| Author(s) | Khemais Jouini |
| Affiliation | Assistant Professor Department of European Languages and Translation, College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Khemias_jouini@yahoo.es |
| Title | Strategies Inference in Reading Comprehension |
| Source | Journal of King Saud University. Languages & Translation. Volume 18, No 1. (2006/1426) |
| Abstract | Studies in Second Language Acquisition have considered the reading process as a communicative interaction between reader and text. This is known in the literature as top-down and bottom-up processing. The reader goes through a series of cognitive operations triggered by his/her background knowledge and the text’s symbols that come in the form of signs and indexes. Second/Foreign Language learners often experience difficulties in retrieving the overt, explicit overall meaning of texts and fail to gauge their covert or implicit meaning(s). Failure to understand new words, to relate the meaning of successive sentences, and to retrieve macro-propositions of larger text units contributes to lack of understanding, let alone interpreting. The present paper maintains that communicative strategies are not sufficient to help the learner develop efficient reading skills. The paper proposes a host of strategic skills that build learner autonomy. It calls for the introduction of learners to, and training in, the application of strategic skills to gauge and infer meaning, at the word level, sentence level, and above the sentence. The paper argues that the strategies proposed develop learners’ ability to read various texts efficiently and progress in fathoming their meaning levels successfully. |
