Chapter 7: Comprehension and Compensatory Processing in Advanced L2 Readers

This study focuses on first year biology students at Stockholm University who are assumed by the Swedish university system to be able to read textbooks in English. These students are compared with first year biology students at two British universities, all of whom were first language (L1) readers of English. Several components of reading comprehension are compared. The Swedish readers are subdivided on the basis of a reading comprehension test into two subgroups, referred to as the ‘very’ advanced and the ‘less’ advanced second language (L2) groups. Other measures of reading skill are then used to compare the two Swedish groups with each other and with the L1 group.

The results indicate that the very advanced Swedish readers of English are fully comparable to the L1 readers on reading comprehension and inferencing tasks. However, these very advanced L2 students were nonetheless somewhat weaker on vocabulary, recall, and word recognition (lexical decision) tasks when compared to the L1 students. It is speculated that the L2 readers generally use inferencing, in the form of general world knowledge and bridging inferences, as a means of compensating for lack of automaticity in low level processing. The less advanced Swedish readers, who comprise the majority of the L2 students, were considerably weaker than the very advanced students on all tests, suggesting that these students may in fact be considerably disadvantaged in having to read course material (in this case biology) in English.

A coefficient of variation was calculated for the word recognition speed test and the sentence coherence recognition speed test as an indicator of automaticity for the L1 group and the L2 group as a whole. For word recognition there was a clear difference, but for sentence coherence the difference was less apparent. A possible explanation is that some of the sentence coherence test items were contrary to expectation and forced the L1 subjects to slow down and consciously work out whether the sentence was coherent or not.

The general conclusions are (1) that the majority of Swedish students do not meet the English reading expectations of the university system, and (2) a minority of the Swedish students, although they had lower scores on vocabulary and recall tasks and less automaticity on the response-time tasks than the L1 readers, seemed to compensate for these weaknesses with inferencing skills, allowing them to achieve comparable reading comprehension product to the L1 readers.