CHRISTINE NUTTALL Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language
London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1982
This book is a very comprehensive one. Its 235 pages cover the full range of
topics relevant to the teacher of reading in a foreign language - and even the mature
reader in a foreign language, if s/he knows enough English: reading process, purposes
and speed, non-text information, word- and text-attack skills, questioning and other
forms of exploitation, intensive and extensive reading programmes, including
organizing a library, and the teacher as reader. The appendices contain texts, extracts
from reading courses, addresses of publishers of graded ESL/EFL readers (why only
British?), the vocabulary levels of these readers, and finally a
bibliography. Numerous recipes for exercises and other training practice are
provided. A detailed contents list compensates for the absence of an index.
The author uses a direct, teacher-friendly style, with lots of common sense. On the
whole, theoretical aspects are simply and reasonable explained (often by clear
illustrations), although it is not always evident how they lead to a concrete reading
programme (pp. 1-19). Reading is viewed as a communicative act between a writer
and a reader, with a focus on crucial reader strategies, such as flexibility of reading
speed, and the use of non-text information so important to authentic text processing.
Whereas recent reading research pinpoints the importance of lexical and textual cues
for comprehension, it is encouraging to see how much attention the author devotes to
word- and text-attack skills (13 pages in Chapter 6 and 43 in Chapters 7 and 8). I
especially appreciate the phonics section (p. 66) (which might he better named
'reading while listening'): the idea of throw-away vocabulary (as distinct from active
and passive vocabularies): the suggestions for convincing students of the significance
of lexical exercises for an efficient acquisition of reading skills: the concrete
examples and exercises and other practical teaching suggestions which
are abundant in these chapters, including the caveats against over-generalization of
their effectiveness. Chapter 9 (twenty pages about questioning) is in direct line with
the prominent role of questions in recent reading research. In particular, there is a very
useful checklist (p. 134) to assess reliable and valid questions. Ore might even
propose that the reader who knows how to ask the right questions understands a text
very well. The author stresses, quite properly, that a reader should process a text not
only intensively (Chapter 11), but also extensively (Chapter 12).
Of course, there are some shortcomings as well. What is lacking is a global model of
reading in a foreign language and the role of the native language, based on
experimental psycholinguistic research. Empirical evidence (for instance Freebody
and Anderson 1983) seems to call for an interaction between all linguistic levels in
reading, to the extent that when one processing route fails, others try to take over, but
never replace it completely. This partial parallel interaction (see Ulijn l984a)
corresponds to the skills literature which highlights characteristics of the reading skill
such as hierarchy, anticipation (prediction), feedback, and automation (speed). They
are dealt with piecemeal throughout the book, if at all: prediction on pp. 120 ff.,
feedback on p. 136 (both could be tested by the cloze procedure, pp. 28 and 148), and
speed on pp. 33 ff. Word-attack skills could have been based on research such as
Walker's (1981) ten-word identification strategies (cf. also Perkins and Brutten 1983).
The author seems to emphasize scanning and skimming as reading styles. What about
search, receptive and responsive reading?
My major criticisms, however, are three-fold:
1 Unlike its title, the book is mainly EFL/ESL oriented. No examples from other
languages are given. English-speaking professionals might he interested to read their
specialist literature in other languages as well (approximately forty per cent of the
world's scientific and technical literature is not written in English (Ulijn 1 984b)).
What use could teachers of other languages make of this book? It is not clear to what
extent the book is specific to foreign-language reading and to what extent native-
language reading transfers to foreign-language reading (cf. Ulijn 1 984a).
2 The role of the textual level in reading might be overstressed. What is the
importance of all kinds of discourse analysis for comprehension: are all exercises
based on real problems (for whom?)? Speakers of romance and germanic languages
will probably not have any problem with the rhetorical structure of English, unless it
contrasts with their expectations based on their native language. (Some might be more
useful for text production than for text reception.) The lexical level could also
encompass interlingual contrasts which hamper comprehension, such as deceptive
cognates. Vocabulary problems cannot be generalized from the basis of any native
language to EFL-reading. It is very unlikely, for instance, that Dutch readers will have
problems with superordinates or sub-technical words like average, approximation,
effect, combination,or determine, even at the intermediate level.
3 The question is, how authentic should a text be (Chapter 3), and from which source:
British or American? Do the appendices really meet readers' interests? From an ESP
point of view. the integration with technical subject matters could he better, in
particular towards the advanced level. The level of sophistication seems to be low for
use in universities and industries in the developed countries, like those of non-
English-speaking Western Europe.
To sum up, this book is thoroughly recommended to any teacher of EFL reading,
despite its weak points. With some imagination, even native-language teachers of
English, and teachers of other languages, could apply the plethora of exercises and
suggestions to their own professional needs. The issues of authenticity of texts, textual
analysis, and the role of the native language in foreign-language reading, as the)' are
presented here, need to he based on more extensive experimental reading research .
Reviewed by J. M. ULIJN
