Text Comprehension Processes in Bilinguals.

Abstract

The text comprehension abilities of Navy recruits who speak English as a second language (ESL) were investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, Tagalog-English-speaking recruits from the Philippines and native English speaking (NES) recruits were compared on a letter-cancellation task. Both groups gave similiar amounts of attention to important versus unimportant words. In Experiment 2, ESL-NES groups were compared on the ability to detect the words, sentences, and paragraphs within a page of run-on text. Differences in word detection were minor compared to the vast, unusual, and patternless errors for sentences and paragraphs by the ESL group. These results, taken together with those of earlier research, suggest that greater gains in ESL reading ability can be had through more training in higher-level paragraph comprehension skills, rather then just decoding and vocabulary. Keywords: Bilingual education, adult education, text comprehension.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1985
Accession Number
ADA158597

Entities

People

  • C. M. Lare
  • F. R. Chang

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Attrition
  • Cancellation
  • Classification
  • Coding
  • Comprehension
  • Decoding
  • Detection
  • Education
  • Human Resources
  • Language
  • Military Research
  • Psychology
  • Security
  • Students
  • Training
  • Vocabulary

Fields of Study

  • Education

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Naval Personnel Management
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.