Understanding Advanced Second-Language Reading

What distinguishes this book is its broad, yet thorough, view of theory, process, and research on adult second-language reading. Offering extensive discussions of upper-register second-language texts (both expository and narrative) that adult second-language readers encounter daily across the globe, it also presents an assessment schema for second-language text comprehension as well as for the assessment of teaching.

Understanding Advanced Second-Language Reading:

• includes languages other than English in the discussion of second language reading
• is firmly anchored in a theory of second language reading ─ the concept of compensatory processing
• emphasizes the multi-dimensionality and dynamic nature of L2 reading development
• focuses on comprehension of upper-register literary texts
• balances theory and instructional practices.

Filling the need for a coherent, theoretically consistent, and research-based portrait of how literate adolescents and adults comprehend, and learn to comprehend, at greater levels of sophistication and whether that ability can be enhanced by instruction, this is a must-have resource for reading and second-language researchers, students, and teachers.

Elizabeth B. Bernhardt is Professor, German Studies; John Roberts Hale Director of the Language Center; and The W. Warren Shelden University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University, US.