Applied Linguistics 25/3: 315±339
# Oxford University Press 2004
Transfer of Reading Comprehension Skills
to L2 is Linked to Mental Representations
of Text and to L2 Working Memory
CATHERINE WALTER
Institute of Education, University of London
Two notions from cognitive psychology were examined in relation to the
transfer of reading comprehension skills from L1 to L2: (1) the notion that
reading comprehension proceeds by the comprehender's building of a mental
structure representing the text and (2) the notion of working memory. Two
groups of French learners of English (at upper-intermediate and lowerintermediate pro®ciency levels) participated in the study: members of both
groups were pro®cient comprehenders in L1 French, but they diered in their
ability to comprehend texts in L2 English, even when the lower-intermediate
learners had no problem in processing the individual sentences of those texts.
Performance in pro-form resolution in two distance conditions provided strong
support for the hypothesis that the lower-intermediate group had failed to
transfer to L2 the ability to build well-structured mental representations of
texts, while the upper-intermediate group had succeeded in transferring this
ability. This structure-building ability was in turn linked to the development of
working memory in L2.
INTRODUCTION
The study of the transfer of reading skills from L1 to L2 has a long history. It
has sometimes been stated in terms of a threshold eect (articulated by
Alderson 1984; Clarke 1988) and studied in several L1±L2 pairs (Barnett 1986;
Markham 1985; Bossers 1991; Carrell 1991). Lee and Schallert (1997)
addressed the question of whether the phenomenon is better characterized
as a continuous one, where the contribution of L1 reading ability to L2
reading ability gradually increases as L2 pro®ciency increases, or a
discontinuous one, typi®ed by the threshold metaphor. While Lee and
Schallert's results were not conclusive, they found more support for a
threshold than for a continuous relationship.
All of these studies were prompted by the observation that L2 comprehension skills at lower levels of pro®ciency do not seem to keep pace with
learners' ability to understand texts sentence-by-sentence. However, none of
the studies proposed to de®ne the nature of the comprehension skills that
initially fail to transfer and later do transfer.
316 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
STRUCTURE BUILDING AND L2 READING COMPREHENSION
The ®rst question that I will examine is this: is the transfer of mental
structure-building skill associated with the level of success in L2 reading
comprehension?
The idea that comprehension involves the building of coherent mental
representations or structures for texts is a familiar one in L1 reading
comprehension research (see for example Bransford and Johnson 1972;
Carpenter and Just 1977; van Dijk 1977; Johnson-Laird 1983; van Dijk and
Kintsch 1983; Schmalhofer and Glavanov 1986; Garnham 1987; Kintsch
1998). In this tradition, I shall adopt Gernsbacher's (1990) `structure building'
model. Gernsbacher gives persuasive empirical evidence that structure
building during the comprehension of a narrative involves the same processes
whether the narrative is communicated orally, in writing or even as a picture
story. In other words, there appears to be an underlying mode-independent
structure-building skill, separate from the decoding skills used in listening,
reading or interpreting graphic information. It would be parsimonious to
suppose that the same structure-building skill underlies comprehension in L2.
In order to judge the evidence for the transfer of the structure-building skill
to the L2 reading comprehension context, let us look in more detail at
Gernsbacher's (1990) description of the structure building process:
1
2
3
4
a foundation for a structure is laid at the beginning of a clause or text;
subsequent information is mapped onto that foundation so long as the
comprehender considers it relevant;
this continues in a hierarchical fashion: information relevant to a
substructure is mapped onto that substructure;
if subsequent information is not considered relevant to an ongoing
structure or substructure, then another structure or substructure is
initiated.
Note the following points:
. this process is very rapid, and not available to conscious introspection;
. `information' also includes the activation of knowledge in long-term
memory;
. there may be more than one `good' structure by which dierent skilled
comprehenders encode the same text;
. the structure in question is not seen as occupying a place in the brain, but is
more likely to consist of a spatially dispersed network of neural activation.
In skilled comprehension, readers suppress inappropriate meanings and build
large, cohesive, hierarchical structures, in which each new element, as it is
integrated, activates preceding related elements. Elements that receive
repeated activation are more accessible for recall. In poor comprehension,
on the other hand, readers fail to suppress inappropriate meanings and shift
CATHERINE WALTER
317
too often to new substructures, building structures that are `bulkier, less
cohesive and less accessible' (Gernsbacher 1990: 213).
Thus, if a reader is building an ecient mental structure, a new element is
®tted into an appropriate place in the overall framework of that structure, and
so activates related elements from earlier in the text. The more frequently an
earlier element is activated, the more accessible it remains for recall, so a
cohesive structure leads to better recall of earlier elements. In a poor, lesscohesive structure, a new element will activate few previous elements, and
earlier elements will be dicult to recall (Gernsbacher 1990: 211±13).
What would this mean for readers who were skilled at structure-building
when reading in L1 but had not completely transferred this skill to reading in
L2? As skilled comprehenders in an L1 situation, they would recall elements
from a text soon after reading them; and building a cohesive structure would
also allow them to recall these elements later on. In the L2 situation, if the
text was well matched to their level of pro®ciency, they would process it well
sentence-by-sentence, and so would be able to recall elements soon after
reading; but building a poor, less cohesive mental structure would cause
problems in recalling elements at a distance.
It follows that one way to gauge the skill of a reader in building mental
structures is to measure their success in recalling earlier information from the
text. Among the dierent possible indicators of this success, I have chosen coreference resolution. In co-reference, one expression in the text depends on or
presupposes another expression (Brown and Yule 1983: 190±222): examples
are pronouns and pro-verbs and their antecedents.
Suppose a group of readers are able to build hierarchical, cohesive mental
structures when reading in L1; and suppose that in L2 they are reading a text
corresponding to their syntactic and lexical level of pro®ciency (i.e. a text they
can process sentence-by-sentence). Suppose, however, that for some reason
they are not able to build sound mental structures based on reading in L2.
Gernsbacher's (1990) framework predicts that these readers will resolve coreferring expressions:
. well in L1, whether the two expressions are near to or remote from one
another; and
. well in L2 when the expressions are near to one another; but
. poorly in L2 when the expressions are remote from one another. (If, on the
other hand, they are having problems with sentence-by-sentence processing, they will have diculty resolving co-referring expressions even when
they are near to one another.)
In the ®rst part of this study, therefore, I examine whether relative success or
failure in structure building in an L2 situation, as measured by co-reference
resolution, corresponds to relative success or failure in L2 reading
comprehension.
318 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
WORKING MEMORY AND READING COMPREHENSION
The second question to be asked in this study is this: is the development of L2
verbal working memory linked to the transfer of reading comprehension skill
(and hence structure-building skill) from L1 to L2?
Working memory (henceforth WM) is a system of mechanisms by which
humans process the information they need for the performance of complex
cognitive tasks and maintain it in an accessible form; that is to say, it is a
combination of a processing system and a storage system. What is processed
and stored can be information from long-term memory, or new information,
or both. Within the general de®nition of WM, detailed descriptions dier from
one model to another, but, as shown in the admirable 1999 volume edited by
Miyake and Shah, there is more consensus than disagreement on major issues
(Anderson et al. 1996; Baddeley and Hitch 1993; Wilson and Baddeley 1988;
Conway and Engle 1994; Cowan 1995; Ericsson and Kintsch 1995; Howes and
Young 1996; Kieras and Meyer 1994; O'Reilly et al. 1999; Schneider 1999;
Teasdale and Barnard 1993).
There is ample support in the literature for the involvement of WM in L1
reading comprehension (Daneman and Carpenter 1980; Baddeley et al. 1985;
Daneman and Tardif 1987; Engle et al. 1992; Cantor and Engle 1993; Ericsson
and Delaney 1999). In the studies of Yuill and Oakhill (1991) in the UK and
Cornoldi et al. in Italy (1996) comparing groups of children who were either
good L1 comprehenders, or good decoders but poor comprehenders, the
researchers found consistently lower WM capacity for the poor comprehenders. Swanson and Berninger (1995) studied 91 skilled and less-skilled child
readers in English-speaking Canada and found that low WM (but not low
phonological short-term memory) correlated with poor reading comprehension, supporting the hypothesis that WM de®cits contribute to reading
comprehension problems. These are only a few examples of a large body of
literature (see also Whitney et al. 1991; Oakhill and Yuill 1996; Perfetti et al.
1996; Light and Capps 1986).
In L2, Geva and Ryan (1993) studied 10- to 12-year-old English±Hebrew
bilinguals and found that their performance in reading comprehension in L2
was accurately predicted by performance on static and working memory
storage tests, in combination with `underlying intelligence and L2 oral
pro®ciency'. Their subjects had learnt to read in L1 at the same time as
they were learning both to speak and to read in L2. Geva and Ryan did not
®nd any eect of years of L2 instruction on L2 reading comprehension.
However, it is dicult to compare this study with others focusing on the
transfer of reading comprehension skills from L1 to L2, since the latter
consider individuals who have learnt to read pro®ciently in L1 before
beginning L2 instruction.
Also in L2, Harrington (1992) and Harrington and Sawyer (1992) studied
WM in Japanese±English bilingual university students, and found a strong
correlation between their L2 WM measure and reading comprehension as
CATHERINE WALTER
319
measured by the TOEFL. Note, however, that this work focused on learners
who were classi®ed as bilingual.
The focus of the present study is the transfer of reading comprehension
skills from L1 to L2, at a much lower level of L2 pro®ciency than the
bilinguals in the Geva and Ryan or Harrington and Sawyer studies.
METHODOLOGY
Participants
In order to control the number of variables in the study, two groups of
participants were selected from the same L1 cultural and educational
background. Choosing to keep these linguistic and sociological variables
constant while varying the level of L2 pro®ciency meant that the mean age
and the educational attainment of the two groups were dierent, and this can
be seen as a weakness in the design. The older, more academically advanced
group is virtually guaranteed to comprehend somewhat more skilfully than
the less advanced group, even in L1, and this needed to be taken into account
in the analysis of results. However, the alternatives (selecting groups from
dierent L1, educational or cultural backgrounds in order to control for age
and/or educational attainment) would almost certainly have led to even more
serious threats to the design.
The participants were French native speakers from a middle school
(ColleÁge) and an upper school (LyceÂe) in a provincial town in the Savoie
department of France. They came from a range of socioeconomic categories
and lived either in the town or in one of the nearby mountain resorts. Four
possible candidates were excluded after initial interviews, since they were
bilingual from birth and spoke both languages at home. Thus all participants
in the study were native speakers of French from monolingual households,
who did not speak any other language on a regular basis outside of a
classroom setting. Two other participants (one from each of the two groups)
were excluded when they left school for psychosocial reasons near the
beginning of the study. This left two groups of 19 and 22 participants
respectively.
The lower-intermediate group of participants consisted of 19 adolescents
(13 girls and 6 boys, mean age 14;6 years, with a range of 13;5 to 15;11 years)
from a single English class in the ®nal year of ColleÁge (middle school). A wide
range within a year group is not unusual in the French school system, where
little stigma is attached to repeating a year (Royal 1999). The class was of
mixed ability but it did not include any pupils with special educational needs.
They were in their fourth year of English classes (3 50 minutes a week), and
in their second year of another foreign language (usually German or Italian).
The upper-intermediate group consisted of 22 young people (18 young
women and 4 young men, mean age 17;10 years with a range of 16;11 to 19;6
years) from a single English class in the ®nal year of LyceÂe (upper school).
320 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
Only pupils with suciently high marks on the examinations at the end of
middle school are admitted into upper school, so overall academic ability in
this group will have been more uniform than in the younger group. The
upper-intermediate participants were in their seventh year of English classes,
and had studied or were studying at least one other foreign language.
Participants also took part in three other experiments besides those
described and referred to here; each participant received a present at
Christmas (a book for upper-intermediate participants and a bag of sweets
for lower-intermediate participants) and a book voucher at the end of the
series of experiments.
Materials and procedures
Three measures were administered, each in both languages: a baseline
comprehension assessment, a pro-form resolution test and a working
memory measure.
Baseline comprehension measure
The baseline comprehension measure was undertaken to establish that both
groups were skilled comprehenders in L1 and to con®rm that a dierence in
L2 comprehension skill could not be attributed to decoding or sentence-level
processing dierences. For this measure, a summary completion task, that is a
gapped summary to complete, was chosen. Taylor (1996: 83±8) argues
persuasively that summary completion oers a reading comprehension
assessment format which takes account of readers' natural processing of a
text. This distinguishes it from multiple choice questions or discrete-item
comprehension questions, whose basis in an analysis of reading as a set of
subskills has been called into serious question (by, for example, Alderson
2000: 93±7). Moreover, summary completion, unlike question-answering,
does not require the reader to understand additional material besides that
which is already included in the text: a particularly important point in L2
comprehension testing.
The English language stimuli were taken from graded readers designed for
learners of English as a foreign language, chosen from the list of the 600 books
judged to be the best in print by the Edinburgh Project for Extended Reading
(EPER 1998). Short (124- to 150-word) self-contained texts were chosen from
sixteen graded readers which corresponded to the pro®ciency level in English
of the lower-intermediate group as determined by (1) the EPER level; (2) their
teacher's assessment of the texts, (3) comparison with their course book, and
(4) observation of the class. Most texts were from the very beginning of each
book. Texts were chosen for similarities in style and topics as well as in level
and length. Some stories focused on action and plot and some on exploring
feelings and relationships, so as not to favour boys' or girls' preferred narrative
styles (Millard 1997). Care was taken that the stories did not depend on
CATHERINE WALTER
321
cultural schemata that the French participants would not share (Steensen et
al. 1979). The sixteen French texts were translations of the English texts,
checked for naturalness by two French native speaker linguists.
As a ®nal guarantee of the accessibility of the English texts for the lowerintermediate group, the content, vocabulary, and grammatical structures in
the English versions of the stories were checked by their English class teacher,
who felt comfortable that the children would not have any signi®cant
diculty with these. Additionally, she included all less frequent words for
productive use in class work shortly before the trials.
For each text, a straightforward summary of about ®fty words was written,
containing ®ve gaps. Seven native English-speaking volunteers (three
linguists and four adolescents of the same age as the lower-intermediate
participants) attempted to complete the English summaries without reading
the original texts, in order to make certain that no answers were
unequivocally internally predictable. The adolescents were paid £5 an hour.
The texts and their summaries were entered into the Psyscope programme
(Cohen et al. 1993) on a Macintosh PowerBook.1
The languages of the texts were counterbalanced, so that half of the
participants read each text in one language and half of the participants read it
in the other language. The order of the texts was rotated. To balance the risks
of other-language activation,2 familiarity eect, and fatigue eect, the
language was changed every two texts: two texts in one language were
followed by two texts in the other language and so on. Each text was preceded
®rst by a screen with a row of asterisks, then by a screen stating the language
of the following text (`English'/`francËais'), and ®nally by a screen with the title
of the text.
Each summary appeared on a single screen after its text, from which it was
separated by a screen with a row of asterisks and then a screen with the title of
the text and instructions in the appropriate language. Paper answer sheets
gave an entire line for each blank in the summary. A sample text and its
summary are given in Appendix 1.
Piloting was conducted in English with nine native English-speaking girls
(mean age 13;7 years) and in both languages with eleven French learners of
English (mean age 17;2 years). The aims of this piloting were (1) to con®rm
that the basic stories were clear and interesting to this age group; (2) to check
the summaries for appropriate diculty and for clarity (answers were
discussed with each volunteer after the trial); (3) to use the answers in
order to test and ®ne-tune the marking system; and (4) to con®rm that the
texts presented no cultural diculties for French participants.
In the study, trials were conducted with participants individually. After
receiving a spoken explanation in French and before beginning the trials, each
participant practised self-paced reading on the computer with a story in
French; and ®lled out a sample answer sheet. The participants were told that
neither spelling nor grammar was important in ®lling out the summaries; that
they could put as many or as few words as they wished for each blank; and
322 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
that they could write answers in French for blanks in English summaries if
they so wished. `Meaning is all that counts' was the ®nal instruction for
summary completion.
The participant pressed a key to move from one screen to the next, but
could not go back to a previous screen. If a screen was skipped because of
faulty handling of the computer, however, the experimenter told the
participant what had been on the skipped screen or showed it to them on
paper (this happened three times). As a further check that decoding or
sentence-level processing problems did not interfere with comprehension,
participants were invited to ask the meaning of any words they did not
understand in English, either in the text or in the summary. No participant
asked about more than a total of six words for all of the eight English stories,
and the questions were overwhelmingly to con®rm correct knowledge, for
example, `Window, c'est feneÃtre?'.
In scoring, one point was awarded for each of the ®ve gaps in each
summary. Half-points were allowed for answers which, while not complete,
gave an indication that the participant had a partial understanding of the
information required. Criteria for scoring had been established on the basis of
the piloting operation. They were then adjusted using the ®rst ten answer
lea¯ets from each group as feedback, that is a few additional acceptable
answers occurred in the ®rst ten lea¯ets, and these answers were added to the
list of acceptable answers. These twenty lea¯ets were then re-marked, and all
the subsequent lea¯ets were marked using the same criteria.
Pro-form resolution measure
As in Yuill and Oakhill's (1991: 85±95) study of young L1 comprehenders'
resolution of co-referring expressions, the co-referring expressions were
embedded in naturalistic stories. This procedure was chosen rather than
using several passages which would require participants to set up a new
context for each pro-form.
Two stories (`Burglars', 875 French/865 English words; and `McCarthy', 951
French/938 English words) were written. The stories contained both action
and exploration of feelings, in order not to privilege girls' or boys' reading
styles (Millard 1997). To ensure that the English texts did not present
decoding or sentence-level processing diculties for the lower-intermediate
group, the same procedures were followed as for the comprehension
assessment. To check for naturalness of discourse, ®ve educated native
speakers with no training in linguistics were asked to read the story and say `if
there was anything strange about the way they were written'; three Englishspeaking and two French-speaking linguists were asked to read the story and
say if the discourse seemed to proceed unnaturally at any point. No problems
were signalled by any of the readers.
Instances of pronoun and pro-verb co-reference were chosen (16 for the
`Burglars' story and 15 for the `McCarthy' story) and when the stories were
CATHERINE WALTER
323
printed on paper these words were printed in red to contrast with the ordinary
black typeface of the rest of the story.The beginning of the `Burglars' story is
given in Appendix 3.
The experimenter and three other linguists made independent judgements
about the pro-forms in the two stories, putting them into one of two distance
categories:
. immediate, where the ®rst mention is in the same or previous clause;
. remote, where the ®rst mention is more than two clauses distant, with any
clear mediating mention also two or more clauses distant.
In each of the two stories, ten pro-forms for which all four linguists agreed on
classi®cation were used for scoring (four pronouns and one pro-verb in each
distance condition). Thus, in each language, each participant was scored on
the resolution of ®ve pro-forms for each distance condition (immediate,
remote). There was always another plausible ®rst mention in the story for the
scored item.
Trials were conducted with participants individually. After an explanation
in French and a practice session in French and English on several twosentence passages, the participants each silently read one story on paper in
each language. They were told to stop when they got to a word in red, read
the word aloud, and tell the experimenter `what the word meant', in either
language, in as few or as many words as they wished. Half the participants in
each group read `Burglars' in French and `McCarthy' in English, and the other
half read with the languages reversed. Within these groups, half the
participants read the French story ®rst and half read the English story ®rst.
When they encountered an expression printed in red, they read the word
aloud and then tried to identify the ®rst mention. If the response was
incorrect, the experimenter ®rst indicated merely that something was not
right; if this did not elicit the correct answer the experimenter gave some
guidance, recalling the context of the story. This procedure was chosen for
several reasons:
. to allow for the possibility of marking the results either strictly or liberally,
to avoid ceiling or ¯oor eects (in the event, however, only the
spontaneous responses were used in the scoring)
. to prevent an early error from in¯uencing later items. The decision had
been made to embed the trial items in one story for each language rather
than writing a new mini-story and obliging participants to set up a new
context for each item. However, a risk of this approach is that earlier errors
can in¯uence later decisions; this risk was minimized by the procedure
described. Note that the instrument was measuring pro-form resolution
skill, and not reading comprehension, which had been assessed in the
baseline study.
. to put the participants at their ease, and to avoid their leaving the trials
with a sense of failure.
324 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
As a further check that decoding or sentence-level processing problems did
not interfere with comprehension, participants were also encouraged to ask
for the meaning of any words or expressions that they did not understand in
English. There were very few problems with lexis, and participants' questions
were overwhelmingly con®rming in nature.
A correct answer given without any prompting was scored 1 and all other
responses were scored 0. (More liberal scoring did not give dierent results.)
Verbal working memory measure
The verbal WM measure used in this study is fully described in Walter (2000)
and Walter and Williams (in preparation). This measure is based on Waters
and Caplan's (1996) modi®cation of the classical Daneman and Carpenter
(1980) reading span measure. The great advantage of a measure of this type
over the Daneman and Carpenter measure is this: WM comprises both
processing and storage; but while the Daneman and Carpenter measure
requires subjects both to process and to store, it only measures storage. Like
Waters and Caplan's (1996) instrument, the WM measure in the present
study measures both processing and storage.
In each language, the stimuli consisted of sets of simple declarative
sentences, six to eight words long, in which the argument requirements of
the verb are either respected (`logical' sentences) or not (`illogical' sentences).
That is to say, in half the sentences (`illogical' sentences) an inanimate subject
is used with a verb which requires an animate one (e.g. Several of the ¯utes play
my cousins). The sentence-®nal words are all dierent concrete nouns.
Sentences were randomly ordered for `logical'/'illogical' conditions. They
were then divided into four series of ®ve increasingly longer sets of sentences:
the ®rst series contained ®ve two-sentence sets and the last series contained
®ve ®ve-sentence sets. Adjustments were then made (respecting the `logical'/
'illogical' order) to ensure that, in any set, the sentence-®nal words were not
phonologically similar and did not have obvious semantic links. There were
four versions of the materials, varying along two parameters:
1
2
In each language, the original randomized list was reversed and re-divided
into sets, and small adjustments were made to avoid phonological
similarities and semantic links.
Two of the versions began with a series of ®ve two-sentence French sets
and two began with a two-sentence English series. In all versions, the
language was changed after the initial two-sentence series and then after
every two series.
The sentences were entered into the Psyscope programme (Cohen, MacWhinney, Flatt, and Provost 1993) on a Macintosh PowerBook, to appear in
the centre of the screen, one sentence at a time. Each set of sentences was
followed by a screen showing a line of asterisks. Each group of ®ve sets was
preceded by a screen announcing the language and length of the next set.
CATHERINE WALTER
325
Participants judged whether each sentence was logical or illogical (processing measure); the time taken for this judgement was recorded (processing
measure); and, at the end of a set, participants attempted to remember the last
word of each sentence in order (recall measure). Each participant was allowed
to choose which of 1 or 0 on the computer keyboard they preferred for
`logical' and `illogical' choices, and practised with sample material until they
were at ease with the procedure. Pressing the button to signal `logical' or
`illogical' made the next sentence or a row of asterisks appear on the screen.
When the asterisks appeared, the participant attempted to say the sentence®nal words of the set in order and the result was recorded on paper by the
experimenter. Success in an item was de®ned as correct recall of all sentence®nal words in a set, in order, with this exception: if a participant said the
sentence-®nal words correctly but in the wrong order, the experimenter asked
(depending on the language in use) `Dans l'ordre?/In order?', and a correct
response to this prompt was counted as a success. The experimenter did not
otherwise indicate whether individual responses were right or wrong. The
trial continued until the participant could no longer reliably recall ®nal words.
Working memory scores in each language were calculated for each
participant, based on three ®gures: one measure of storage (reliably
remembered sentence-®nal words, or `recall span'), and two measures of
processing (reaction time in milliseconds for correct answers at recall span;
and percentage of correct logicality judgements).
Recall span, as in Daneman and Carpenter (1980) and Waters and Caplan
(1996), was expressed as the highest level (sentences per set) at which the
participant correctly recalled the sentence-®nal words in three out of ®ve sets,
with an extra half-point given for correct recall in two of the ®ve sets at the
next higher level. For example, a participant who recalled all sentence-®nal
words correctly on three out of ®ve four-sentence sets, and then recalled all
sentence-®nal words correctly on two out of ®ve ®ve-sentence sets, would
obtain a recall span score of 4.5.
Reaction time was measured as the time in milliseconds between the
appearance of a sentence on the screen and the pressing of the button to
signal the logicality judgement. Only reaction times at reading span for correct
logicality judgements were taken into account.
To obtain an overall WM score, z-scores for the three components (recall
span, percentage of correct logicality judgements, reaction time) were
calculated by taking both French and English components into account. In
other words, to take recall span as an example, each subject contributed two
values (recall span in French and recall span in English) to the sample
population on which the recall span z-scores were based. The z-scores for
reaction time at span and percentage of correct logicality judgements were
calculated in the same way. The reaction time z-scores were multiplied by ±1
(higher reaction times indicating less good processing, whereas higher scores
on the other two measures indicate better processing and recall). Overall WM
scores were calculated as the means of the three z-scores.
326 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
RESULTS
Baseline reading comprehension assessment
Mean scores out of 40 and standard deviations are given in Table 1. Figure 1
shows the summary completion scores by language and group.
From Table 1 and Figure 1, showing the results of the baseline reading
comprehension assessment, it can be seen that in L1 French, while both
groups showed good evidence of comprehension, at 80 per cent and 70 per
cent of correct summary completion replies, there was a small dierence
between them. This dierence was con®rmed by a one-way ANOVA in which
there was an eect of group, F(1,39) = 7.041, p < .05. This dierence was not
surprising, given the disparity in maturity and academic attainment between
the two groups. However, at 70 per cent of correct judgements, the lowerintermediate participants were comprehending well in L1. The next question
was whether the between-group dierence in comprehension scores in L2
paralleled the dierence in L1; or whether the lower-intermediate group's L2
Table 1: Means and standard deviations of summary completion scores for
all participants (out of 40), by language and group
Language
French
English
Lower-intermediate
(N = 19)
Upper-intermediate
(N = 22)
Mean
SD
Mean
SD
28.07
13.84
4.18
7.21
32.00
27.73
4.30
6.28
Figure 1: Mean summary completion scores (out of 40), by language and
group
CATHERINE WALTER
327
scores were much further from their L1 scores than their upper-intermediate
counterparts' scores.
In order to investigate whether there was a dierence in the degree to
which the two groups were transferring their comprehension skills from L1based comprehension to L2-based comprehension, a 22 mixed-design
ANOVA was carried out on the summary completion scores, with one
between-subjects factor: group (upper-intermediate, lower-intermediate), and
one within-subjects factor: language (French, English). Both main eects
were signi®cant. There was a main eect of group, with upper-intermediate
participants completing summaries more successfully than lower-intermediate
participants: F(1,39) = 47.20, p < .0001. There was a main eect of language,
with summaries of French stories being completed more successfully than
summaries of English stories: F(1,39) = 59.70, p < .0001.
There was a signi®cant two-way interaction between language and group:
F(1,39) = 17.95, p = .0001. This demonstrates that the lower-intermediate
participants' comprehension scores in the two languages were much further
apart than those of their upper-intermediate counterparts. (Stricter and more
liberal scoring regimes gave the same results.)
Pearson product±moment correlations were carried out between the mean
French and English summary completion scores, to investigate whether
French L1 comprehension skill predicted English L2 comprehension skill.
There was an overall correlation between the two sets of summary completion
scores, r = .31, p < .05, but no signi®cant correlations when the scores were
broken down by group. Pearson product±moment correlations were also
carried out between the English mean summary completion scores and
English ®nal school marks from the previous academic year as based on the
schools' pro®ciency examinations. Here, in contrast, there were correlations
not only for both groups taken together (r = .39, p < .05), but also for each
group taken on its own (lower-intermediate: r = .73, p < .001; upperintermediate: r = .61, p < .01). Note that these school marks were based on
dierent examinations for each group, but that the examinations were of the
same nature and based on the same scales. Within each group, pro®ciency in
English, as measured by school marks, predicted success in English summary
completion better than did L1 French reading comprehension skill measured
as success in summary completion; this pattern is current in the literature
about reading at lower levels of L2 pro®ciency (in, for example, Bernhardt
and Kamil 1995; Carrell 1991).
Recall that the comprehension texts were speci®cally written and tested so
that the lower-intermediate group could process the language at a sentence
level. Yet the dierence between lower-intermediate L1 and L2 text
comprehension scores (36 percentage points) was signi®cantly larger than
the upper-intermediate L1/L2 dierence (10 percentage points). It is unlikely
that the dierence between the L1 scores of the two groups would cause such
a large disparity between their L2 scores without the intervention of some
other factor. It can thus be said with con®dence that these two groups of
328 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
readers were (a) processing well at sentence level and comprehending well at
text level in L1; (b) processing well at sentence level in L2; and (c) showing
patterns of transfer (upper-intermediates) or diculty in transfer (lowerintermediates) of reading comprehension skills from L1 to L2 texts, similar to
the patterns found in previous studies.
Pro-form resolution measure
Mean scores out of 5 and standard deviations are given in Table 2. Figure 2
shows the pro-form resolution scores by language, distance, and group.
Table 2: Means and standard deviations of pro-form resolution scores (out of
5), as a function of language, distance, and group
Language
French
English
Distance
Immediate
Remote
Immediate
Remote
Lower-intermediate
(N = 19)
Upper-intermediate
(N = 22)
Mean
SD
Mean
SD
4.10
3.73
3.74
2.26
0.87
1.03
1.00
1.33
4.45
3.90
4.23
4.00
0.74
1.23
0.81
1.23
Figure 2: Pro-form resolution scores (out of 5), by language, distance, and
group
CATHERINE WALTER
329
A mixed-design 222 ANOVA was carried out, with one betweensubjects factor: group (upper-intermediate, lower-intermediate), and two
within-subjects factors: language (French, English) and distance (Immediate,
Remote). All main eects were signi®cant: a main eect for group, F(1,39) =
10.58, p < .005, indicating that the upper-intermediate participants resolved
pro-forms more successfully than the lower-intermediate participants; a main
eect for language, F(1,39) = 8.53, p < .01 indicating that L1 pro-forms were
resolved more successfully than L2 pro-forms; and a main eect for distance,
F(1,39) = 27.47, p < .0001, indicating that Immediate pro-forms were resolved
more successfully than Remote pro-forms. There was a signi®cant two-way
interaction between language and group, F(1,39) = 6.39, p < .05, indicating
that the upper-intermediate participants' scores in L2 were reliably closer to
their scores in L1 than those of their lower-intermediate counterparts. There
was a signi®cant two-way interaction between distance and group, F(1,39) =
4.33, p < .05, indicating that the upper-intermediate participants' scores for
Remote pro-forms were reliably closer to their scores for Immediate pro-forms
than those of their lower-intermediate counterparts. Most importantly, there
was a signi®cant three-way interaction between language, distance and
group, F(1,39) = 6.91, p < .05, indicating that the dierence in L1 and L2 proform resolution between the two groups in the Remote condition was reliably
dierent from that in the Immediate condition. (Note that an ANOVA with
`Assignment of story version' nested within group was carried out, but its
results were identical to those of the 22 ANOVAs reported here.)
Pearson product±moment correlations were performed between L2 baseline
comprehension and L2 resolution of Remote pro-forms for each group. The
results are given in Table 3.
The upper-intermediate participants were resolving Immediate and Remote
pro-forms similarly well in L1 and in L2. The lower-intermediate participants
resolved Immediate and Remote pro-forms well in L1, and resolved
Immediate pro-forms well in L2. This is consistent with their building
eective structures corresponding to the L1 text, and with their processing
the L2 text well at sentence level. However, the lower-intermediates were
signi®cantly worse at resolving Remote pro-forms in L2 than in L1. If they had
experienced diculty in sentence-level processing in L2, this would have
been re¯ected in their Immediate L2 pro-form resolution scores, and this was
not the case. The patterns of the lower-intermediate scores correspond to
what was predicted if they were building eective structures corresponding to
L1 texts, but failing to build eective structures corresponding to L2 texts. In
other words, these results support the hypothesis that the transfer of mental
structure-building skill is associated with the level of success in L2 reading
comprehension.
In the baseline comprehension measure, we saw two groups of learners at
two dierent levels of L2 pro®ciency. The upper-intermediate group showed
via the summary completion measure that they comprehend reading texts
similarly well in L1 and in L2. The lower-intermediate group results in
330 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
summary completion showed that they comprehend well in L1; but that they
have problems comprehending L2 reading texts, even when these are geared
to their level of L2 pro®ciency. Now we see that, in the Remote pro-form
resolution measure, designed to gauge structure building skill, the lowerintermediate group performs well in L1 and poorly in L2. This is consistent
with success in transfer of structure building skill being associated with
success in L2 comprehension.
In this regard, the pattern of correlations in Table 3 is interesting. There are
no correlations between summary completion and Remote pro-form
resolution in L1, and this may indicate that both groups were suciently
skilled in structure building in L1 so that individual dierences were not
re¯ected. In L2, the lack of correlation for the lower-intermediate group is
unsurprising given their relative lack of success in both measures. What is
interesting is the signi®cant correlation in L2 for the upper-intermediate
group, whose members were successful in L2 in both comprehension and
summary building measures. The better an upper-intermediate participant
was at structure building, the better s/he was at comprehension. This provides
further support for the hypothesis that the transfer of structure building skill is
associated with success in L2 comprehension.
Table 3: Pearson product-moment correlations between summary completion
scores and remote pro-form resolution scores, as a function of language and
group
French L1
English L2
Lower-intermediate
(N = 19)
Upper-intermediate
(N = 22)
Total
(N = 41)
ns
ns
ns
.63**
ns
.65***
** p < .01; *** p < .0001
Working memory measure
Means and standard deviations for percentage of correct logicality judgements, number of ®nal words reliably recalled and reaction time for correct
answers at best recall span by language and by group are given in Table 4.
The means and standard deviations of overall WM scores, by language and
group, are given in Table 5.
In order to examine the overall relationship of WM with the baseline
comprehension (summary completion) scores, both French and English WM
scores were plotted on the x-axis of the same graph, against the means of the
corresponding summary completion scores. The resulting correlations are
given in Table 6. Correlations were compared using Fisher's (1921) method
for testing the dierence between two independent rs, and this showed
CATHERINE WALTER
331
Table 4: Means and standard deviations of scores for recall span (maximum
5.0), logicality judgement (percentage of correct judgements) and reaction
time for correct answers (in milliseconds, at span) for all participants, by
group
Measure
Language Lower-intermediate
(N = 19)
Mean
Recall
span
French
English
Logicality
French
judgement English
Reaction
time
French
English
SD
3.73
2.05
Upper-intermediate
(N = 22)
Total
(N = 41)
Mean
Mean
0.79
0.95
4.50
2.84
SD
0.77
0.58
4.14
2.47
94
83
4
12
96
91
5
8
95
87
6144
11785
1615
3704
5278
6522
1148
1401
5679
8961
SD
0.86
0.86
5
11
1434
3777
Table 5: Means and standard deviations of WM scores (expressed as means
of the z-scores of the three contributing measures, with the reaction time zscore polarities reversed) for all participants, by language and group
Language
French
English
Lower-intermediate
(N = 19)
Upper-intermediate
(N = 22)
Total
(N = 41)
Mean
SD
Mean
SD
Mean
SD
0.35
±1.01
0.25
0.59
0.73
±0.02
0.26
0.30
0.55
±0.48
0.32
0.67
Table 6: Correlations between all WM scores and summary completion scores
All scores French
scores
English
scores
Upper-intermediate
Lower-intermediate
.76**
.73***
.46**
.79***
.33*
* p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .0001
signi®cant dierences between the French and English correlations (p < .05)
and the lower-intermediate and upper-intermediate correlations (p < .01).
In other words, Table 6 shows that having a higher verbal WM (ability to
process and store complex information simultaneously) corresponds to being
332 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
better at reading comprehension, for both groups. It also shows that this is
signi®cantly more the case for the lower-intermediate group. Small
advantages in WM give signi®cant advantages in comprehension, especially
at the lower level of pro®ciency. This supports the hypothesis that there is a
link between the development of verbal WM in L2 and success in L2 reading
comprehension.
When correlations were carried out between WM and summary completion
scores for each language by group, neither group yielded a signi®cant
correlation in French, and nor did the upper-intermediate group yield a
correlation in English. The only signi®cant correlation in English was between
the lower-intermediate group WM scores and their baseline comprehension
scores, r = 0.49, p < .05.
This single signi®cant correlation is similar to ®ndings in other studies of
WM. Observation of WM dierentiation `when the going gets tough' is
common in the literature, and is well accounted for in various models (e.g.
Baddeley and Logie 1999; Ericsson and Kintsch 1995; Ericsson and Delaney
1999; Engle et al. 1999). Neurophysiological support for this observation is
provided by D'Esposito et al. (1995), who performed fMRI studies on patients
who were simultaneously carrying out a spatial task and a verbal task;
D'Esposito's group found that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortexÐthe part of
the brain that has been found to be associated with WM executive control
processesÐwas activated (as were the domain-speci®c areas associated with
the two tasks). It is notable that the prefrontal cortex was not measurably
activated when the two tasks were performed independently, but only when
there was a higher overall demand on WM. In the present study, the
correlation between WM scores and comprehension scores corresponds well
to the lower-intermediate group's experiencing high demand on their L2 WM
in the summary completion tasks.
In order to examine the relationship of verbal working memory with
structure building, both French and English WM scores were plotted on the xaxis of the same graph, against the means of the corresponding Remote proform resolution scores. The resulting correlations are given in Table 7.
Detailed correlations between English WM and English Remote pro-form
resolution scores by group were performed, but these did not, however, yield
signi®cant correlations.
The Table 7 ®gures do tend to support the hypothesis of higher demands
being made on WM in the English pro-form resolution condition. They also
correspond to higher WM demands on the lower-intermediate group
generally. However, the predicted correlation between Remote pro-form
resolution and WM for the lower-intermediate group did not emerge, and this
merits further study.
CATHERINE WALTER
333
Table 7: Correlations between all WM scores and Remote pro-form resolution
scores
All scores French
scores
English
scores
Upper-intermediate
Lower-intermediate
.45**
.52*
ns
. 53**
ns
* p < .001; ** p < .0001
DISCUSSION
The ®rst hypothesis that this study addressed was:
The transfer of mental structure-building skill is associated with level of
success in L2 reading comprehension.
This hypothesis was supported: the baseline reading comprehension measure
showed that both groups of participants were skilled comprehenders in L1,
but diered in their ability to transfer their comprehension skill to L2. Next,
the pro-form resolution measure showed that both groups were building
sound mental structures in L1, but that there was a signi®cant dierence
between the groups' ability to do so in L2, even when they understood texts
on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Patterns of correlation supported the notion
that the more successful structure builders were operating similarly in L1 and
L2, and that the better they were at L2 structure building, the better they
were at L2 reading comprehension.
The second hypothesis was:
The transfer of reading comprehension skill (and hence structurebuilding skill) from L1 to L2 is linked to the development of verbal
working memory in L2.
This hypothesis also received some support: verbal WM correlated with the
baseline reading comprehension measure precisely in that `tough' circumstance (lower-intermediate, L2 Remote pro-form resolution) predicted by
models of WM. In addition, L2 verbal working memory tended to correlate
with L2 structure building as measured by Remote pro-form resolution.
However, there was not a signi®cant correlation between Remote pro-form
resolution and WM for the lower-intermediate group speci®cally, and this
deserves further study.
So a crucial element in transferring reading comprehension skill from L1 to
L2 appears to be the transfer of the structure-building ability; and this transfer
appears to be linked to the development of WM in L2. These ®ndings provide
a possible explanation for the perceived threshold nature of the transfer. If
successful structure building is accomplished in L1 but not in L2, it is not the
ability to build mental structures that is absent; what is lacking is the
334 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
attainment of some level of L2 ability which acts as a precondition for the
structure-building skill to operate. Recall the nature of the structure-building
skill as described by Gernsbacher (1990). If some element or set of elements in
L2 WM were insuciently developed for the comprehender to link incoming
material to a previously established structure, the comprehender would fall
back on initiating a new structure. The result of this process occurring
repeatedly would be the sort of bulky, inaccessible mental representation that
less-skilled L1 comprehenders produce (Gernsbacher, 1990). A failure to link
appropriately even once or twice at crucial early points in the building of a
mental representation might be enough to prevent the building of a cohesive
structure, and hence to prevent recall of earlier information. The L2
comprehender would continue to have diculties in recall for a time, even
as the underlying capacity continued to develop progressively. Success in
building reliable mental representations based on L2 would only improve
when the underlying capacity had developed to a point where quite a large
number of the unconscious decisions involved in building a representation
were successful. This would account for the perceived threshold nature of the
L1-to-L2 transfer.
The question now arises: what is the nature of the link between L2 WM and
L2 reading comprehension? One way of investigating this question is to
examine empirically the possible sources of demand on WM capacity, for
example less well elaborated L2 phonological representations, or more
eortful syntactic processing. Another is to undertake a longitudinal study
in which WM, L2 reading comprehension skill, and various elements of L2
pro®ciency are tracked. This would eliminate the problems associated with
any experimental design that involves matched groups, more pronounced in
the present case where it is very unlikely that groups can be matched both for
®rst language background and for age.
Further studies involving learners from dierent L1 backgrounds, including
languages outside the Indo-European family and languages whose orthography is not phonological, would throw additional light on this subject.
(Final version accepted April 2004)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am most grateful to the participants from the ColleÁge Jean Rostand and the LyceÂe ReÂgional
Polyvalent et Professionel, both in MouÃtiers, France; to Michael Swan and John Williams for their
continuing advice and support; to Julie Norton, Susan Mandala, Dominique Flandin-Granget, and
Catherine CobeÁs for serving as linguist informants; to the members of the Working Memory
Workshop, and especially Alan Baddeley and Robert Logie, for their advice on working memory
matters; and to ®ve anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of
this article.
CATHERINE WALTER
335
APPENDIX 1
Project Omega
Charles Hat®eld Baker III was a very rich man. There wasn't a richer man in all of New
York City. He was the head of a large number of important companies. He had land
and buildings and houses in the country. He had boats and horses and an aeroplane.
But he was a simple man. He liked the simple things of life: a good cup of coee, a kiss
from a pretty girl, a walk through the park on a ®ne autumn day.
He had all these things on this Wednesday morning. He drank two cups of very good
Italian coee for breakfast. His daughter, Julia kissed him goodbye. `Have a nice day,
daddy,' she said. And he left his apartment to walk to his oce. He always walked
through Central Park to his oce.
(Reprinted by permission of Addison Wesley Longman Limited from Project Omega by
Elaine O'Reilly, 1991.)
Summary
Charles Hat®eld Baker III was _____A_____ New York City. He controlled a lot
of _____B_____. He had land, buildings, houses, and expensive possessions. He
liked _____C_____ things. On this Wednesday he had two _____D_____, his
daughter kissed him, and then he left his apartment to _____E_____.
APPENDIX 2
(The beginning of one of the stories from the pro-form resolution test. The
words which are underlined here were printed in red.)
BurglarsÐEnglish
It was a very dicult day at the oce. Monica's secretary was ill, and a temp
from an agency was taking her place. She wasn't very ecient, and Monica
had to explain the same things to her again and again. Then there was a
problem in another part of the building that Monica had to go and sort outÐ
she was away from her desk for more than an hour, and while she was out
she missed an important phone call. [. . .]
336 TRANSFER OF READING SKILLS
NOTES
1 The texts were entered into the Psyscope
program so as to appear in one of four
segmentation conditions: sentence-by-sentence; word-by-word; by meaningful
phrases; or cut in the middle of syntactic
units. This was done to test hypotheses
about possible dierences in reading performance based on segmentation condition.
In the event, there was no signi®cant
dierence between any of the conditions.
2 To some extent, both languages are always
activated in bilinguals. But excessive otherlanguage activation can interfere signi®cantly with processing in tasks where the
participants have no indication of which
language is going to come next. However,
studies have shown that bilinguals can
exercise a great deal of conscious control
over excessive other-language activation,
especially when it is clearly indicated which
language is called upon for each part of a task,
and also when languages are not switched
too often. (See Scarborough et al. 1984;
Durgunoglu and Roediger 1987; Basden et
al., 1994; Costermans and Galland 1980;
Doctor and Klein 1992; and Durgunoglu
and Hancin's 1992 review of the subject.)
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