In this part of the book, reading is referred to as reading competence or ability and the two terms are used interchangeably, as it is often the case in the literature discussing reading. It is assumed, as in many theoretical perspectives (Koda 2005), that reading comprehension involves an interaction of information derived from text and pre-existing reader knowledge.

Reading is discussed within a psycholinguistic orientation and the componential view of reading. A psycholinguistic perspective conceptualizes reading as a set of mental operations during which the reader creates his/her own representation of a text. The componential view of reading, in contrast to a unitary perspective, “dissects reading into its components” (Koda 2007: 1), allowing researchers to explore constituent components of the reading comprehension process. In theory and empirical research, two levels of cognitive processing are usually distinguished: “lower” – focusing on letter identification, word recognition and syntactic parsing; and “higher” – involving discourse processing and knowledge about text characteristics which enable the reader to construct his/her representation of the text. Components included in both levels are addressed in this book. Chapter Two explores lower-level aspects of reading: phonological, word-related components and sentence processing. Chapter Three discusses higher-level processes, i.e., the impact of discourse processing on reading as well as the relationship between text structure and comprehension.

The discussions conducted in the subsequent chapters draw on the assumption that FL/L2 reading involves two languages.