Given the central role played by texts in the multiliteracies approach, reading is perhaps the most important modality for teaching the linguistic, sociocultural, and cognitive dimensions of a FL. We consider it so significant not because other linguistic modalities are less so but because developing strategies for scaffolding student comprehension and analysis of written FL texts is a foundational element, for example, in creating oral communication opportunities and in designing transformed practice activities in which students react to texts or use model texts to create new ones of their own. In other words, shaping how learners interact with written texts is a necessary starting point for focusing on the development of other linguistic modalities. In addition, many strategies for reading-focused instruction that align with the multiliteracies approach find their parallels in similar or identical strategies for working with FL audio or videotexts.

Yet despite the inherent importance of reading in this approach, its place in lower-level FL instruction is far from evident. FL instructors may ask themselves questions such as how learners with limited linguistic competencies can engage with authentic FL texts, how such texts might be integrated into a course without losing one’s focus on the mastery of lexico-grammatical structures, or whether reading should even be a primary focus alongside the development of oral communication abilities in a language-focused course (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016). As Kern (2000) wrote,

Reading complex texts for which they are not the intended readers, language learners must learn to navigate through unfamiliar vocabulary, grammar structures, and cultural references. They must also learn to deal with frustrating silences—when cultural presuppositions remain tacit and keep the foreign reader at arm’s length from understanding (p. 129).

Perhaps due to the linguistic and cultural difficulty posed by authentic written texts as Kern highlighted above, they are often absent or limited to the sideline in elementary FL textbooks, and teachers either do not use them, relying instead on simplified, non-authentic texts, or reserve them for the end of instructional units (i.e., as a sort of cumulative activity to synthesize various functions and structures) or for inclusion on summative assessments to gauge student comprehension of targeted functions and structures. These practices reflect a traditional view of reading in which skill development was thought to “procee[d] linearly—moving from listening, to speaking, to reading, and finally, to writing,” meaning that “students were seldom taught how to read in another language until they first developed their aural and oral skills” (p. 169). As such, the role of reading in lower-level FL instruction has often been limited to a support skill for practicing language rather than a primary means of exploring the FL and its culture(s) and for providing models of meaning design.

In line with both communicative language teaching (CLT) and the place of reading in the advanced-level university FL classroom, when reading authentic FL texts does occur, often it is relegated to outside-class status, meaning that students typically read the text on their own at home, talk about it during the following class with their instructor and colleagues, and then write reactions or analysis of the text outside class by themselves. As such, reading becomes a private act of textual decoding, typically carried out for comprehension of surface-level facts. As Kern (2000) cautioned, this traditional approach to FL reading is problematic, given that

many students are not trained in the types of reading that teachers often tacitly expect them to do … teachers may need to start off by leading students to recognize the kinds of textual phenomena, social interactions, information, and uses they hope students will ultimately recognize on their own when they read (p. 131).

In fact, the process of FL reading is complex and multi-faceted, a notion that we will now explore in greater detail.

Factors and processes in FL reading

As mentioned above, FL reading is a process that involves numerous dimensions—linguistic, cognitive, and sociocultural—as one attempts to establish comprehension of the text. Although it might be assumed logically that the most important factor in FL reading is overall proficiency in the language being read, research has shown that linguistic competency is only part of the story (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016). In fact, Bernhardt’s (2005) meta-analysis of a large body of research on FL reading revealed that a group of factors including strategy use, content and domain knowledge, engagement, interest, and motivation account for up to half of the variance in FL comprehension, becoming more important as FL proficiency improves. Lexico-grammatical knowledge about the FL, somewhat surprisingly, explains up to 30 percent of variance in comprehension, whereas first-language literacy (including knowledge of text structure and beliefs about word and sentence configuration) accounts for up to 20 percent. These findings suggest that, in reality, FL reading involves far more than simply transferring L1 reading ability to the FL or decoding strings of FL words to make meaning. As Kucer (2009) pointed out, successful readers

are not just literate in the L1 and linguistically capable in the FL, but they are also adept at using existing knowledge to make sense of new information, asking questions before, during, and after reading, drawing inferences from a text, monitoring their comprehension, using compensatory strategies when meaning breaks down, determining what is important in a text, and synthesizing information (as quoted in Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016, p. 140-141).

Conclusions such as Kucer’s (2009) highlight not only the knowledge base that underlies successful FL reading but also the cognitive dimension or the psychological processes that the reading process entails. The dominant models that characterize these reading processes are bottom-up, top-down, and interactive. Bottom-up processing models are text-oriented, so textual meaning is constructed through letters, words, phrases, and sentences. Skills in bottom-up processing are developed through activities like decoding, syntactic feature recognition, and word segmentation. Top-down processing models, on the other hand, are reader-driven and holistic in the sense that textual meaning is constructed through background knowledge and drawing inferences in relation to the text. Skills in top-down processing are developed through activities like hypothesizing and predicting—in other words, they involve active collaboration on the part of the reader. Reflecting characteristics of both of these models are interactive processing models, in which textual meaning is constructed through simultaneously accessing reader- and text-based variables and text processing is multidimensional (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016). This third model is most in line with what current SLA research has revealed about reading in a FL—namely, that it is a complicated, multidimensional process involving a complex array of numerous factors (Hall, 2001).

In recent years, cognitively oriented models of FL reading have resulted in process-oriented instruction, which entails pre-reading activities for activating the learner’s background knowledge and expectations related to the text; while-reading activities, which move from global to detailed comprehension of the text; and post-reading activities, which require learners to productively use language forms and ideas from the text. Although this pedagogy has had a significant impact on CLT-oriented approaches to FL reading, as Paesani, Allen, and Dupuy (2016) pointed out, because of its almost exclusive cognitive bent, these approaches “leave aside the social and contextual factors essential to language learning and to the multiliteracies framework” (p. 142). We will now turn to a brief discussion of the role of reading in a multiliteracies approach.

Reading and the multiliteracies framework

Whereas reading in a FL was traditionally conceived as an act of decoding a set of linguistic symbols and absorbing information, in a multiliteracies perspective, it is viewed not as a receptive skill but a recursive act of meaning design that involves interaction between the text and reader and the reader creating discourse from the text (Hall, 2001; Kern, 2000). It is further seen not just as an individual act but a social one, in the sense that reading reflects a set of patterned literacy practices tied to and reflecting a group, community or culture and can connect learners to the world around them (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016). Allen and Paesani (2010) defined reading in a multiliteracies approach as the “active, dynamic process of creating form-meaning connections through interpretation or creation of texts” (p. 122). This view of FL reading in a multiliteracies approach leads to a new goal concerning its role, not for learners to arrive at normative native interpretations but instead to “explore multiple meanings and to understand that their interpretation may well be different, even in opposition to certain ‘native’ interpretations … and to come to see how interpretations arise from interactions between a text and the readers cultural assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, and values” (Kern, 2008, p. 375).

Given this conception of reading, it follows that in a multiliteracies approach to FL instruction, reading-focused pedagogy focuses on helping students to engage in meaning design by attending to various linguistic and schematic Available Designs (which you read about in the Introduction module as well as other modules) found in texts and drawing on existing knowledge to construct textual meaning (Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016).

Unlike in traditional approaches, FL reading is carefully scaffolded, occurring in collaborative classroom activities rather than at home in the hands of individual learners. Kern (2000) explained that these activities distinguish themselves from reading-focused activities in traditional approaches insomuch that the relationship among the linguistic modalities is not linear but reading, writing, speaking, and listening often overlap and co-occur. This pedagogy is further grounded in the four curricular components of situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. These pedagogical components involve immersing the learner in written language (situated practice), receiving direct assistance in the complexities of reading FL texts (overt instruction), evaluating and analyzing what one reads (critical framing), and reshaping or redesigning texts (transformed practice) (Kern, 2000). The following table lists a selection of reading-focused activities suggested by Hall (2001) and Kern (2000) that align with each of the four curricular components.

A perusal of these activities suggests the integrated, overlapping nature of how various linguistic modalities are mobilized in reading-focused multiliteracies instruction.

References

– Allen, H. W., & Paesani, K. (2010). Exploring the feasibility of a pedagogy of multiliteracies in introductory foreign language courses. L2 Journal 2(1), 119-142.

– Bernhardt, E. (2005). Progres and procrastination in second language reading. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25, 133-150.

– Hall, J. K. (2001). Methods for teaching foreign languages: Creating a community of learners in the classroom. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prenctice Hall.

– Kern, R. (2008). Making connections through texts in language teaching. Language Teaching 41, 367-387.

– Kucer, S. B. (2009). Dimensions of literacy: A conceptual base for teaching reading and writing in school settings (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

This module includes:
• A short webinar led by an expert on the topic
• A few core readings and a set of learning activities to consider before, during, and after reading
• A series of pedagogical applications
• A reflective teaching prompt which engages teachers to think back on their experience preparing and implementing a literacy-based lesson
• A few additional resources, which will include: 2-4 annotated references, including one that focuses on advanced instruction; 4-6 additional references for this who wish to dig deeper into the topic; links