Reassessing second language reading comprehension: Insights from the psycholinguistics notion of sentence processing

Abstract

Theories and practices in second language reading pedagogy often overlook the sentence processing description from the psycholinguistics perspective. Second language reading comprehension is easily associated with vocabulary learning or discourse strategy. Yet, such activities can lead to an unnatural way of reading such as translating vocabularies or pointing out information as required. Meanwhile the authentic way of reading should encourage a natural stream of ideas to be interpreted from sentence to sentence. As suggested by the sentence processing notion from the psycholinguistics point of view, syntax appears to be the key to effective and authentic reading as opposed to the general belief of semantic or discourse information being the primary concern. This article argues that understanding the architecture of sentence processing, with syntactic parsing at the core of the underlying mechanism, can offer insights into the second language reading pedagogy. The concepts of syntactic parsing, reanalysis, and sentence processing models are described to give the idea of how sentence processing works. Additionally, a critical review on the differences between L1 and L2 sentence processing is presented considering the recent debate on individual differences as significant indicators of nativelike L2 sentence processing. Lastly, implications for the L2 reading pedagogy and potential implementation in instructional setting are discussed.

Keywords

• l2 sentence processing
• syntactic parsing
• second language reading pedagogy