In Part III, Chapters 10–13 described the core skills that comprise reading comprehension. These include the development of main-idea comprehension, reading strategies, grammar knowledge, discourse knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge. Part III also presented many specific implications for instruction to help build these core skills and knowledge bases. In Part IV, Chapters 14–17 will extend the discussion of these core skills and knowledge resources by introducing the following themes for expanding comprehension skills: the development of reading fluency skills, the importance of engaging in extensive reading, the power of curricular and instructional practices to improve reading, and the potential of assessment practices to support student learning (a theme not commonly associated with assessment practices).

Chapter 14 addresses the topic of fluency in reading, a topic that is gaining increasing attention as a key aspect of reading abilities. In L1 reading contexts, oral passage-reading fluency has demonstrated a strong relationship with reading comprehension. In experimental training research, fluency is a strong predictor of comprehension development. These two findings have led to a much greater awareness of the role of fluency as a type of component skill. Over the past 10 years, since the report of the National Reading Panel (2000), a considerable amount of new research has appeared on reading fluency. In L2 contexts, relatively little fluency research has been carried out and fluency is not yet a major element of reading instruction. This chapter also provides an extensive discussion of fluency-instruction practices as well as guidelines for their implementation.

Chapter 15 extends the concept of fluency, and reinforces the core skills introduced in Part III, through a commitment to extensive reading.

It is well established that reading comprehension depends on a reader's awareness of how discourse is structured. Good readers are tuned to the ways that information is organized and to the signaling mechanisms that provide the cues to this organization. Good readers are able to identify the main or topic sentences as they appear in a text and are sensitive to text structures that help identify when and where to find main-idea sentences. Good readers recognize when new topics are introduced, how they are maintained through pronouns and other anaphoric cues, and when there is a topic shift, or when new themes or concepts are introduced. They are able to recognize the vocabulary that signals maintenance or shifts in discourse information as well as lexical forms that commonly identify specific organizational patterns in texts (e.g., cause–effect, comparison–contrast, problem–solution).

Discourse-structure awareness is often associated with a reading strategy or set of strategies (e.g., recognizing main ideas, inferring connections among parts of a text, recognizing organizational patterns in texts, identifying typical genre features of a text).

The subtitle of this book captures its focus: moving from theory to practice. Writing a book about the impact and implications of reading theory on second-language (L2) reading instruction means that a number of alternative perspectives are not developed in the book. So, at the outset, I will say that this book is not primarily a survey of existing L2 reading research and what it has uncovered about L2 reading abilities. Two excellent recent publications already exist on the topic: Hudson (2007) and Koda (2005, see also the 2007 update) outline in detail L2 reading research. When envisioning this book, I wanted to focus more on what teachers and curriculum developers could do with information about reading and reading development to improve L2 reading instruction. At the moment, I am not convinced that synthesizing L2 reading research, by itself, would lead more clearly toward that goal. One consequence of this orientation is that the book is heavily oriented to English first-language (L1) reading research.

The book has a second goal that follows from the first. It focuses on explanations for how fluent reading works and how research on reading can be used to promote reading development. At present, I know of no current L2 reading book that attempts to explain in detail how reading comprehension works as a unified process and that also explores instructional implications and effective teaching practices. Teachers need to have a good sense of how fluent reading works if they are to understand key implications from research as well as the range of instructional assertions made about what will improve reading comprehension.

In Chapter 10, reading strategies were introduced as a major means for building effective main-idea comprehension through instruction. A number of individual strategies were introduced because of their effectiveness in supporting comprehension. It was also noted that these strategies are better taught as part of the process of teaching comprehension through interactions around texts, rather than creating separate sets of activities for teaching and practicing each discrete strategy. This chapter focuses on the development of the strategic reader, rather than strategies themselves. The strategic reader is one who automatically and routinely applies combinations of effective and appropriate strategies depending on reader goals, reading tasks, and strategic processing abilities. The strategic reader is also aware of his or her comprehension effectiveness in relation to reading goals and applies sets of strategies appropriately to enhance comprehension of difficult texts.

Before exploring the advances made toward developing strategic readers, it is necessary to address three major issues surrounding strategy instruction in reading: (a) the relationship between skills and strategies; (b) the relationship between metacognition and strategies; and (c) the role of metalinguistic awareness in comprehension.

Skills and strategies

During the 1970s, when it first dotted the reading landscape, the term strategies signified a form of mental processing that deviated from traditional skills-based reading. However, any distinctions between skills and strategies that seemed apparent then have begun to fade, leaving many to wonder where skills end and strategies begin…. The same procedures (e.g., finding the main idea) can fit under both the skill and strategy categories.

Part I identified the component skills that are considered cognitive factors in reading. These include word-recognition skills of various types, syntactic knowledge and processing, discourse processing, strategic processing, and working memory. Part II explores aspects of variation in reading ability that are not specifically associated with individual cognitive differences among learners. Instead, chapters in Part II examine how reading abilities can vary among learners who read in different languages, who read in more than one language, who come from different social contexts, and who read with differing levels of motivation.

Chapter 6 outlines differences in reading abilities that are due to reading in different first languages. The fundamental argument of this chapter is that there are variations in word and sentence processing based on the specific orthographic systems of different languages. These orthographic differences across languages are captured in part by the Orthographic Depth Hypothesis, which is described in some detail. Other orthographic differences across languages that contribute to L1 reading variation are differences in syllable complexities allowed by different languages (phonotactic constraints and consonant clusters), differences in degrees of morphological complexity allowed by differing L1s, and differences in informational density presented by the script. At the same time, the study of reading across different L1s highlights universal aspects of reading, which are discussed in the latter part of the chapter, as well as degrees of L1 transfer at the level of sounds, orthographic segments, morphemes, and words.

Chapter 7 focuses specifically on L1 and L2 relations in L2 reading. The chapter begins with a careful examination of L1–L2 differences, most of which are associated closely with L2 linguistic, socioeducational, and cultural developmental factors.

Reading fluency – what good readers do on a continual basis with most reading material that they encounter – is an essential component of efficient reading-comprehension abilities. Fluent L1 readers can recognize almost every word they encounter in a text automatically. Fluent L1 readers can read a passage aloud at a rapid steady rate with good comprehension and with little hesitancy due to the basic syntax or the words they encounter. Fluent L1 readers read most texts at between 250–300 words per minute. Finally, fluent L1 readers can read for extended periods of time without difficulty or effort. Research has associated fluent reading of words with reading-comprehension abilities in L1 studies of young children. Oral passage reading rate and extensive reading are also strongly associated with L1 reading-comprehension abilities at multiple age levels. In L1 contexts, fluency research and teacher-resource books have emerged at a notable rate over the past decade, giving L1 reading fluency much greater recognition (Adlof, Catts, & Little, 2006; Breznitz, 2006; Kuhn & Schwanenflugel, 2008; Kuhn et al., 2006; Miller & Schwanenflugel, 2006; National Reading Panel, 2000; Rasinski, 2003; Rasinski, Blachowicz, & Lems, 2006; Samuels & Farstrup, 2006; Schwanenflugel et al., 2006; Spear-Swerling, 2006).

The situation is different for L2 reading research and instruction. At present, relatively little research has been conducted on word-reading fluency or on oral reading-rate fluency in L2 settings.

Reading is something many of us take for granted. We read with what appears to be little effort and little planning. And it is remarkable that so much of the world's population can read – a little more than 80 percent of the world's population can read to some extent (Elley, 2001; Tucker, 2000; UNESCO, 2007). They can read basic forms, read advertisements, read newspapers, and use basic reading skills in their work and daily lives when needed. Some percentage of these people can read at a much higher level of comprehension, learning new conceptual information from texts, synthesizing new information from multiple texts, critiquing information in texts, and using their comprehension skills to reinterpret texts (Elley, 1992; Kirsch et al., 2002; NAAL, 2005; NAEP, 2007). Universal literacy is an ideal goal that is an ongoing priority among UNESCO, nation states, and many nongovernmental organizations, and efforts need to be made to reduce illiteracy levels.

It is also important to recognize that many people around the world read in more than one language. Large populations of people have learned to read in second or third languages for a variety of reasons, including interactions within and across heterogeneous multilingual countries, large-scale immigration movements, global transportation, advanced education opportunities, and the spread of languages of wider communication.

The term model refers specifically to a representation of the psychological processes that comprise a component or set of components involved in human text comprehension. (Goldman, Golden, & van den Broek, 2007: 27)

The previous chapters have explored many of the basic cognitive concepts and processes that underlie how we understand reading as well as the many major component processes involved in comprehension. A final goal for this part of the book is to explain how these concepts and component processes can be assembled into an understandable synthesis. These efforts at synthesis are most commonly accomplished by proposing models of reading. Models characterize theories of reading, providing ways to represent a theory or part of a theory; they explain what reading involves and, in more detailed versions, how reading works (Sadoski & Paivio, 2007). Most commonly, they are created from a body of research findings that can be synthesized to help explain the nature of reading abilities or of some major component of reading. Models generally make further predictions about reading beyond accounting for existing research results, and these predictions can be verified and falsified. In this way, models organize a body of research findings, help give coherent explanation to some larger ability, and provide the foundation for additional research exploration.

There are general models of reading-comprehension abilities and also models of word recognition, models of syntactic processing, models of working memory, and models of inferencing. There are specific models based on empirical evidence and metaphorical models that make more abstract generalizations. In every case, the authors are looking to explain how reading, or certain essential subcomponents of reading, might work based on available evidence.