Even if a foreign language student is an able decoder in English, the level of effort required to read for meaning in real time academic situations can be a monumental task. Look how author Richard Rodriguez (1982) describes his own reading in English as a new language: “Most books, of course, I barely understood. While reading Plato’s Republic, I needed to keep looking at the book jacket to remind myself what the text was about”. One might ask how Rodriguez could be reading a book at such an advanced level in English but still not reading with comprehension. How could he read and yet not read? And what is it that makes reading in a new language so overwhelming? Perhaps part of the answer can be found in the less extensive listening vocabulary upon which foreign language students can draw when reading written words, they have never seen before. Part of it may result from incomplete knowledge of the syntax and grammar patterns of English. When we struggle with sentences in a new language, reading takes a great deal of cognitive energy. As a result, retaining the gist of the previous sentences in a paragraph or of previous paragraphs in working memory is hard to do as we move through a text. Even when decoding is no longer very effortful, it is still much harder to move along through a text and construct meaning from it as we read in a new language. We might describe this as a real-time “delay”, which has to do with discursive practices. When the rate of processing discursive meaning from text can’t “catch up” with the rate of our decoding, the result may be the strange phenomenon of decoding but not comprehending, as lamented by Richard Rodriguez above.
LEMS, Kristin; MILLER, Leah D.; SORO, Tenema M. Teaching Reading to English Language Learners. Insights from Linguistics. New York and London: 2010, pp. 171-2. (Adapted).
The excerpt discusses what the author calls ‘real-time delay’ in English as a foreign language students’ reading ability. After reading this passage, choose the best alternative that may define this real-time delay.
