Reading Skills of Non-Native Speakers of English.

Abstract

Reading Skills of Non-native Speakers of EnglishJohn. W. Oller, Jr. and James R. TulliusUniversity of California, Los AngelesIn the excitement that has attended theories of education,programmed learning, transformational generative grammar, bilingualeducation, socio-linguistics , psycho-linguistics, etc., in recent years, thefundamental skill of reading has been largely overlooked. It has been set to one sidein order to give place to other skills which have fallen more directly intothe spotlight of popularity. This is not necessarily to say that the theoriesthemselves are not applicable to reading, rather that there has been little attemptto find out to what extent they are or not. In spite of the fact that many proponentsof the audio-lingual (now usually transformational audio-lingual) approach toforeign teaching have contended that it was not their intention to bypassthe teaching of reading, we are nevertheless faced with the fact that this is preciselywhat has happened in many foreign programs. Indeed, there has beenlittle attempt to answer many of the researchable questions regarding thedifferences and similarities between learning to read in a foreign or a secondlanguage1 and learning to read in one's native language.As Andrews (1970) has observed, more practice is usually afforded speakingand listening skills on the grounds that oral is primary anyway and thatreading will come naturally if the students are able to speak the language (p. l ).As she correctly points out, this implicit assumption is certainly not true in the caseof normal native speakers all of whom learn to speak with some fluency, but manyof whom fail to develop comparable efficiency in reading. Native speakersapparently require a great deal of practice and no mean amount of careful trainingin order to develop skill in reading. Why should we expect the case of non-native1

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