Chapter 5: What Don’t You Understand?: Understanding Misunderstandings in Foreign Language Reading

In spoken Foreign Language (FL) discourse, some misunderstandings can actually lead to further negotiation of meaning, and ultimately clarification. What happens, however, when misunderstandings occur in the context of FL reading? The parameters of negotiability become more limited, although negotiation of sorts occurs. Research on misunderstandings in discourse written in a FL is sparse, albeit such research could further our knowledge of the reading process and inform interactive models of FL reading. In the research we report here, we analyze 120 reading recalls of a Spanish passage that obtained a significantly higher number of misunderstandings compared to three other passages to ascertain what was misunderstood and why. Our subjects were second-year Spanish students enrolled in an intensive six-hours-per-day three-week program at a large state university. Our analysis of the reading recalls, which were written in English, indicated that most misunderstandings fell into two broad categories: linguistically-based and cognitively-related misunderstandings. These conspired to break down comprehension. As a result of our analysis, we profile the reading behavior of FL learners of limited FL proficiency when faced with a culturally laced topic of which they have little knowledge. Our findings suggest that readers process the language they understand and then, because of propositional deficits and limited language proficiency, they fill in the gaps with propositions that work at that particular juncture, irrespective of whether they make sense or follow any cohesive thread.