Online reading strategy guidance in a Foreign Language

Abstract

This paper reports on an online guided reading program designed and developed by the authors, and implemented in class conditions. The program allows students to read a short story from a computer screen and obtain immediate support, in the form of suggested problem-solving strategies designed to help them overcome the lexical and grammatical difficulties commonly encountered by intermediate language students, at local text level, during the reading process. Based on the analysis of case studies of readers, the chief objective of this study is to gauge the pedagogical relevance of the guided reading program and suggest that it facilitates intermediate language students’ first encounters with literary texts.

Reading Online in Foreign Languages: A Study of Strategy Use

“…In contrast, as research evidence also suggested (Bouvet & Close, 2011;Garner, 1987;Paris & Myers, 1981;Poole, 2008), poor readers maintain less knowledge of and control over these above-mentioned strategies. What is worse, oftentimes, poor readers may even uphold incorrect concepts about what reading strategies are, and they do not distinguish good strategies from poor strategies.…”

“…Skilled readers, when reading, as scholars (Bouvet & Close, 2011;Forrest-Pressley & Waller, 1984;Huang, Chern, & Lin, 2009;Park & Kim, 2011;Poole, 2008) identified, are not merely able to decode and comprehend the linguistic features of a reading passage. More importantly, they possess some knowledge about certain reading skills and strategies and are able to take control of them to facilitate their reading tasks.…”