The Case for Computer-Mediated Reading: "Une vie de boy.".

Abstract

Great emphasis has recently been placed on communicative competence in foreign language undergraduate education (Birckbichler and Corl, 1993; Phillips, 1993). However, many students are not acquiring the ability to think and write critically about literature in a second language, creating a curricular gap between the study of languages and literature in many undergraduate language programs.' Recent class evaluations of intermediate-level students, who typically begin reading excerpts of authentic texts in the third semester of French undergraduate study, revealed difficulty and even intense dislike of reading short passages of French literature. Many plausible explanations occurred to us-cultural biases or stereotypes, syntactical and structural differences between the native and target languages, and a lack of interest in the subject of the reading. But the most daunting problem for foreign language readers may well be the sheer number of unfamiliar words and the frustration of relying on brief definitions in printed dictionaries. The problem for many undergraduate language students is further complicated because they often lack the appropriate cognitive framework to make sense of the new information presented by foreign texts (Bernhardt, 1990, 1991; Swaffar et al., 1991). The potential for misunderstanding exists whenever the living culture of the students is markedly different from the culture of the historical framework of the text. To fur-

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