Native English speakers\u27 reading strategies for Japanese and Spanish: Are they same? A multiple case study

More and more researchers in second language acquisition accept the theory of the reader-response process in reading comprehension, and they recommend that students should focus on meaning by inference ability rather than vocabulary or grammar. With this reader-response approach, readers are encouraged to use their background knowledge, cognates, titles, pictures and other contexts to guess the meanings in the reading of authentic materials. However, when confronted with the combination of unfamiliar subject matter and totally different features from a European language, how do American readers comprehend a text? The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study is to investigate what kinds of strategies are employed in reading Japanese, which is comprised of very different linguistic features from English, as compared to reading Spanish, which shares similarities with English. The study focused on two native English speaking adult individuals who had approximately the same proficiency level in both Japanese and Spanish languages. In this study, think-aloud procedures, interviews, observations, and the researcher\u27s journal were used as data collection sources. These descriptive data were analyzed using inductive analysis procedures. The most significant result in this study was that when both participants encountered more difficult reading, they relied more on grammatical knowledge in Japanese and more on guessing from cognates in Spanish. Secondly, more demanding cognitive processes in Japanese reading were a common phenomenon observed in both participants. Finally, the participants\u27 language aptitude, motivation, learning style, and personality were found to be integrated to affect their reading strategies. The pedagogical implications from these findings are as follows: (1) grammar instructions should be more emphasized for novice Japanese language learners than Spanish language learners; (2) educators should not demand that students use top-down processing at very early stages of their Japanese language learning because they cannot free their cognitive process to find meaning; (3) students\u27 individual differences must be considered in introducing some reading strategies