Lesenlernen fremder sprachen: Laboratoriumsexperimente und empirischpädagogische folgeuntersuchungen

Abstract

The question of how to teach foreign-language reading comprehension to adults having no command of the foreign language remains difficult to answer and so far research on reading cannot provide teachers with clear and satisfactory methods. This paper presents two studies: experiments on learning to read foreign languages, and observational studies in real classroom situations of a beginning French reading-course. The experiments are rather small-scale investigations not intended to answer the above question but to clear up some basic aspects of foreign-language reading and especially to study the role and influence of an audiolingual component. We developed special selfinstructional materials for the purposes of this experiment and reduced the foreign audiolingual component to zero in two of the three experimental groups — thus only one group had audiolingual material but the written program was equal for all groups. The foreign languages involved were Serbo-croatian in the two original versions of script (cyrillic and roman) and Japanese. There is strong empirical evidence in both studies that learning to read a foreign language does not firstly mean decoding to sound but the development of receptive analytical skills in order to get the right meaning of written language.