DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED BY READERS WHILE READING

▣ DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED BY READERS WHILE READING

① GLOBAL PROCESSING DIFFICULTIES

■ When perceived from their point of view, readers often face a dilemma concerning the plausibility of the message or the informed motion presented in the text. In cases like these, we say that there is a mismatch between the reader's view of the world and the view that seems to be presented in the text.

 

 

 

■ Since, at this intratextual level of processing, there needs to be an interaction between global coherence and local coherence, language teachers can help students look for and recognize some of the features related to these concepts by asking these questions: Where did the text appear and what do we know about the journal or the book where it occurred? Who is the author, and what do we know about them? When was the article or text published, and what were the issues of concern? Strategies that combine top-down processing with scanning the text for critical sentences can help the reader construct the overall coherence of the text.

 

 

 

■ Another difficulty might be in the interaction between old and new inſormation. This starts with the writer making certain assumptions about prior or shared knowledge with the reader. There are linguistic, cohesive devices that separate new information from old information in the text, but the assumed background knowledge usually cannot be retrieved from the text since it is extratextual in nature. In these passages, Whitehead assumes that all readers of his article have some basic knowledge about universities; without such background knowledge, they could not make sense of the writer's particular message.

 

 

 

■ To identify old and new information in the text and thus evaluate the writer's position and intention and recruit his/her relevant schema, the reader must employ linguistic knowledge that grammatically signals such distinctions. 

 

 

 

■ Carrell (1988) discusses two types of difficulties that learners may encounter when reading: too much reliance on text-based ſeatures via bottom-up processing resulting in text boundedness, or too much dependence on knowledge-based processing, thereby allowing inappropriate schemata irrelevant extratextual knowledge to interfere with proper text interpretation. 

 

 

 

■ In the first case, we find readers who get bogged down by linguistic complexity and miss the main point made in a paragraph or a whole text, and in the second case, the reader ignores some of the information or ideas presented in the text because of adhering rigidly to preconceived expectations that may not materialize. Both of these paths for misinterpreting a text stem from the fact that the interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing is not optimal for the particular reader with the specific text.

 

 

 

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② GRAMMATICAL FEATURES THAT CAUSE READING DIFFICULTIES

 

■ Every language has some linguistic features at the sentence level that can be perceived as difficult. In English, nominalization is a grammatical process that enables the writer to compact much information into one noun phrase. This density of data and the complexity of the resulting structure significantly affect the processing of the written text. The complexity of any given English noun phrase may be due to multiple modifiers such as one finds in complex compounds, relative clauses with deleted relative pronouns, and various other compound modifiers in prenominal position.

 

 

 

■ These types of structures are widespread in English exposition in general and in scientific writing in particular. The stringing together of multiple modifiers can make recognizing the head noun during bottom-up processing quite tricky. 

 

 

 

■ Adjectival clauses with deleted subjects potentially create a twofold difficulty. On one the one hand, they may interfere with the identification of the modifier and the head; on the other hand, the grammatical form of the participles may mislead readers into thinking that such a construction is a verb phrase. The following examples will illustrate these two problems: 

 

 

 

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③ DISCOURSE FEATURES THAT MIGHT CAUSE PROBLEMS 

 

■ Reference needs to be maintained throughout a written message of any sort to ensure both cohesion and coherence. 

 

 

 

■ ESL/EFL reading courses should provide activities that enable learners to locate instances of obscure references, allowing them to practice identification and utilization of such concerns. They should also point out grammatical features such as tense and aspects that help readers distinguish between the main plot and the background. 

 

 

 

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④ LEXICAL ACCESSIBILITY 

 

■ Psycholinguistic models of reading have placed particular emphasis on the reader being able to combine personal knowledge (i.e., top-down processing) with textual information (i.e., bottom-up processing) to get at the meaning of written texts.

 

 

 

■ Haynes (1993), in her studies of the "perils of guessing," finds that ESL readers can be good guessers only when the context provides them with immediate clues for guessing, while insufficient context and a low proficiency level on the part of the learner may lead to mismatches in word analysis and recognition that can cause confusion and misinterpretation of the target text. She recommends that teachers make students aware of these difficulties, encouraging them to double-check their guesses using the dictionary occasionally. 

 

 

 

■ Dubin and Olshtain (1993) further emphasize the need for teachers to consider how a given text provides helpful contextual clues. 

 

 

 

■ It is necessary to analyze reading passages carefully before they are assigned to intermediate-level students for teaching purposes. Words with high textual support in a quote should be designated as words that students can guess from context (such as succumbing in the preceding passage). Students should be encouraged to identify the clues that help them think from context to become efficient guessers whenever sufficient clues are available. On the other hand, the teacher or textbook writer should identify the words that have no textual support in the passage and provide easily accessible glosses.