© 2004 by Oxford University Press
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Transfer of Reading Comprehension Skills to L2 is Linked to Mental Representations of Text and to L2 Working Memory
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 lower-intermediate proficiency levels) participated in the study: members of both groups were proficient comprehenders in L1 French, but they differed 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.
Accepted April 2004.