Teaching reading as creating meaning from texts

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