Description of the study

1.1. The goal of the study

Assuming that students are more skilled readers in their mother tongue than in a FL I wanted to investigate whether there was any aspect of reading in which students show more skill in Polish and which students could improve upon in the process of reading in English. I considered the think-aloud (TA) procedure appropriate for this purpose. My assumption was that gaining insight into subjects’ reading proc-esses could provide an excellent opportunity to observe how students approach text in both languages and what diffi culties they encounter and how they handle them. I believed that applying an “on-line” method would facilitate a comparison of students’ reading in the two languages. Th e following general questions were investigated:

Do profi cient readers of Polish (L1) and advanced readers of English (FL) –

read in the same manner in their L1 and FL?

If they do not, what is the diff erence in the way they read in Polish (L1) and –

English (FL)?

It is important to emphasize that the above questions took on a more specifi c form at various stages of the study. Th e study consists of six stages, which are pre-sented below (Table III.1.).

It is important to emphasise that the main study was preceded by a pilot study, which aimed to pre-test the think-aloud procedure and to fi nd texts at the appro-priate level of diffi culty. In the pilot study, fi ve undergraduate students were asked to read a Polish and an English text, and to think aloud when reading. Th e results of the pilot study had an important infl uence on the fi nal version of the texts and the think-aloud procedure applied in the main study.

Table III.1. Stages of the study

Stage of the study Focus of the analysis Source of data Stage 1 Analysis of reading strategies TA protocols

Stage 2 Analysis of problems and

solutions

TA protocols

Stage 3 Analysis of propositions TA protocols

Stage 4 Analysis of idiosyncratic

patterns of constructing comprehension

TA protocols

Stage 5 Evaluation of students’

comprehension

TA protocols

Stage 6 Interviews with students Interviews conducted with each student by the author of the study

Source: own study.

1.2. Subjects

Th e subjects chosen for the study were ten undergraduate students of a foreign language teacher training college: 6 women and 4 men. All the subjects volunteered to participate in the study; some explained that they had decided to take part in the study because they were interested in linguistic research. All the subjects were in their early twenties. Th eir foreign language competence was assessed as advanced – C1 (according to Common European Framework, Coste et al. 2003). As regards the students’ L1 reading skill, I considered the subjects to be a homogenous group of competent L1 readers. Th is was concluded on the basis of the information ob-tained from the questionnaire that had been administered before the think-aloud study. Th e questionnaire is not discussed in this book; it was the main method in another study which explored the role of L1 in foreign language learning (see Kusiak 2009 for more details). Th e subjects were my students; thus, I assumed that they would feel comfortable with me as a researcher conducting the study.

1.3. Texts

Both texts were authentic news magazine articles: a Polish one taken from News-week (the Polish edition) and an English text – from Time. Th e texts are one-page long; both are accompanied with photos. Th e Polish text consists of 9 paragraphs;

the English text has 10 paragraphs. Since the pilot study showed that the task of reading complete texts could be too time-consuming and thus tiring for the sub-jects, the students were asked to read the fi rst 6 paragraphs in the Polish article and

the fi rst 7 paragraphs in the English article. Th e passages prepared in this way were evaluated to be in themselves self-contained and complete. Th e English text, entitled Is progress obsolete? (Lasch 1992), discusses the issue of progress, its advantages and limits; the Polish text Materia ducha (Pinker 2004) asks questions concerning the dichotomy of brain and soul. In selecting the texts no readability formula was used to assess the texts. Since the study was based on a theory which views read-ing as a problem-solvread-ing activity, I assumed that the texts should be challengread-ing for the students. I decided that this challenge should be present not in the topic itself but in how it is discussed. Th is means that I had looked for texts that develop their main topics in an “intricate” way, which would be refl ected in their complex propositional network. However, I assumed that the topics of the texts were ones of general interest and that the subjects would fi nd the texts interesting enough to continue reading. Th e main reason why expository texts were chosen for the study was that expository text is the main genre of textbooks and other texts that college students read for their study purposes.

1.4. Tasks

I intended to elicit simultaneous verbalisation produced by the subjects at the moment of their performance. My purpose was to elicit a natural way of reading a complete text, “the overall approach of the subjects towards the task, in which the whole process of the task fulfi lment is verbalised” (Gabryś-Barker 2009: 31). In order to slow down the process of readers’ attending to a text, the think-aloud task directed subjects to read the texts paragraph after paragraph. Th is procedure served to elicit reading for main ideas and to observe how the students construct their models of text, which would correspond to the particular paragraphs (see Part One, Chapter 3, Section 3.1.2. for a model-based theory of comprehension). Another aim of asking the subjects to read paragraph by paragraph was to introduce breaks in the same places in the texts, whereby to impose on the students a similar manner of reading. Th is was meant to facilitate a comparison of students’ protocols. It is interesting to add that the main study did not repeat the think-aloud procedure applied in the pilot study, which was: (1) to ask students to read each text paragraph by paragraph; (2) to summarise each paragraph they had fi nished reading and (3) to predict what the next paragraph would be about. Th is was evaluated as a procedure that could hinder students’ natural way of reading.

Th e subjects read two texts: an English and a Polish text. Five students initially read the English text, then the Polish one. Th e other fi ve read the texts in the reverse order. Th ey all followed the same think-aloud procedure for both texts. To decrease the cognitive load of the task (see Part Two, Chapter 1, Section 1.5.), the subjects were instructed to report in Polish while reading both texts. Th e subjects were in-formed that the session would be recorded. My role during the think-aloud session involved fostering verbal reporting. When the subjects were silent for particularly

long, I asked them questions about what they were thinking. Additionally, as I was following the text while the students were thinking aloud, I sometimes asked the students to clarify, e.g., which line or words in the text they were talking about.

However, I attempted to minimise any social interaction with the subjects so that they could focus their attention on the task.

Th e think-aloud session was followed by an semi-structured interview, during which the students were asked to comment on the way they had read each text and on their general reading styles in Polish and English. Th e subjects were also asked to comment on the think-aloud task.

1.5. Directions to subjects

Th e students were not familiar with the think-aloud methodology. To make the task easier, I demonstrated what a think-aloud task is like, i.e., I thought aloud while reading an extract from an article in Polish selected from Newsweek (the Polish edition). Additionally, I presented several examples of aspects of reading which the students could report on while reading the texts, such as problems with diffi cult vocabulary, paying attention to illustrations, etc. Prior to the think-aloud task, the students were told that they would be asked to read silently two texts: an English text and a Polish one and describe in detail what they were “doing” during the process of reading the texts. Each student was told which text he/she should read fi rst. Th e students were instructed to read each text paragraph by paragraph and to report back in Polish. Th ey were informed that the texts they were going to read were newspapers articles. I made sure that the students did not know the articles they were going to read.

During the interview, the subjects were asked general questions, such as “Would you like to add anything about how you read the texts?” and “What do you think about the think-aloud task?” Additional questions were asked to encourage the students to develop their comments.

1.6. Transcription process

Both the think-aloud session and the interview were recorded by means of a digital voice recorder. Th e material was transcribed. Th e subjects’ recorded verbalisations were matched with the corresponding paragraphs in the texts. While transcribing, I wrote down everything that the subjects produced. Th e data was parsed into clause-length sentences. I also transcribed signs of indecision or refl ection, e.g.,

“uhm.” I also indicated in brackets the meaning of such words, e.g., if I interpreted them as expressions of surprise, disappointment, etc. Pause time was indicated by

dots placed in brackets; the number of dots refl ecting the length of the pauses – the more dots, the longer the pause. Certain types of nonverbal behaviour which were possible to identify through a listening to the tape were indicated, e.g., subvocalisa-tion of text or laughter.

1.7. Process of analyzing the protocols

In the present study, reading is viewed as a cognitive process that involves stra-tegic problem solving (e.g., Olshavsky 1976/1977). It is accepted, as is often dis-tinguished in theory and empirical research, that reading consists of two levels of cognitive processing. One level, called the “lower,” focuses on letter identifi cation, word recognition and syntactic parsing; the other one, referred to as the “higher,”

involves discourse processing and knowledge about text characteristics, which enable readers to construct their representation of the text. To explore the reader-text interaction, the main principles of mental model theories are drawn on. Two theoretical perspectives which have contributed to the conceptualization of read-ing in the present study are: the van Dijk and Kintsch (1983) model and Britton’s (1994) theory of grammar exposition and the process of understanding expository texts. (Both are described in detail in Part I, Chapter 3, Section 3.4.3.) According to the fi rst model (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983), text information is represented in memory at three levels: surface form, which refers to the representation of the exact wording and syntax; propositional textbase, which corresponds to a multileveled, locally coherent propositional network of semantic text information and a situ-ation model, which depicts real-life situsitu-ations presented in the text as perceived by the reader, i.e., the reader’s interpretation of the text. According to Britton (1994), the author of an expository text directs the reader in his/her comprehen-sion. Th e reader develops the representation of the text in the form of network of idea nodes derived from the text and his/her prior knowledge. After Kintsch (1988, 1998) and Britton (1994), it was accepted that the reader constructs in his/

her mind mental structures (units of knowledge) which correspond to proposi-tions (units of information) expressed in the text. In the TA study described be-low, I looked at the role of higher-level and lower-level skills of reading as well as the learners’ ability to construct the representation of the texts they were asked to read.

Th e process of analyzing the protocols comprised several stages. At subsequent stages of the analysis, the general research question as to whether profi cient readers of Polish (L1) and advanced readers of English (FL) read in the same manner in their L1 and FL became more specifi c. Stages 1–6 explain how at each stage of the study the main concept of the study, which is reading, was operationalized and how the data was analysed. To check the reliability of the coding scheme at stages 1–5, the coding process was conducted three times at intervals of a few months. Intra-rater reliability averaged 90%, which was considered as satisfactory.