1. Cecilia Chang
Williams College
See How They Read: An Investigation into the
Cognitive and Metacognitive Strategies of
Nonnative Readers of Chinese

2. Project Description
This is a study that investigated the development of
CFL (Chinese as a Foreign Language) reading ability
by examining the discourse processing strategies of
college CFL readers at three proficiency levels –
after one, two and three years of Chinese language
study, and their relationship to comprehension
performance.

3. Purpose
-- To discover what CFL readers already know and do, as
well as what strategies differentiate highly proficient
readers from those who are less proficient.
-- To identify and promote effective reading strategies in
order to optimize learners’ proficiency.

4. Cognitive & Metacognitive
Strategies in Reading
Cognitive strategy – Declarative knowledge of strategy
use.
Local level: access to lexical/semantic/syntactic text
elements.
Global level: inference generation;
text integration;
background knowledge activation

5. Cognitive & Metacognitive
Strategies in Reading
Metacognition in Reading (Baker and Brown, 1984) -
- The reader’s knowledge about
 the reading task
 the reading text
 reading strategies
 his or her own learning style
Metacognitive strategy in the current study –
Evaluation and procedural knowledge of
strategy use.

6. Research Questions
1. What is the relationship between CFL learners’
cognitive and metacognitive activities during
reading and their reading comprehension?
2. How do the cognitive and metacognitive
activities differ among learners of varying
language proficiencies, and between more and
less proficient readers?

7. Study Design
 Participants
96 CFL learners of three proficiency levels from
various programs, both in the U.S. and abroad.
 Materials
One set of the reading passages used in the
Progressive Reading Program at USC (Li, 1988).
Set includes three passages developed for reading
at the second-, third-, and fourth-year levels.

8. Study Design
 Method
Each subject read one of the three passages,
recalled content in written English, and filled out a
questionnaire about their strategy use.

9. Findings
1. Readers at higher proficiency levels engaged in more
global-level processing activities than readers at lower
proficiency levels. This trend was particularly
prominent in the intra-level comparisons of more- and
less-proficient readers.
2. The global-level processing activities engaged by
proficient readers at different proficient levels were
distinctly different in nature.

10. Level 2
-- Compensation Strategies --
(Oxford, 1990)
Proficient readers
 were better able to bring their prior knowledge of the
reading topic to reading than less-proficient readers ;
 used context more actively to guess at the meaning of
unknown words ;
 had stronger tolerance for not knowing the pronunciation
of characters/words .

11. Level 3
--Text-driven Processing Strategies --
Proficient readers
 had stronger tolerance for not knowing the
pronunciations of characters/words ;
 had better ability than weaker readers in distinguishing
main points from supporting details ;
 had better ability in understanding the overall text
meaning ;
 could better recognize the organization of the text ;
 could better remember what they had read.

12. Level 4
-- Bidirectional Processing Strategies –
(Declarative and Procedural)
Proficient readers
 showed stronger effort in identifying sources of
comprehension problems;
 reread from the sentence prior to the problematic part for
repair more than less-proficient readers did;
 showed stronger effort in monitoring their
comprehension
 regarded the ability to remember text details as desirable
more than less-proficient readers did.

13. Level 4
-- Bidirectional Processing Strategies –
(Text-driven and Knowledge-driven)
Proficient readers
 did not merely focus attention on important parts of the
text when they read;
 indicated stronger ability in anticipating incoming
information,

14. Pedagogical Implications
 Strategies are the causes and the outcomes of
improved language proficiency (MacIntyre, 1994;
Rost, 1991; Phillips, 1991).
 Only by reaching a certain level will a student be
likely to use a given strategy (Bremner, 1999, p.495).

15. Pedagogical Implications
 Level 2 – developing tolerance and
compensation strategies at the
word/character level.
 Level 3 – developing readers’ sensitivity to
various aspects of text structure.
 Level 4 – developing readers’ keen
awareness of procedural abilities.

16. Conclusion
As Allen et al (1988) pointed out, “textbooks and
method which teachers employ to teach (reading) also
reflect a set of assumptions about the text-based nature
of the process of reading in a second language” (p. 164),
CFL textbook writers must keep abreast with the ever-
increasing body of knowledge about second language
reading generated from work on genre theory, discourse
analysis, and background/cultural knowledge in
enriching reading curriculum, as well as in transforming
the ways in which reading has been conceptualized and
approached by classroom practitioners in the field of
CFL.