferring the meaning of such words is not as easy for learners at this level of proficiency as one might expect. Hence teachers should ensure that they prep the students adequately by training them in the use of inferencing strategies which address the deficit areas my ‘experiment’ identified.

You can find more on this topic in the book ‘The language teacher toolkit’ I co-authored with Steve Smith and available for purchase at http://www.amazon.com

Introduction

In a previous post I already concerned myself with reading instruction; more specifically, I advocated that much reading skills instruction in UK classrooms tends to revolve around comprehension tasks. I also pointed out how such practice is detrimental to the development of reading proficiency, as it does little more than testing students on their ability to find details in a text rarely engaging students in real life tasks. As I advocated in that post, reading instruction should do much more than that: should inspire L2 learners to read independently and equip them with effective reading skills and learning strategies (e.g. using online dictionaries or knowing how to exploit the full learning potential of an online article). Moreover students should be given a degree of choice in terms of the to-be-read-texts.

Thus, foreign language teachers need first and foremost to develop their students’ self-efficacy as readers, i.e. the belief that they can read, they can comprehend L2 texts whilst making reading an enjoyable experience. To believe that s/he can be effective at reading an L2 text a learner will need more than a growth mindset; s/he will have to experience repeated episodes of success in reading tasks and a feeling of progression.

For teachers to enable students to experience such success they need to be able to understand the cognitive processes involved in the L2-learner comprehension of L2 written text. Most importantly, they need to be conversant with some recent research findings which are somewhat counter-intuitive and may force them to reconsider the way they teach not just reading, but all the other three macro-skills too.

Thus, in this post I set out to concisely outline how the human brain processes foreign language written text and explain why UK teachers may have to change their current instructional approach to reading.

Top-down processing accounts of L2 reading

Before the early 70’s the dominant theory of reading comprehension was that the reconstruction of the intended meaning of a text proceeds ‘bottom-up’, i.e. from the decoding of the smallest units (letters) to incrementally larger units, i.e.: words, then clause, then sentences, etc. Reading was seen as a linear process of recognizing one word after the other until the entire meaning of a sentence is grasped. This view of the reading process was discounted by subsequent research.

Seminal work by Goodman (1972) and subsequently Rumelhart (1980) turned reading theory upside-down (literally!). Rumelhart’s model of reading proposed that the human brain processes written text using top-down rather than bottom-up processing. His theory, rooted in cognitive psychology and still widely accepted by many scholars and researchers, posited the existence of cognitive structures called schemata which encapsulate all of our background knowledge with regards to specific life situations or concepts and consist of elaborate frameworks of objects and relations which we use to make sense of the world. For instance, when we think about a ‘haunted house’ we will activate schemata which contain all the experiences we had stored over the years about haunted houses – whether mediated by fiction or in real life. Schemata being also culturally situated, a Chinese learner’s schemata about a haunted house may be different from an Italian or a Maori’s. Schemata are, in this sense, the building blocks of cognition and “reflect the experiences, conceptual understanding, attitudes, values, skills, and strategies …[we] bring to a text situation” (Vacca & Vacca, 1999, p. 15).

To go back to the haunted house example. Imagine one is reading a short story about a haunted house (in their native language). Top down processing theory posits that that learner, in order to comprehend the text will apply his/her knowledge about the topic (content schemata) and of the genre-specific features of short-story texts (discourse schemata). Content and discourse schemata will be activated by cues in the text and applied to reconstruct the intended meaning; so, for instance the sentence ‘she saw a ghost’ will activate a range of expectations about the consequences of seeing a ghost (e.g  ‘she screamed’, ‘she ran’); one of them may match automatically what comes next or may not. Failure to understand, then, may mean that (a) the cue in the text is ineffective or (b) there is no schema in the brain which matches that cue and that text. In this sense, reading is not just a receptive skill, but require construction of meaning and cognition, in that, if we find in the text information we do not have a schema for, that information may result in the creation of a new one.

This model has been applied by L2 theorists and researchers to L2 reading, too: L2 learners would apply their content and formal schemata to makes sense of L2 text. Consistent with this theory, schemata application would not require the reader to recognize every single lexical item and morpheme. This psycholinguistic framework, viewing reading as a game of guessing, sampling, predicting, and verifying top-down hypotheses, emphasizes the role of higher level syntactic and semantic processes and minimizes the role of component and bottom-up processes.The application of schemata entailing that one does not need to decode every single word in the text, you may now understand why on your PGCE you were told that you should teach students to look for key words to enable them to understand texts. And I am sure quite a lot of you still model this strategy with GCSE, IB or A level groups.

However, just as I did, you too will have found that this inferential approach does not work all the time. In the absence of a solid and wide-ranging vocabulary repertoire, this inferential approach often leads students to making wrong assumptions about the intended meaning of L2 text. So, when someone uses the typical UK textbook with simple and predictable texts packed with known word and cognates about very familiar topics like daily routine, free time and hobbies, etc… this approach may work. With more complex and less predictable texts (e.g. authentic texts) however, this is often not the case.

Interactive models of L2 reading

Hence, more recently, the pendulum has swung back again: in recent years, scholars and researchers have re-discovered the importance of bottom-up processing in reading comprehension. New cognitive accounts of the reading process have been proposed which are widely accepted by the academic community: interactive models which recognize the synergy of top-down and bottom-up processing in reconstructing the intended meaning of L2-texts. From this perspective, it is claimed that information processing of text is driven by both bottom up and top-down information’ i.e. the processing of the physical stimuli (bottom-up processing) and the context provided by expectation and previous knowledge (top-down processing) (Carrell et al., 1998).  Prior knowledge with the help of accelerated bottom-up processes influences the perception, speed, and conceptual framework in reading processes. This view proposes multiple, independent, parallel routes simultaneously processing information with a cross-checking mechanism. Active routes are contingent upon the information presented, the individual’s knowledge and the task demands (Grabe, 2004).

In conclusion, whilst we read in the L2 our working memory activates different systems simultaneously to process the different levels of the text in an attempt to comprehend the author’s intended meaning: higher order skills (e.g. content schemata) and lower order skills (e.g. letter and word recognition).

The role of phonological processing and oral fluency in reading proficiency

One specific set of lower order skills has received particular attention in recent years: lower level verbal processing in working memory and, in particular phonological processing. There is a vast body of research evidence indicating that poor readers exhibits deficits in phonological processing and ability in general.

There are a number of reasons as to why efficient phonological processing correlates with high level of reading proficiency. Firstly, as discussed in previous posts (e.g. ‘Words in the minds’) the establishment of a complete and solid phonological representation for a word appears to be the first and the most important requisite for success in early L2 vocabulary acquisition for a young L2 learner (Segalowitz et al, 1991)

Secondly, there is clear evidence that meaning activation in Working Memory is mediated through phonology (e.g. Metsala & Ehri, 1998; Proctor, Carlo, August, and Snow, 2005). This is because when we learn a word, we encode it through its phonological representation (see my description of the role of articulatory loop in ‘Eight important facts about working memory’ for more info on this point); hence, when we identify a word, its phonological representation is automatically and very rapidly activated and precedes the retrieval of its meaning from Long-term memory. In other words, meaning activation is mediated by phonology.

Thirdly, rapid lower level verbal processing means that the brain can free up cognitive space in Working Memory during reading; this means that there is more space available for higher level cognitive processing, from the application of formal schemata (e.g. the analysis of grammar/syntax) to the application of content schemata.

Another important set of evidence points to a strong correlation between oral fluency and reading proficiency (e.g. Geva and Ryan, 1993 and Droop and Verhoeven, 2004). Droop and Verhoeven’s study is particularly interesting as the two groups they compared were equivalent at pre-test in terms of knowledge of vocabulary but not in terms of oral fluency; the group with higher levels of oral fluency were the more proficient readers. Hence better oracy skills correlated with more effective reading skills.

General implications for reading instruction in the foreign language classrooms

Effective reading comprehension being dependent on how effective top-down and bottom-up processing are performed, L2 reading instruction must concern itself with, on the one hand, training students in the skillful application of schemata; on the other, it must provide learners with masses of instruction in (a) topic-specific vocabulary and word-recognition skills; (b) metalinguistic knowledge (the ability to recognize parts of speech, noun/verb/adjective inflections, syntactic order, etc.) ; (c) discourse markers (connectives) and their function as text organizers and, much more than it is usually done, (d) phonological awareness.

It should be pointed out that of the four elements just listed, two, range of vocabulary and phonological awareness are the most widely acknowledged by research as effective enhancers of reading proficiency. Hence I strongly recommend these should take priority in our teaching of reading skills.

Practical implications

The obvious corollary of the above discussion for the foreign language classroom is that a sound approach to reading instruction must include fairly traditionally activities such as:

• Schemata activation activities – These should include; (1) pre-reading activities activating the background knowledge students have about the topic(s) dealt with in the to-be-read text (e.g. brainstorming student assumptions as to why people smoke before reading an article on the causes of smoking); (2) activities which require students to predict / infer what comes next in a text based on their knowledge of the world, e.g. jigsaw reading or ‘guess what comes next’ tasks (whereby a very short story where only the opening line is visible to start with is displayed on the classroom screen and the students have to infer what the next line is about); (3) before reading a challenging L2 text students may be asked to read similar texts in the L1- an idea originated with Krashen;
• Vocabulary building activities of the likes found at language-gym.com (work-outs section). These should be carried out routinely prior to engaging students in any reading task and should focus on the words included in the to-be-read texts in order to lessen cognitive load during reading; they should also be carried out after each reading task for consolidation purposes;
• Metalinguistic tasks engaging students in contextualized structural analysis of the target text (e.g. whereby students are asked to identify to what part-of-speech category words belong to)
• Extensive practice in the recognition of discourse markers (e.g. gap-fill or translation tasks);
• Narrow reading tasks – these kill a lot of birds with one stone as narrow reading helps enhancing vocabulary by constantly recycling it from text to text (five or six texts should be used) and by requiring the application of the same schemata set;
• Metacognitive retrospective tasks – students are asked to reflect on two or three main issues that impeded their understanding of the target text and what they could do to overcome them.

The most important implications for L2 reading instruction, however, refer to oral fluency and phonological skills and their link with reading proficiency. Teachers may have to focus much more than they currently do, in my experience on enhancing phonological awareness. In a previous post on ‘Listening micro-skills enhancers’ (https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/06/16/seven-micro-listening-enhancers-you-may-not-be-using-often-enough-in-your-lessons/)  I indicated several examples of very-easy-to-set-up activities that students enjoy, which focus on this hyper-neglected dimension of oracy.

Moreover, the evidence that higher levels of oral fluency correlate with higher levels of reading proficiency even when vocabulary range is equivalent entails that ways must be find to integrate lots of oral practice in the foreign language classroom – a pedagogical recommendation that I have often made in my posts, advocating that a substantial chunk of each lesson should be devoted to learner-to-learner oral interaction tasks (of the communicative sort).

Conclusions

Based on the above discussion teachers may have to rethink the way they teach reading skills. Firstly, their approach to reading skill instruction should focus systematically on both top-down and bottom-up processing skills. The two skills can be taught separately, obviously; they do not have to be explicitly integrated in every single lesson. Oral fluency, vocabulary building and phonological awareness must be focused on much more than it is currently done in foreign language lessons as they are pivotal to the development of reading proficiency.

A few days ago, one of my colleagues approached me in the MFL Department corridor to share a resource he referred to as ‘Parallel texts’ from Steve Smith’s www.frenchteacher.net . ‘This is excellent!’ – he said, showing me a worksheet (here: http://frenchteachernet.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/parallel-reading-texts-for-near.html) . This contained a text in French on daily routine on the left hand-side and its translation on the right; some comprehension activities were included, too. ‘My students find them very useful!’ he added.

I hardly needed any convincing as I had used Parallel Texts (French / Italian) myself in the past when working as a translator for the European Union in order to refine my English, day in day out for a few months – and it paid off; my English vocabulary, syntax and awareness of text-specific discourse features grew exponentially as a result. In this article I will show what the potential benefits of using parallel texts with L2 learners can be in light of L2 acquisition theory and how they can be best exploited, in my view, in the classroom and/or as homework.

How can they impact foreign language learning?

Benefit 1 – They encourage ‘noticing’

‘Noticing’ is a phenomenon first documented, in the L2 acquisition literature by Richard Schmidt. According to Schmidt’s (1990) ‘Noticing hypothesis’ the learning of a foreign language grammar structure cannot occur unless the learner ‘notices’ the gap between the way that structure is used in the target language and his/her own L1. In my classroom experience I have witnessed many a time that Eureka moment when a student said, almost thinking aloud, “Oh, I get it! ‘I went’ in French is actually ‘I am gone’. That would be an occurrence of ‘noticing’. Another common occurrence of this process is when our students process our feedback on error and notice the gap between our version and their erroneous output.

One of the benefits of parallel texts, when the translation is as faithful as possible to the text, is exactly that the co-occurrence, side by side, of the target language and the first language version on the same page facilitates ‘noticing’. What’s more, such noticing, occurs in an ‘authentic’ linguistic context (not on the board through teacher-led examples), under lighter cognitive load (as the translation facilitates information processing) and in a safe ‘environment’ (as the translation takes away the risk-taking that inference-making involves). It is advisable, obviously, when using parallel texts, to encourage and scaffold ‘noticing’ by asking, for example, metalinguistic questions on the text, which can become the springboard for an inductive or explicit grammar session on a specific grammar / lexical structure.

Bringing the importance of ‘noticing’ into the learners’ awareness as a powerful catalyst of language acquisition can, in my opinion, impact those students who are more motivated and metacognizant. In fact, if we aim at forging autonomous learners, fostering noticing is a must and I cannot think of any other reading or learning activity that lends itself as beautifully as Parallel texts to creating a context for learning to ‘notice’. They certainly worked for me as a learner.

Benefit 2 – They can effectively scaffold reading with less confident readers

This is especially true of less confident learners who are put off by texts with masses of words they do not understand. The fact that one knows that there is a translation one can fall back upon when one ‘doesn’t get it’, may lessen the anxiety levels of such learners and provide a solid affective scaffold. But won’t this, someone may argue, encourage over reliance on translation? It won’t if parallel texts are used sensibly, with the right students and emphasizing the importance of looking at the translation only when they are stuck or when they need to double check that their inferences are correct. The use of parallel texts as scaffolds for reading is recommended at the early stages of instruction; the translation support will be gradually phased out as the students become more confident.

Benefit 3 – Students learn vocabulary in context

Parallel texts are one of the most ‘authentic’ ways of presenting new lexical items, as the learners do not process the target vocabulary through artificial means (e.g. through flashcards) or in a vacuum (e.g. vocabulary lists), but in an authentic linguistic environment (e.g. articles, short stories, poems), without the direct mediation of or need for the teacher. Moreover the process is relatively effortless both for teachers and students, thanks to the translation. But would it not be better, instead of ‘spoon-feeding’ them, to get them to find out the target words meaning inductively? Surely, the cognitive investment would result in deeper processing and consequently ‘better’ learning, right?

The answer is: it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If my aim is to develop/enhance student reading strategy use, I will elect not to use parallel texts. However I will prefer parallel texts when they represent a first step in a sequence of vocabulary activities aimed at recycling ‘to death’ useful words/phrases I have identified in the text and I want my students to learn. Hence, being the ‘presentational’ stage in a planned sequence of tasks I will have my students process those items effortlessly, to start with (i.e. with the support of the translation). After this first stage, one can, for instance:

1. Gap the L2 or English version and ask the students to fill them in with the missing words (in the context of a multiple choice quiz)
2. Cut up / Jumble up the English text and ask the learners to rearrange it based on the French text;
3. Then the English translation may be removed and typical vocabulary building and reading comprehension activities can be carried out (e.g. matching lists of English words with L2 words in the text; matching lists of L2 words with synonyms in the text; true or false, questions and answers; summaries or even translations of specific parts of the text; etc.)
4. Another activity students enjoy is to be given a modified version of the original texts, where the L2 or the English text contains errors ‘planted’ by the teacher. The learners are told the number of mistakes in the translation and are given ‘X’ number of minutes to spot and fix them.

In order to sensitize the learners to the target words in the text, quizzes and other vocabulary activities can be carried out prior to reading the text, which focus the students on those words. This, in my experience, can significantly enhance retention of target lexis.

Benefit 4 – They facilitate access to more challenging texts

Often, at lower levels of proficiency, learners cannot access texts due not so much to the vocabulary per se, but because of the complexity of the grammar or syntax. Parallel texts make it possible for learners to access higher level texts by providing valuable support in this respect, by means of the bilingual translation.

Benefit 5 – Differentiation

Parallel texts can be very helpful in differentiation from a more practical point of view. Imagine you want to carry out one or more comprehension tasks on a text. You could first either download a parallel text from a source or create your own; then you could eliminate the translation altogether for the more able learners whilst keeping ‘bits’ for the less able. With a little bit of editing you will be able, in a few minutes, to obtain three or four differentiated versions of the original.

In conclusion, parallel texts are a very useful and versatile learning tool that can be used to (a) scaffold reading with less confident learners (by virtue of being ‘safer’); (b) to facilitate conscious or subconscious ‘noticing’ (thanks to the co-occurrence on the same sheet of the L1 and L2 version); (c) to differentiate (with little work on the teacher’s part) and (d) to present new vocabulary in context. The best examples of non-electronic parallel texts for lower levels of proficiency I have located on the web so far are found at http://www.frenchteacher.net . I hope that the author, Steve Smith, will carry on producing them targeting higher levels of proficiency, too. Great interactive online parallel texts can also be found at http://www.textivate.com.

The enhancement of reading skills proficiency in foreign language learners has never been as crucial to their linguistic and holistic development as in the 21^st century classroom, due to the prominent role that digital technology and the Internet play in their lives. The Internet allows foreign language students easier and cheaper access to masses of information without having to purchase or borrow a book, and allows for a vast variety of choice of topics and text-types.

The goals of reading in the 21^st century classroom

With this in mind, in this day and age, more than ever, in their daily practice, curriculum planners, L2-instructional material writers and teachers need to have reading proficiency development in their focal rather than subsidiary awareness, striving, as much as possible, to enable learners to become competent autonomous readers. This means ensuring that they :

1. WANT to read independently – this implies experiencing success and enjoyment in reading tasks in the classroom as well as being conversant with the benefits of reading for the enhancement of one’s overall L2-proficiency;
2. Have effective approaches to reading independently – this requires learners to have acquired (a) effective reading strategies to compensate for lack of vocabulary knowledge; (b) learning strategies (such as using dictionaries effectively and knowing how to select accurately website resources for reading);
3. Have a wide enough vocabulary repertoire to be able to read independently;

To this we must add the need for students who may one day pursue a career as translators or interpreters to acquire translation skills.

The problem

To what extent do published instructional materials, MFL departments’ schemes of work and teachers explicitly, regularly and consistently focus on the above? Let us take a look at some of the typical reading activities in foreign language lessons (in totally random order):

• Word-recognition tasks;
• Searching the target text for the L2 equivalent of a list of L1 words;
• Deciding if statements about a text are true / false (or not mentioned);
• Closed / open-ended questions on a text;
• Inferring how target grammar structures in a text work;
• Partial or full translation of a text;
• Practice of compensation strategies (inferring meaning from context);
• Reading for gist (students summarize the main points);
• Reading for pleasure;
• Gap-fills;
• Split sentences to match;
• Matching questions and answers;
• Looking for information we need to accomplish a typical real-life task;
• To model the use of the discourse features and conventions which characterize a specific text-type;
• Jigsaw reading (piecing a jumbled up text back together);

Research strongly indicates that most foreign language lessons in UK school settings focus mainly on reading comprehension tasks such as true or false, (closed) questions and answers, gap-fills, matching exercises and, to a lesser extent, split-sentences and jigsaw reading. Although there is a place for this kind of activities, they hardly serve the goals of reading instruction listed in points (1), (2) and (3) above.

What these activities do, is test students’ comprehension of the written text whilst implicitly modelling a perception that reading is about skimming and scanning texts for answers to questions. These tasks, do have the potential to enhance the foreign language learner’s reading proficiency, do not get me wrong, in that they require students to apply inference strategies to answers the questions they are asked and semantic analysis; moreover, if the students are allowed and encouraged to use dictionaries, they may learn some new language in the process. However, they do not always per se necessarily widen and consolidate learners’ vocabulary repertoire – unless each texts is recycled through a range of activities and has some pre-reading tasks building up to them and some post-reading ones aimed at consolidation.

Even at the level of strategies acquisition the learning gains of this practice may be overestimated. Research clearly indicates that for reading strategy instruction to be most effective, reading strategies need to be taught explicitly – which, in most cases, in my experience, doesn’t happen.

The most detrimental impact of exposing students mostly to reading comprehension tasks, in my view, refers to the affective domain: how do we motivate learners to enjoy reading for reading’s sake by perpetuating such practice day in day out? How can we model real-life-like reading behavior if students carry out reading tasks that do not really occur in the real world apart from trivia-quiz nights? Real-life reading tasks involve (i) comprehending the main points of  text – not necessarily as directed by the questions formulated by the teacher/textbook; (ii) finding information one needs for the accomplishment of a task, to fill gaps in their knowledge or (iii) simply reading to learn new things for the sake of personal enrichment. Such tasks are more likely to motivate foreign language learners than comprehension for comprehension’s sake. Not to mention the negative consequences for the motivation to read when learners who are less good at making intelligent guesses or inferring details consistently score poorly.

The personal enrichment aspect briefly touched upon above is, in my view, the least tapped into in the typical MFL lesson, possibly because it entails that the learners would have to have a higher degree of involvement in choosing what is read in class – which some teachers may disagree with. But if we want to model independent learning, this has to happen and, thanks to the internet and mobile technology, this is easier to implement in the 21^st century classroom.

From a cognitive point of view, another harmful effect refers to the fact that we do not engage our students in extensive reading often enough. Yet, this is crucial to develop their autonomous competence as readers. Extensive reading, must be actively promoted and scaffolded in class as well at home, as often as possible for it to become a habit to carry over to out-of-classroom student practice. Scaffolding is the key word here, as students will need reminders to read and materials, worksheets, google documents, Edmodo, Padlet or other platforms to log in new words they found, to ask the teacher for clarification, to express their response to the content, etc.

Grammar, too, is rarely linked to reading activities. Yet, recent research has found that readers who are able to analyze the language occurring in a text structurally, i.e. through the application of their knowledge of the L2-grammar rule system do have greater chances to understand a text than those who do not. Reading skills enhancing activities should therefore also include tasks which demand learners to analyze texts metalinguistically (e.g.: sorting specific words in the text into nouns, gender, tense; asking questions as to why an adjective has an ending rather than other, etc.) .

Implications for the enhancement of reading skills

Top-down and Bottom-up processing skills – Reading skills instruction should aim at developing Top-down processing and bottom-up processing skills. The former refer to reading strategies involving using previous knowledge about the topic and context of the text-in-hand to infer meaning. Bottom-up processing skills refer to the way the learner reconstructs a text’s meaning through the knowledge of vocabulary, grammar/syntax and sociolinguist features. In order to practice both sets of skills, just giving students reading comprehension ‘quizzes’, marking them and giving scores is not enough to impact reading proficiency. I advocate the following tactics:

1. Pre-reading tasks which (a) elicit background knowledge of the topic and context of the target text and model useful reading strategies and (b) present and practice the key vocabulary occurring in the target text;
2. Recycling of the same text through several activities to exploit its full linguistic potential across the lexical, grammatical and cultural dimensions. Such activities will involve word-recognition; finding target language equivalent in the text of L1 word (see www.frenchteacher.net for examples) ; scanning the text in search of synonyms of a list of L2 words; grammatical analysis; comprehension questions, true or false and gap-fills. Text manipulation activities of the like found on www.textivate.com can also be very useful.
3. Post-reading receptive and productive tasks aiming at consolidating the vocabulary and the grammar ( odd one outs, categories, gap-fills, split sentences – see www.language-gym.com/work-outs for more example)

Real-life reading activities – in order to enhance student motivation and effectively scaffold independent Internet-based out-of-the-classroom reading, reading activities should also include the same activities the learners engage in real life, whether for pleasure (e.g. reading media gossip about a pop-star, synopsis of a movie, reviews of videogames, short stories, poems, magazines articles ) or to accomplish a task (checking the train schedule; researching information for a piece of homework; finding out where one can buy a given product at the cheapest price, booking a holiday online).

Student-driven text selection -teachers ought to give students a degree of choice as to what is read in the class. This can be done fairly easily in settings where students have tablets, personal computers or mobile devices. When this is not possible, the teacher could carry out a survey to find out what students are interested in and select the target texts accordingly. Teachers should not be afraid to be high jacked away from the topic under study a few lessons per term.

Reading longer texts – This should become a habit amongst our students, starting with simplified readers or using parallel texts of the likes found on the excellent www.frenchteacher.net and culminating in the use of longer short-stories. Reading clubs can be set up with the support of school librarians, parents or older students. I personally have found extensive reading to be very useful in enhancing reading and language proficiency overall.

Web-related learning strategies – students should be made aware of what the most effective approaches to developing reading skills on the web are. This will include advising them on where to find resources suitable for their level of proficiency; modelling ways to exploit such resources effectively; how to use online dictionaries or forums where to seek linguistic support (e.g. the wordreference.com one); how to store and organize effectively the new vocabulary they come across and even how to use it for self-teaching (e.g. by using quizlet or memrise).

In conclusion, textbooks and teachers should be more creative, eclectic and systematic in their approach to reading skills practice and enhancement. The development of an effective and motivated Internet-savvy autonomous L2 reader should be at the heart of any pedagogic approach to reading instruction in the 21^st century. This entails providing the learners with effective cognitive tools (reading strategies), adequate L2 declarative knowledge (vocabulary and grammar), an enhanced awareness of how the Internet can help them improve their reading skills (web-related learning strategies) and opportunities for reading-related enjoyment and personal enrichment.