Text variables

Text type is one of the main reading variables which may influence both the motivation and approach to reading. Brown and Yule (1983, p.6) define text as a ‘verbal record of a communicative act’ which may be a transcription or written form of speech. Halliday and Hasan (1985) describe text as a functional language that is ‘doing some job’ (p.10) covering a variety of topics, for instance, conveying New Year’s greetings or persuading someone to buy a product. 'Successful' readers should be able to contend with various types of text and the information. This includes orthographic, lexical, sentence level and discourse level variables. This section provides more information about text and genre.

Further, each of these elements and its challenges to Libyan EFL readers such as orthography, lexical words, grammar, and genre are discussed in the next sections.

Text type and genre

There are several rhetorical structures of text type. Paltridge (1996) refers to the ‘text type’

as grouping the text in its similar linguistic forms. For example, Halliday (2005) argues that a text can be described according to its rhetorical function such as being ‘persuasive’,

‘descriptive’ or ‘expository’, depending on the goal of the writer. A text description from the writer’s goal is established in the field of rhetoric and seems to have a psychological reality (Pique and Viera, 1997). Meyer (1975) introduces four types of texts: comparative, time order, collections, and cause and effect. Crombie (1985) adds two more types of text:

problem/solution and topic-illustration. It might be important for the FL reader to have knowledge of these rhetorical forms to decode the message that the writer wants to convey to the reader (Meyer, 1975). Paltridge (1996) states that various genres may share the same text type. For instance, a single genre such as a formal letter may have more than one text type, such as problem-solution and exposition.

There are different kinds of written text and each has its own rules to describe its content to the reader. Thomas and Farrell (2009) state that there are two main types of texts that EFL readers should identify by genre: fiction (poetry, short stories, novels and plays) and non-fiction (reports, articles and essays). However, a number of researchers (Paltridge, 1996;

Davies, 1995) emphasised the importance of differentiating between genre and text type when this distinction could be useful for reading. According to Paltridge (1996), the term

‘genre’ refers to activities that occur in society; for example, poems, songs and prayers.

Davies (1995) also describes genre as:

A class of (written) texts which reflect a particular set of social processes and goals and which derive from an identifiable and public source/environment, and which are directly or indirectly controlled by an editor. (Davies, 1995, p.92)

Thomas and Farrell (2009) add that EFL readers should develop their awareness of the different features of genres by providing a preview ‘of the text and topic rather than only providing background knowledge or just asking students to read the text’ (p.50). The reader’s ability to preview knowledge of the text (contrast, compare, and cause and effect) may help them comprehend the content (use top-down strategies) because they understand the purpose of the text. The following sections provide further details about each part of the text.

Orthography

Orthographic knowledge in the written mode could be described as ‘the knowledge of the spelling of a language’ (Taylor and MacKenney, 2008, p.20). Human visual information processing might be affected by the orthographical variations between languages (Hung and Tzeng, 1981). A number of studies have argued that orthographic difficulty and word familiarity, such as frequency and number of syllables, have a strong influence on a text’s readability (Bormuth 1966). The focus of this research is on Libyan EFL readers and, therefore, the Arabic language is the main concern. Japanese and Chinese languages are logographic (using a whole character to represent a single word), while Arabic and English are alphabetic, though each has its own type of symbols. Arabic has 28 consonants and short vowels are not important. English, on the other hand, has 24 consonants with a complex number of vowel sounds. Schmitt (2000) argues that Arabic is ‘based on triconsonantal roots, with vowels being of lesser importance’ than English; when Arabic readers read in English, ‘there can be an “indifference to vowels” that often results in misrecognised words’ (p.50). For example, the word 'moments' may be confused with 'monuments'.

Ryan and Meara (1991) investigated the problems that Arabic speakers face in REFL. In their research, Ryan and Meara (1991) compared Arabic EFL students with non-Arabic speaker groups in reading the same English text; they found that Arab EFL students were slower and made more errors than other EFL groups. They concluded their study by stating that the main reason was that most words in the Arabic language had relatively stable roots, and consisted of three consonants that could be combined with other vowels to produce words. For instance, the stem ب ت ك‘k-t-b' is combined with different vowels to produce باتك ketab- book; ةبتكم maktaba - library; and بتاك kateb - writer. I discuss this further in Chapter Six but missing the vowels and depending on the same root to produce words, which are in the same context, may affect Arabic students' decoding and processing in reading English.

It is also important to note that not all alphabetical systems are written in the same direction, from left to right. Arabic, for instance, is written from right to left. Hung and Tzeng (1981) argued that the habit of reading directions (left-to-right versus right-to-left) might affect the pattern of visual lateralisation, so that the change of reading route from one side to another may affect 'eye movement, namely, the nature and degree of control of

individual movement' (p.130). In addition, as noted in Chapter One, Arabic does not have variations between lower and upper case letters in proper names or words at the beginning of sentences and so Arabic speakers may have difficulty recognising proper nouns.

The main concern of teaching the orthographical system in the target language is to help EFL students decode by focusing on sounds and letters. Therefore, the question is: does decoding (bottom-up strategy) the structure of words without analysing and

comprehending their meaning really mean reading for understanding? The next section discusses the combination of letters to form a word.

Lexical items

The word is considered the main unit of any written context that builds up the sentence, paragraphs and text. As Koda (2004) states, ‘individual words are the critical building blocks in text-meaning construction’ (p.29). In analysing the English word system, vocabulary might represent a number of challenges for the FL reader. For instance, researchers such as Koda (2004) have demonstrated that a successful EFL reader has a great number of words in his/her memory, which helps him/her to break down the words into segments and morphemes to comprehend text meaning. However, the number of words that the individual has in his/her memory may not be enough because English is a language rich in words that have several meanings (synonyms) and multiple meanings (polysemic). Hedgcock and Ferris (2009) add that FL readers must not only have a good knowledge of the direct meaning of the words, but also have knowledge about connotation and denotation meanings in vocabulary. The denotative meaning in the dictionary is usually the same, but the connotative meaning is usually different. For example, the word

‘owl’, whose denotation is ‘a nocturnal bird with large forward-facing eyes’ also has the connotation of ‘wisdom’ in English (Hedgcock and Ferris, 2009). However, in Arabic 'owl' has a negative connotation of ‘bad luck’. Furthermore, not all words’ meanings can be found in the dictionary. For example, a word like Kinraddie will not have a denotative meaning in the dictionary because it is a fictional reference.

Word recognition

Koda (2004) refers to the term word recognition as the process of extracting lexical information from a graphic display of words. In other words, word recognition is the

reader’s ability to apply phonics and word analysis of the printed version and to express its oral equivalent (Morrow and Wixson, 2013). Research has, of course, been conducted to identify what the reader can do to recognise the word meaning in the text. For example, the top-down model, describes reading as a ‘guessing game’ (Goodman, 1967) in which readers look through the text seeking familiar information. From Clarke and Silberstein’s (1977) point of view, this process is a ‘sampled process’, in which, according to Grabe (2009, p.89), the reader has expectations about the data in the text, and 'samples enough information in order to confirm these expectations'. However, some research on reading, for example that conducted by Birch (2007) and Koda (2004), has disputed such top-down claims and, instead, emphasises that the model does not describe how sampling is directed in the mind of the reader. In terms of comprehension, it is unclear what the reader will learn from a text about which s/he has previous knowledge.

Birch (2007) demonstrates that with EFL readers, things may be mistaken at any point in this process because students tend to fixate more on the meaning of the word than on its function, as I did with the word Kinraddie. This requires extensive FL knowledge and EFL readers may not have enough knowledge about the English alphabetic system used in the text. Even if they know all the Roman letters, they might be unable to ‘identify graphs quickly and effortlessly as they are reading’ (Birch, 2007, p.83). It is crucial in establishing the benefits of word recognition in understanding English texts to provide students with enough practice of letter-to-sound relationships through word recognition exercises. So, word recognition is a very useful bottom-up type strategy. Word meaning is another reading factor that may affect reading comprehension when vocabulary in one language could be understood in more than one way in the target language. The following section discusses lexical meaning.

Lexical meaning

English is a rich language of semantic variations such as homonymy, synonyms, polysemy connotations and denotations, and the EFL reader must select the appropriate interpretation to understand the text (Hedgcock and Ferris, 2009). Homonymy or lexical ambiguity, describes words that have multiple meanings. Lexical ambiguity may also affect

comprehending meaning at the level of the sentence. For instance, it may be easy to read on the surface: ‘French silk underwear’ (Cruse, 1986, p.67). However, according to Cruse, the sentence may be interpreted in two different ways. One meaning is that it might be

underwear made with French silk (‘French silk’ underwear), and the other meaning is that it is French underwear made of silk (French ‘silk underwear’).

Selecting the appropriate meaning for the word from the text is a complex task that is related to a number of factors. Hedgcock and Ferris (2009) demonstrate that word knowledge is important for the EFL reader, in that they should sort vocabulary through a variety of syntactic information, such as transitivity, in which verbs takes direct objects, and intransitivity in which verbs take no objects; and idiomatic collocations and noun forms. However, some verbs can be both transitive and intransitive. For example, ‘to tell’

as in ‘to tell a story’ is transitive, while ‘tell me about yourself’ is intransitive. The following example from Hedgcock and Ferris (2009, p.83) illustrates grammatical complexity: the word ‘tell’ could be used as a noun form as in ‘a tell in poker, as viewers of a 2006 James Bond film’. This and other types of syntactic structure are discussed in the next section.

Cross-linguistic in word recognition

FL readers often have a large vocabulary in their L1, which may be helpful in reading in the target language. However, its existence alters communication between the text and the reader (Hedgcock and Ferris, 2009). First language linguistic knowledge can be helpful when the student uses his/her L1 knowledge to improve their ability to understand the target language. However, transferring lexical patterns from one language to another may cause confusion and affect the students’ abilities to comprehend FL texts. For example, English has two interpretations for the Arabic word Salaam. Salaam refers both to

‘greeting someone’ and ‘peace’. Hence, the Arabic EFL reader might be confused in choosing the appropriate interpretation from the context. Koda (2004) demonstrates that FL readers will always be affected by their L1 word knowledge, even if their skills in the target language are high because activation of the L1 is automatic. So, FL readers cannot do anything to stop the L1 from affecting their reading in the target language. However, it is important to know that it is not only the complexity of FL words that may prevent the comprehension of the text, but also L1 lexical knowledge. The next section presents the syntactic structure and how words are joined together to produce a sentence.

Grammar

Syntactical structure is another variable that may affect FL reading. Odin (1989) argues that most languages have distinct grammatical structures. For instance, as noted in Chapter One, the basic word order in English is Subject Verb Object (SVO), while in Arabic the verb always precedes the subject, VSO. In addition, the use of verbs in Arabic is not like the use of verbs in English. The Arabic language has no use for the ‘verb to be’ (for example, 'am', 'is' and 'are'). For instance, the Arabic EFL reader may read the following sentence: ‘this (is) a book’ as ‘this a book’. Therefore, the sentence may be understood in a different way because of the generalisation from L1 to FL.

In addition, there is no distinction in Arabic between the simple (I leave), continuous (I am leaving) and present perfect aspects (I have left) as there is in English. Mourssi (2013) conducted an empirical study with 74 Arab students acquiring grammatical items of FL (English). He noted that the Arabic language used only the simple tense in the past, present and future to signify an action completed at the time of speaking. Therefore, Arabic EFL students use the simple past forms to express the present perfect, present continuous, past continuous and gerund because ‘they think that the alternative forms can give the same meaning as the simple past in English grammar’ (p.401). Consequently, Arabic EFL readers find difficulty with these present and past tense aspects when decoding English sentences.

By testing these cross-linguistic variables on A Scots Quair, I recorded a number of difficulties. Most of the new words could not be found in the Arabic-English dictionary and, if found, their meaning were different from the context of the sentences such as ‘lay’.

In addition, the grammatical structure of the sentences was complex and above my

linguistic knowledge (see Chapter One). I tried to apply Bernhardt’s (1991) reading model, discussed in Section 2.7.1 and to use my L1 strategies to understand the novel, but my L1 alphabetic system, tense and genre are different from the FL. These language variations affected my motivation to continue reading the extract. Based on these difficulties, the following sections discuss briefly the reader’s variables in comprehending reading texts.