Article published In:
ITL - International Journal of Applied LinguisticsVol. 81/82 (1988) ► pp.19–46
Vol. 81/82 (1988) ► pp.19–46
Pre-Reading and the use of Advance Organisers in L2 Reading Instruction
The article describes an experiment in the use of one category of pre-reading activity, advance organisers, with a population of L2 learners (L2-French; L1-English) at three proficiency levels. Advance organisers, like other pre-reading act)vities, are designed to encourage a more contextually sensitive and schemata driven form of reading strategy usage, and thus counteract the observed tendency of L2 learners to process texts in a too exclusively decoding oriented manner. It was hypothesised that the presence of an advanced organiser would facilitate the text comprehension of the subject L2 learners, particularly with respect to their use of discourse constraints. The results indicated some degree of facultative potential, but not in the dominantly discourse-constraint oriented manner predicted. Levels of facilitation appeared to depend on subject proficiency level and difficulty level of the text. Implications for the use of pre-reading activities and for further research in this area are discussed.
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