An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

husband telephoned me on the Friday’, and depending on which word is made most 
prominent, this utterance will carry different implications – compare, for instance:
// her 
HUSBAND
 telephoned me on the friday// (not anybody else)
// her husband 
TELEPHONED
 me on the friday// (he did not talk to me face to face)
// her husband telephoned 
ME
 on the friday// (not anybody else)
// her husband telephoned me on the 
FRIDAY
// (not on another day)
Similarly, when we read, say, a bedtime story to a child, we enact and bring to life 
all the meanings conveyed by the use of sounds, all from the inert printed words 
in front of us – by the way we use intonation, pauses, voice quality, stress and 
segmental sounds.
It is in a similar spirit that readers are invited to bring the record of the interaction 
below to life. Since this chapter deals with speaking and pronunciation in second 
or foreign language learning and teaching, it seemed appropriate to focus on an 
instructional setting and on protagonists who are (intermediate/low advanced) 
learners of English.
Read the conversation transcript below and answer the questions following it. 
The conversation took place in the following context: A and B are students at a 
London college, studying for an examination in advanced spoken English (as a 
foreign language). They are engaged in a communication task: B, a Japanese female 
student is describing an alpine scene to her male Swiss-German interlocutor, A.

---

214 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
He has the same set of six pictures as her, although in a different order. His task is 
to identify in his set the picture being described.
B1: 
Mm there are a lot of cars around the hotel and the cars,
some cars are f-covered with snow, and I can see three red 
[pronounced /led/] cars in front of the hotel
A1: Pardon, 
three?
B2: 
Three red /led/ cars in front of hotels. And there are some 
people who are going to skiing I think. And it’s quite shi-mm 
it’s very sh-sun the sun is shining very brightly . . . and I can 
see the mark, ‘P’ on the wall of the first floor of the hotel 
[laughs]
A2: 
Ah yeah . . . Do you see the sky on the picture?
B3: Yes, 
yes.
A3: 
Okay, then I know which one it is [identifies the picture to B]
B4: 
Yeah, yes xx [unintelligible]
A4: 
I didn’t understand the let cars. What do you mean with
this?
B5: 
Let cars? Three red [pronounced /red/] cars.
A5: Ah 
red.
B6: Red.
A6: 
Now I understand. I understood car to hire, to let. Ah red,
yeah I see.
(From Jenkins, 2000: 81; supplemented by more co-text provided by J. Jenkins.)
Questions
• How does the text unfold? Does it have an overall generic structure?
• How do the speakers’ choices of grammar and vocabulary reflect the various stages 
of the text?
• What features of ‘online’ processing of speech are evident?
• What strategies does A use to manage and negotiate the topic?
• Where are follow-up turns made? What do you notice about them?
• On which level (segmental or suprasegmental) does the main pronunciation problem 
seem to be? How do you explain this problem, and what would you do as a teacher to 
try and help with it? Would you only work on the pronunciation or also on the perception 
aspects of this problem? How would an understanding of phonology help you in your 
teaching task?

---

Reading
Patricia L. Carrell
Georgia State University
William Grabe
Northern Arizona University
Introduction
Interest in second language reading research and practice has increased 
dramatically in the past 15 years. Part of this interest is due to the increasing 
recognition that reading abilities are critical for academic learning, and that 
L2 reading represents the primary way that L2 students can learn on their own 
beyond the classroom. Part of the interest is due to the increasing recognition 
that we all live in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural world, one that is becoming 
more interconnected through global media and the new global economy. Part 
of this interest evolves out of increasing numbers of immigrant and language 
minority students in mainstream L1 educational systems around the world and 
efforts to address their needs appropriately. Without a doubt, L2 reading research 
and instruction will grow in importance in the coming decade.
Reading, as is true of all aspects of language knowledge and use, is complex 
and the development of fluent reading abilities by L2 students is a challenging 
undertaking. In this chapter we outline some of the complexities involved with 
L2 reading, key issues concerning L2 reading processes and learning, and some of 
the implications of these issues for instructional practice.
What is Reading?
Because we read for a variety of purposes, we often vary the cognitive processes and 
knowledge resources that we use. Therefore, it is not straightforward to identify one 
purpose for reading as the single way to interpret what we mean by ‘reading’. The 
many purposes for reading, although drawing on the same cognitive processes and 
knowledge resources, do so in differing combinations and with varying emphases 
on these processes and resources. For example, when we want information from 
a manual, we will search for that information by some combination of scanning 
for key terms and skimming small segments for meaning to see if we are in the 
right area of the text. When we read a newspaper we read headlines and often 
skim news stories to see if we want to slow down and read more carefully. When 
we read a good novel at night, we generally do not skim (unless we get bored), but 
we usually do not read carefully to remember details either. When we are trying to 
learn new information, we read more slowly, thinking about how information fits 
with prior information in the text and with our own background knowledge. As 
we read for all of these different purposes, we shift how we employ our cognitive 
processes and knowledge resources (Grabe, 2009).
It is possible to talk about a number of these purposes with general labels, such as 
scanning, skimming, reading for general understanding, reading to learn, reading 
to integrate information and reading to evaluate critically. To understand these 
13

---

216 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
purposes better, we need to determine how the underlying cognitive processes 
and resources systematically relate to the ability to achieve these purposes. Thus, 
in line with Carver (1992), scanning is a reading process that requires recognition 
of a visual form (number, word or phrase) that can be matched to forms in the 
text. It does not require semantic processing and it can usually be carried out at 
a rate of 600 words per minute (wpm). Reading for understanding is a process 
requiring visual and semantic processing and the construction of the summary 
version of what the text means. It is usually carried out by fluent readers at 
about 250–300 wpm. Reading to learn is a process that requires, in addition to a 
summary version of what the text means, an array of elaborated relations created 
among the sets of information being processed. These relations form hierarchies 
of text interpretation and they need to be combined with the reader’s prior topical 
knowledge. For fluent readers, such a process seems to be carried out at about 200 
wpm. (Younger readers do not read fluently, but progress in efficiency through 
school grades. By the middle to end of secondary level education, most students 
read fluently at the rates noted above.)
For this chapter, we will assume that L2 readers in academic settings most often 
need to develop ‘reading for understanding’ and ‘reading to learn’. Under both 
reading purposes, it is possible to say that ‘comprehension occurs when the reader 
extracts and integrates various information from the text and combines it with 
what is already known’ (Koda, 2005: 4). At the same time, this definition does 
not indicate the many components of the required cognitive processing or the 
knowledge bases being integrated during the reading process. Thus, a definition 
of reading requires some recognition that a reader engages in processing at the 
phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels, and also 
engages in goal setting, text-summary building, interpretive elaborating from 
knowledge resources, monitoring and assessment of goal achievement, adjusting 
processing to enhance comprehension, and repairing comprehension processing 
as needed. Moreover, these activated processes and resources (in working memory) 
are integrated under intense processing-time constraints. With this more elaborate 
definition of reading, it becomes apparent that the nature and development of 
L2 reading is complex. It is also apparent that developing fluent L2 readers is a 
challenging task requiring much time, resources and effort.
Reading in a Second Language
Aside from the complexity involved in understanding the nature of reading, 
there are further complexities for L2 readers. L2 readers exhibit the full range of 
variation that can be found for L1 readers (variation in training, age, schooling, 
motivation, socio-economic level, as well as individual cognition). In addition, 
these L2 readers are usually acquiring a complex cognitive ability that is in some 
ways distinct from L1 reading. L2 readers do not have the same language resources 
as L1 readers at the outset of learning; they do not share all the social and cultural 
assumptions and knowledge bases that L1 readers use when reading in their own 
language; they do not share all the background knowledge that is often assumed 
about ‘how the world works’; they often are learning in the second language for 
various reasons – to return to their home country, to integrate in the L2 society, 
to build on an educational base that is already in place from earlier L1 schooling 
– and they are working with cognitive resources and processing that involve two 
different languages.

---

217
Reading
These differences have at least three consequences. First, research in L2 reading 
will need to examine the potential impact of these differences and cannot simply 
assume that results of research on L1 reading will apply in L2 contexts. Second, these 
differences suggest that L2 readers may employ cognitive resources in somewhat 
different ways from L1 readers, especially where there are clear differences 
between the L1 and the L2 (for example, the mapping of sounds and graphemic or 
orthographic forms may differ in two languages) (Grabe, 2009; Koda, 2005). Third, 
the actual cognitive processes themselves may be somewhat different simply as a 
result of working with more than one language (for example, L1 and L2 words may 
be stored and accessed differently in the lexicon; transfer from the L1 may affect L2 
reading) and these possibilities need to be explored (Cook and Bassetti, 2005; Koda, 
2007). The recognition that L2 reading is in some ways similar to and in some ways 
different from L1 reading deserves attention because the differences represent a 
major reason for carrying out L2 reading research.
L2 Reading Versus L1 Reading
In some cases, the differences between L1 and L2 reading contexts are matters 
of degree; in other cases there are strong qualitative differences between the 
two that motivate important research questions and instructional practices. 
Major differences between L1 and L2 reading can be categorized according to 
three groupings: linguistic and processing differences; other individual and 
experiential differences; and socio-cultural and institutional differences (Grabe, 
2009; Grabe and Stoller, 2002; Koda, 2005). Within these groupings, the following 
12 differences represent important elements in understanding the nature of L2 
reading development, which also serve to drive L2 reading research.
Key Linguistic and Processing Differences
1 Differing amounts of lexical, grammatical, and discourse knowledge at 
beginning stages of L1 and L2 reading. L1 students usually know several 
thousand words orally in their L1 before starting to read. They also implicitly 
know most of the basic syntactic structures of the language, and they have 
already had experiences with the way stories and other genres are structured.
2 Varying linguistic differences across any two languages and varying language-
transfer influences. L2 students often come from languages that use different 
orthographies or different ways to encode information in orthography. These 
differences across languages also may generate significant differences in the 
way the print is processed and in the types of transfer that may or may not 
occur.
3 Interacting influences of working with two languages. L2 students build and 
use a bilingual mental lexicon of some type (see Chapter 8, Psycholinguistics); 
they engage in bilingual processing of language structures and semantic 
interpretations; they engage in translating; they have relatively varying 
fluencies in the two languages; they make varying uses of each language in 
differing sociolinguistic domains. They also learn their L2 at different times in 
their lives and they experience varying degrees of interdependence between 
the two languages.
4 Varying L2 proficiencies as a foundation for L2 reading. L2 students come to 
reading tasks with a wide range of L2 proficiencies. The obvious consequences 

---

218 An Introduction to Applied Linguistics
of this variation is demonstrated by their abilities to carry out different reading 
tasks successfully and to read for multiple purposes. Less obvious consequences 
also involve motivation, the role of language transfer, socio-cultural factors 
and several other issues (many noted below).
Key Individual and Experiential Differences
This second set of factors that separate L1 and L2 reading are less commonly 
investigated, but the results available suggest that these differences play important 
roles in L2 reading development. In particular, they suggest that L1 reading findings 
and their implications need to be examined in light of L2 research findings rather 
than be assumed to apply to L2 instruction.
5 Differing levels of L1 reading abilities among the L2 students.
6 Differing amounts of exposure to L2 print.
7 Differing motivations for reading in the L2.
8 Differing kinds of texts in L2 settings.
9 Differing language learning resources for L2 readers.
Key Socio-cultural and Institutional factors
Socio-cultural topics for L2 reading are relatively unexplored empirically except for 
the work under contrastive rhetoric, and further research is needed (Goldenberg, 
Rueda and August, 2006). The L2 research to date suggests that these differences 
can influence the development of L2 reading abilities above and beyond the 
differences noted above (Grabe, 2009; Hudson, 2007).
10 Differing socio-cultural backgrounds of L2 readers.
11 Differing ways to organize discourse and texts in L1 and L2 settings.
12 Differing expectations of educational institutions in L1 and L2 settings.
Issues in L2 Reading
Automaticity and Word Recognition
Word recognition is at the centre of reading fluency and automaticity. Given the 
importance of words in reading, it is not surprising that much of the research in 
second or foreign language reading has focused on vocabulary issues (see below;