Metacognitive Awareness and Second Language Reading

Abstract

second language reading has begun to focus, among other things, on readers' strategies. In the same way that investigating speakers' communicative strategies reveals the ways speakers manage oral communication, comprehension, input, and thus, ultimately, acquisition (Wenden & Rubin), reading strategies are of interest for what they reveal about the way readers manage their interaction with written text and how these strategies are related to text comprehension. Since the 1970s there has been no shortage of L2 learning theorists advocating teaching students to use a variety of reading strategies in order to read better.' These strategies run the gamut from the traditionally recognized reading skills of skimming and scanning, contextual guessing or skipping unknown words, tolerating ambiguity, reading for meaning, critical reading, and making inferences, to more recently recognized strategies such as building and activating appropriate background knowledge (Zvetina) and recognizing text structure (Block).2 Less common have been empirical investigations into reading strategies actually used by successful and unsuccessful second language learners (Hosenfeld; Hauptman; Knight, Padron & Waxman; Sarig; Block; Barnett). In exploratory, descriptive investigations of small numbers of individual learners using think-aloud techniques, studies by both Hosenfeld and Block identified apparent relations between certain types of reading strategies and successful or unsuccessful foreign or second language reading. For example, Hosenfeld's successful reader: 1) kept the meaning of the passage in mind during reading; 2) read in broad 3) skipped words viewed as unimportant to total phrase meaning; and 4) had a positive self-concept as a reader. By contrast, Hosenfeld's unsuccessful reader: 1) lost the meaning of sentences as soon as they were decoded; 2) read in short phrases; 3) seldom skipped words as unimportant, viewing words as equal in terms of their contribution to total phrase meaning; and 4) had a negative selfconcept as a reader. Block, in a study focused on generally nonproficient readers, found that four characteristics seem to differentiate more