Rethinking the Role of Reading

¶ … Rethinking the role of reading in teaching a foreign language to young learners" by D.W. Dlugosz (2000) surmises that students early in the process of learning English including those who have never read in their own language can benefit from enhancing learning a foreign language by reading in that language from the beginning. The researcher does not clearly delineate in the article the research questions to be answered or a hypothesis to be tested.

What can be surmised from reading the article is that the researcher sought to determine whether or not children were able to hear, read and understand a foreign language; learning it in a faster and more comprehensive way than with traditional methods. Dlugosz maintains that traditionally, children have been taught a foreign language through speech communication for an extended period of time, supported by responding ofttimes in their native tongue.

Because of this, the researcher argues that educators then underestimate children's ability to read in the beginning of learning a second or foreign language. Dlugosz posits, however, that the inclusion of teaching reading in programs of language has the ability to benefit early learners, below the age of five, what have not been taught to read in their native language. Dlugosz conducted a study with two groups of six-year-old children (8 children in test group and 10 in control group).

The children participated in the study for an hour two times per week and were taught English using a primary textbook (Holderness 1997). The children in both groups participated in activities of speaking and listening that were recommended by the author if the book used for the study. The differences between the test and control group was in how revisions were processed. Researchers carried out revisions (written and oral games and material) in cycles over a period of 10 months.

The researcher does not clearly delineate methodology, theoretical assumptions on which the study is founded, nor are definitions articulated that are study specific. According to researchers, the children were able to retain long-term the meaning of noted phrases at a higher level. With regard to understanding of the material presented and executed through revisions, the retention rate was noted as 70% of vocabulary and phrases in the control group and 15% higher in the test group.

There was also a clinically significant different noted in the speaking scores of the test (75%) and control group (47%) (Dlugosz 2000). Moreover, children that were part of the test group were more inclined to speak in the foreign language with enunciation that was near that of a native speaker than their peer cohorts in the control group.

Because of the results derived from the study, the researcher concluded the importance of focusing on English teaching programs that emphasize reading as a part of the learning curriculum early in the students' education as young children are able to listen to, speak and understand a foreign language at a very early age (Doman 1990). The researcher maintains that the positives that were seen with text-based foreign language learning conducted in the aforementioned study would produce results that were similar with older students as well.

Dlugosz argues that communication-based learning is really designed for those instructors who have a true mastery of the foreign language; however, there are many teachers particularly in certain geographic locations, who do not possess such mastery and would significantly benefit from other means of teaching foreign language.

Moreover, the researcher suggests that those teachers who may be far less fluent in the foreign language would be able to use text oriented pedagogy with children that were older as a means of fostering foreign language learning instead of sole relying on communication-based teaching (Dlugosz 2000). Analysis Researcher Dlugosz acknowledges the traditional methodology of teaching foreign language to students and notes that primarily the focus has been on oral communication as the method of instruction.

However, he posits in his study that children are capable of learning a foreign language with understanding more readily if they learn to read the nascent language from the beginning. Although the article was easy to follow and understand because the author did not specify whether or not this was a qualitative or quantitative study, it was left to the reader to determine this to be.