Facilitating Effects of Marginal Glosses on Foreign Language Reading

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larly amenable channel for second language acquisition is well established (Krashen).1 Recently, arguments have been advanced supporting the reading of L2 literary texts as powerful sources of linguistic and cultural input (Kramsch; Goldenstein). In fact, the use of any authentic selection is apparently very appealing to foreign language students in the US (Swaffar). The understanding of such passages can be improved by the L2 reader's use of knowledge of text topic and structure (Hudson; Carrell). Many literary passages, however, contain so many low-frequency vocabulary items that the reader's background knowledge may be unavailable because of the undue attention required to decode individual word meanings. In this case, reading no longer provides a minimally stressful access to real language but becomes instead a threeto four-hour ordeal, mainly because of the [non-native reader's] constant recourse to a dictionary (Crow: p. 242). The importance of vocabulary is underscored by a study which found that, in certain contexts, just one unfamiliar word can render a sentence or even a whole passage incomprehensible (Wittrock, Marks & Doctorow). One traditional means of bridging the gap between the L2 text and the L2 reader's limited cultural