McCormack B (2001). ‘The maintenance and loss of reflex-ive anaphors in L2 English.’ Ph.D. diss., University ofDurham.

McCormack B (2004). ‘Methodological aspects of a gener-ative-based attrition study.’ In Schmid M S, Kopke B,Keijzer M & Weilemar L (eds.) First language attrition:interdisciplinary perspectives on methodological issues.Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 243–257.

Murtagh L (2003). ‘Retention & attrition of Irish as asecond language.’ Ph.D. diss., University of Groningen,NL.

Nagasawa S (1996). ‘Attrition of speaking skills in ad-vanced speakers of Japanese L2: A multiple case study.’Dissertation Abstracts International, Section A: TheHumanities and Social Sciences (DAIA) 56(11), 4381.

Nagasawa S (1999). ‘Learning and losing Japanese as asecond language: A multiple case study of American uni-versity students.’ In Hansen L (ed.) Second LanguageAttrition in Japanese Contexts. Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press. 169–199.

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Schmid M S (2002). First language attrition, use and main-tenance: the case of German Jews in anglophonecountries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

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Second Language Listening 81

Second Language Listening

G Brown, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

It was not until well into the second half of the 20thcentury that second language listening was widelyrecognized as a skill that could and should be system-atically developed and assessed by those teaching asecond language. Whereas earlier scholars such asHenry Sweet and Harold Palmer had stressed theimportance of teaching the spoken language, in theirview such teaching was to be based on ‘‘the science ofphonetics,’’ which effectively meant that the aspectof the spoken language actually taught was its pro-nunciation. It seems that these scholars supposedthat, if you could pronounce the target language reas-onably well, it must follow that you would be able tounderstand it when you heard it spoken. So, in earlywork on listening comprehension based on the struc-turalist tradition, it was assumed that the main prob-lems in second language listening would be a mirrorimage of problems with pronunciation. Students were

systematically taught to identify differences betweenthose sets of vowels or consonants in the target lan-guage that a contrastive analysis of the phonologicalsystems of the L1 and L2 predicted would be difficultfor the L1 speakers to distinguish in L2 speech. Stu-dents listened to triplets of words, such as bit bit beator try dry try, and were required to identify whichof the three words was different from the othertwo. They listened to sets of words with similar con-sonantal and vocalic structure but different stresspatterns and identified those with different stress pat-terns. And they listened to phrases like the pink oneuttered with either falling or rising intonation andidentified the one with rising intonation as a question.

With the advent of mass tourism in the 1960s, thegulf became glaringly apparent between being able toidentify a sequence of words spoken slowly and care-fully in the foreign language and being able to identifywords in the acoustic blur of normal conversationalspeech. As Wilga Rivers (1968: 135) remarked, em-phasis in language teaching had hitherto been placedon students’ production of the language, disregardingthe fact that communication takes place between (at

82 Second Language Listening

least) two people. She suggested that the primarydifficulty for a traveler in a foreign country was notthe problem of making himself understood but ofbeing unable to ‘‘understand what is being said tohim and around him’’.

On the rare occasions when students were invitedto listen to a tape to understand the content of whatwas said, they typically listened to a text thatconsisted of a narrative or discursive text read aloudslowly and distinctly by a native speaker. After lis-tening to the tape, they were asked questions on thecontent. The questions, often as many as 10 or more,concerned information spaced at roughly equal inter-vals through the text, following the format widelyused in ‘teaching’ the comprehension of the writtenlanguage. Consider what these second language lear-ners were being required to do: ‘‘treat all spokenlanguage as primarily intended for transference offacts . . . listen with a sustained level of attention,over several minutes to spoken language . . . interpretall of it . . . commit that interpretation to memory . . .answer random, unmotivated questions on any of it’’(Brown and Yule, 1983: 60). Sophisticated adult na-tive speakers often had difficulty in recalling some ofthe trivial detail that such ‘comprehension questions’addressed. For most second language learners, theexperience was negative and demotivating.

The challenge since the 1960s has been to helpstudents identify words in the stream of speech andto equip them with strategies to enable them to inter-pret the content of utterances in the relevant contextof utterance and to work out what speakers mean bywhat they say.

Bottom-up Interpretation

It seems clear that structuralists were correct in claim-ing that being able to identify words in the stream ofspeech is fundamental to understanding what aspeaker is saying. In some genres of speech, notablyin relaxed conversation, where the focus is on theestablishment or maintenance of social relationships,it may not be necessary to identify all the words thatare spoken but, to participate meaningfully in theconversation, it is essential to identify at least thoseexpressions that indicate the topic of the utteranceand what is said about that topic. In primarily trans-actional genres, on the other hand, where the transferof information will have some effect in the world, itmay be essential to identify even the detail of thoseunstressed grammatical words that you can oftenafford to leave only vaguely guessed at in social con-versation. When you are listening in your first lan-guage, you tend to be quite relaxed about how muchyou can afford not to fully interpret. In a second

language, particularly in the testing situation of aclassroom, it is hard not to panic if you realize thata series of unidentified words is rushing past yourears.

It is sometimes suggested that, in order to identifywords in the stream of speech, it is necessary to beable to identify all the consonantal and vocalic oppo-sitions that occur in the accent of the target languagethat students are being exposed to. This is a counsel ofperfection. We should remember that in any accentof English, some of the oppositions found in otheraccents will not occur. Thus, standard AmericanEnglish does not distinguish between the wordsbalm and bomb; young speakers of southern BritishEnglish (‘RP’) do not distinguish between the wordspaw, pore, and poor; Scottish English does not distin-guish between the words cot and caught, cam andcalm, or pull and pool; Yorkshire English does notdistinguish between the words put and putt; andLondon Cockney English does not distinguish be-tween the words sin and sing, thin and fin, or thatand vat. Yet, on the whole, speakers of differentaccents of English understand one another’s speechwell enough, even though in their own accent they donot make exactly the same set of phonological dis-tinctions that their interlocutor makes. Second lan-guage learners are likely to encounter speakers from arange of different English accents and need to learn toidentify the basic distinctions that are maintained instressed syllables in all English accents, rather thanspending much time on rare sets of oppositions thatdo not occur in most accents and which, even there,may carry only a low functional load. Whereascourses in pronunciation will normally be based ononly a single native accent, courses in second lan-guage listening need to be much less constrained andto be relevant to a variety of major English accents.

There is obviously a significant difference betweenencountering words in the written and spoken formsof the language. In the written form, spaces betweenwords unambiguously demarcate individual words.A major difficulty in interpreting the spoken form ofa second language lies in determining where wordboundaries occur. It is not always appreciated thatcrucial information needed in the task of segmentingthe acoustic blur of the stream of speech lies notonly in discriminating between phonological opposi-tions but also in identifying the phonologicallyconditioned variables that characterize particularconsonants when they occur initially or finally in aword or stressed syllable. For historical reasons,much has been made in teaching English as a secondlanguage of the ‘aspiration’ (delayed voice onset time)that follows the articulation of a voiceless stop whenit is initial in a stressed syllable. On the other hand,

Second Language Listening 83

the glottalization that precedes the articulation ofthe same set of phonemes in the coda of a syllable inmost accents is typically ignored. Yet each feature isequally informative in identifying relevant parts ofword structure (Brown, 1990: Chap. 2). Similarlymuch has been made in British ELT of the distinctionbetween palatalized (‘light’) and velarized (‘dark’) /l/,without noting the generalization that the structure ofthe syllable in the RP accent is always more palatal-ized in the onset and more velarized in the coda of thesyllable, a fact that affects the articulation of all con-sonants in these positions. The effect is most easilyheard in sonorants and continuants where syllable-initial (onset) consonants will be heard as more pala-talized, and hence higher in pitch, than syllable-final(coda) consonants. There are, of course, accentswhose syllables are differently structured: the Englishof Glasgow has velarized consonants initially aswell as finally, and Welsh English has palatalizedconsonants finally as well as initially.

Much more generalizable across accents than thesepalatal/velar subtleties is information about thosephonotactic constraints that are helpful in identifyingsyllable and word boundaries, information that issadly underexploited in the teaching of second lan-guage listening. For example, if an ESL listener hearsa sequence /ml/ in the stream of speech, it is relevantto know that, since this cannot form an onset clusterin a syllable of English, it cannot mark the beginningof a word. The /l/ must be syllable initial, whichmeans that the /m/ must be final in the precedingsyllable; the significance of this fact is that wherethere are syllable boundaries, there are potentialword boundaries (Cutler and Norris, 1988). An es-sential requirement is to learn to identify and to payattention to the stressed syllable of words, since thisis the syllable that is most reliably clearly articulat-ed. In the stream of speech, a great deal of the pho-nological information that is available when wordsare pronounced slowly and clearly in citation formis routinely lost, particularly in unstressed syllables.Unstressed syllables are frequently elided, particular-ly when they occur as one of an unstressed sequence(for instance, in words such as library, governor, ex-traordinary). Processes of elision and assimilationtake place across syllable boundaries and radicallyalter the familiar features of the citation form. Suchprocesses occur densely in normal, informal speechwhose relevance for learners is much greater nowthan it was pre-1970 since this type of speech isused in a much wider range of situations than itused to be. It is not only found in informal conversa-tional contexts but is regularly heard on radio andtelevision (even in news broadcasts, once models ofslow, carefully articulated speech) and is standardly

used in academic lectures and in public speakingmore generally. (Harris (1994) and Shockey (2003)gave detailed accounts of these processes.)

I have suggested that a crucial component of sec-ond language listening is identifying words cor-rectly. More to the point may be identifying thelarger, prefabricated structures of which so much spo-ken language is constructed. Wray (2002) reviewed anarray of studies that demonstrated the crucial sig-nificance of such structures, particularly in the earlystages of learning a second language. It seems likelythat many expressions are, initially at least, learned asunanalyzed chunks. Other expressions may be incor-rectly analyzed (as in the case of the L2 learner ofFrench who analyzed the spoken version of chocolatas chaud cola). In many cases, it may be that suchexpressions are stored and used quite effectivelyuntil eventually confrontation between spoken andwritten forms (or the utterance and the world) leadsto a reanalysis. The acquisition of lexis, and of for-mulaic expressions in particular, is still the subjectof extensive research.

Having identified (some of) the expressions in anutterance, the listener needs to order them into chunksthat can be understood as syntactically structuredand co-interpretable semantically. Just as the writtenlanguage uses punctuation and layout to indicate theorganization of discourse, there are various signals inspeech, for instance, intonation, slowing down, andpausing, that indicate the boundaries of chunks ofspeech that need to be co-interpreted. In most accentsof English, the beginning of a new sentential structureis typically indicated by being placed relatively highin the speaker’s pitch range, and the rest of the struc-ture is included within the overall contour that fol-lows. The end of the structure is usually marked bybeing uttered at a lower level in the pitch range thanthe onset and is often followed by a pause. Internalsentential boundaries may be marked by shorterpauses and sometimes by variation in pitch height ordirection (cf., Ladd, 1996).

Where spoken language differs dramatically fromwritten language is in the scale of interruptions, mod-ifications, and use of interpersonal markers in itsproduction and in its reliance on the present contextof utterance to constrain possible interpretations bythe listener. Most speakers have had the experienceof interrupting themselves, pausing, reconsidering,planning again, beginning to express themselves inone way, and then immediately modifying what theyhave just said. Unlike writers, they cannot undertakesuch operations secretly, without the interlocutorknowing. Second language learners unused to listen-ing to spontaneous speech that has not been previous-ly at least partially planned are in danger of having

84 Second Language Listening

their attention distracted from the message by ma-terial that is introduced as part of the planning pro-cess. Often the changes speakers make are marked byinterpersonal and modal expressions such as well,erm . . . I mean, so . . . you see . . . , if you get mymeaning . . ., as far as I’m concerned . . ., I think . . .,I’m sure . . ., phrases that disturb the smooth flow ofa sentential structure at both a syntactic and an into-national level. A feature of spontaneous conversa-tional speech that second language learners needto become accustomed to is how such universal fea-tures of spoken language are managed in the secondlanguage.

As speech plays such an important role in interper-sonal relationships, its production is often modifiedby paralinguistic features that express the attitude ofthe speaker toward the listener and/or toward what isbeing said. English speakers who are being particu-larly polite to the interlocutor often speak higherin their voice range, relatively softly, and with a‘breathy’ voice, whereas those who are being aggres-sive typically speak lower in their pitch range, moreloudly, and with a ‘harsher’ voice quality. Speakerswho are being sympathetic or kind speak low intheir voice range, slowly, and typically with a ‘creaky’voice. Whereas it seems plausible that basic humanemotions such as fear, anger, or timidity are expressedsimilarly in all languages, it seems probable that atti-tudes that are more culturally conditioned are morelikely to be variable in their expression across lan-guages. Second language learners, at quite an earlystage in their exposure to tapes and videos of L2speakers interacting, might profitably pay attentionto paralinguistic features of speech in order to identifywhether speakers are agreeing or disagreeing witheach other, being polite or aggressive, or friendly orunfriendly, long before they can understand the lin-guistic details of what is being said (Brown (1990),summarized in Rost (2002)).

Interpretation and Inference

Clark and Clark (1977: 45) drew a helpful distinctionbetween ‘constructing an interpretation’ and ‘utiliz-ing an interpretation,’ drawing attention to the factthat, in everyday life, we use language to get thingsdone. In doing a crossword puzzle, we might con-struct an interpretation without putting the interpre-tation to further use but most speech is functional,either to interact with someone socially or to transferor extract information. This implies that there is moreto the interpretation of an utterance than simplyidentifying words, syntactic structures, and thin se-mantic meanings; we must infer what the speakerwho produced the utterance intended to achieve by

it. The term ‘interpretation’ reflects this process betterthan the term ‘comprehension.’ To have compre-hended an utterance suggests a total, correct productnow present in the listener’s mind. For a listener whois trying to understand a decontextualized utterancein a language test, a translation equivalent of the thinsemantic meaning may yield a judgment of ‘correct’but, as Goffman (1981: 28) remarked, ‘‘the mental setrequired to make sense of these little orphans is thatof someone with linguistic interests’’ rather thansomeone who is using language purposefully. Itmight be supposed that a total, correct productcould be achieved in understanding short, banal utter-ances such as what is the time? But even such afamiliar utterance may have been produced by thespeaker primarily to bring about an awareness ofthe passage of time on the part of the listener, anintention that the listener may remain unaware ofeven after having produced an apparently appro-priate translation. ‘Interpretation’ gives a better im-pression of the riskiness of the listener’s effort tounderstand what the speaker means by producingthe utterance and it gives no impression of finality –once constructed, an interpretation is not fixed andimmutable but may subsequently be modified. It isbecause, in most genres, there can be no single ‘cor-rect’ interpretation of what is said that some scholarsquestion the possibility of measuring or assessing thedegree of a student’s ‘spoken language comprehen-sion’ (issues discussed in Shohamy (1996); Spolsky(1994)).

To arrive at an interpretation, the listener needs tomake inferences at many levels. To begin with, thelistener may need to infer the identity of words notclearly heard but which would make sense of theutterance. Then, the effect of the immediate verbalcontext on the sense (meaning) of words must betaken into account. For instance, the word red proto-typically denotes a strong, saturated red hue and theword face prototypically denotes the configuration ofeyes, nose, mouth, and chin that would be repre-sented in a child’s drawing. However, once thesewords occur in the phrase red face, red must be inter-preted as denoting a pinky, blotchy color, whereasface will draw attention particularly to the cheeksand perhaps the forehead but certainly not the eyesor mouth. The listener must infer which of a widerange of senses is appropriate in a given verbal con-text. For a second language listener, particularlyone who has learned the foreign words in terms ofone-word translation equivalents, extending the in-terpretation of a word well away from its centraltranslational sense requires considerable confidencesince it is obviously an operation fraught with risk(Færch and Kasper, 1986).

Second Language Listening 85

The issues of syntax, of combining words in onesyntactic structure rather than another, and of thechoice of syntactic structure having any effect oninterpretation have been curiously neglected in cogni-tive models of comprehension. Most accounts of dis-course meaning simply ignore the nature of thesyntactic structures selected by the speaker and pro-duce representations of discourse meaning consistingof a set of abstract semantic ‘propositions’ fromwhich all specifically syntactic information has beenexpunged. A few writers have insisted on the signifi-cance of syntactic structure in determining how thesemantic content of an utterance is understood (e.g.,Brown, (1994); Levinson (2000)). Halliday (1978)pointed out the disruptive effect on the listener’spresuppositional coherence of using inappropriatesyntactic structures (consider which is the most ap-propriate radio commentary on a ceremony: Thesun’s shining. The day’s perfect. versus It’s the sunthat’s shining and the day that’s perfect). Davison(1980) noted the effect on interpretation of usingpassive rather than active constructions in some cir-cumstances, and Sanford and Moxey (1995) havedrawn attention to the inadequacies of any accountof interpretation based solely on propositional repre-sentation. It is far from clear why a language shoulddevelop different ways of expressing the same propo-sitional content if using a different syntactic structurehas absolutely no effect on meaning. Rather littleexperimental work has been conducted on the effecton interpretation of varying syntactic form but atleast we should note that a competent listener wouldneed to draw inferences when an unexpected syntac-tic structure is employed: compare the effect of Hecertainly spoke to her with She was certainly spokento by him.

The Context of Utterance

It is a truism that spoken language typically reliesheavily on context for its interpretation. There is awidespread view that speakers and listeners ‘share’the context of utterance. Yet a moment’s thoughtreminds us that speaker and listener can usually seeeach other’s face and facial expression but not theirown, and each of them has private interests, percep-tions, judgments, and prejudices and brings to anyinteraction different hopes and expectations for itsoutcome. As Johnson-Laird (1983: 187). remarked,‘‘the notion of the context overlooks the fact that anutterance generally has two contexts: one for thespeaker and one for the listener. The differences be-tween them are not merely contingent but. . .a crucialdatum for communication’’. I shall consider three

aspects of context from the point of view of thelistener: external context of situation, social context,and textual/discoursal context. Each of these aspectsof context interacts and overlaps with the others,more or less obviously in different genres (Brown,1998).

The External Context

Utterances are produced in a particular place and at aparticular time. Much of what is said will be assumedto be relevant to the place and time of utterance. Ifsomeone comes into a room, shivers, and says It’scold, the listener will understand that the commentapplies to the current place and time – if not to thetemperature within the room, then to the local exter-nal temperature. If I, in a temperate country, say inwinter It’s warm today, I mean that it is relativelywarm for this locality at this time of year, not that itis as warm as it might be in August or in Singapore. Ifthe speaker says She’s coming on Monday, the listenerwill assume that the relevant ‘Monday’ will be thenext one after the day of utterance. If the conversationis about ‘the president,’ ‘the doctor,’ or ‘the school,’the listener should assume that it is the partici-pants’ current, local president, doctor, or school, ifno contrary information is given. Conversations will,by default and in the absence of contradictory infor-mation, be assumed to be relevant to ‘local’ condi-tions, where ‘local’ can be interpreted as widely ashere can be interpreted in here in my hand, here inthis room, here on this street, here in this town, herein this country, and so on.

A concept of ‘appropriate behavior,’ which maydiffer in different cultures, will set limits on what itis appropriate to say and how it is appropriate tosay it in particular places and at particular times.There are appropriate greetings for different timesof day, for meeting, and for parting. There are someplaces, places of worship, for instance, where sometopics or manners of speaking would be judged inap-propriate. If I have a trivial message for you about thepostponement of some distant future event, it wouldbe inappropriate for me to come to speak to youabout it in your hotel room at midnight, invadingyour personal space and possibly awakening youfrom sleep. If, in defiance of convention, I were toinsist on speaking to you in such circumstances, youmight well infer that I meant more than I was overtlyexpressing. The subtleties of contraventions, deliber-ate or intentional, of conventions governing types ofutterance appropriate to particular external contextsare peculiarly difficult for second language learners tointerpret with any confidence without extensive ex-perience of the culture where the second language isused.

86 Second Language Listening

The Social Context

For the listener, the most significant figure in thesocial context is the speaker, and the significant rela-tionship is that between speaker and listener. Whetherthe speaker is speaking to a group of listeners orshaping the utterance for just one listener, the speakermust make judgments about how far they willshare what Clark called ‘‘communal lexicons’’(1998: 60–87). Communal lexicons, Clark suggested,are built on such social features as shared nationality,education, occupation, hobbies, language, religion,age cohort, and gender. The more social featuresthat the speaker and listener share, the more thespeaker can rely on the listener being able to under-stand specialist vocabulary. Where speaker and listen-er share an occupation, suppose both are ship’sengineers, even where the listener is a second lan-guage learner, they are likely to be able to negotiatethe senses of technical terms with some confidencethat each understands what the other is speaking of aslong as the listener feels relaxed and is able to thinkclearly. However, when the speaker is the dominantparticipant in an interview that is communicativelystressful for the second language learner, for instance,when the learner is a junior doctor being interviewedfor a job by a senior member of the profession, theability of the listener to negotiate a shared under-standing of a term may be curtailed, which may resultin a breakdown of communication. For nervous stu-dents in examination conditions who are exposed totapes of speakers with whom they share few, if any, ofClark’s social features, only the most self-confidentof students are likely to arrive at an adequate inter-pretation in the lottery of a speaker, or speakers,talking on a quite unpredictable topic that may bedistant from any of the student’s own interests. It willalways be the case that a second language learner willhave least difficulty in understanding language thatthe speaker is sympathetically shaping for that partic-ular individual, taking account of the learner’s cur-rent state of control of the second language andanticipated knowledge of the topic.

When listening to speakers from their own speechcommunity, listeners will often make stereotypicaljudgments about the speaker on the basis of thespeaker’s self-presentation in terms of dress, hair, pos-ture, and what the listener knows about the speaker’soccupation. Such stereotypical judgments may influ-ence the listener’s interpretation of what the speakersays. If asked in the street what the time is by asmartly turned-out passer-by as opposed to onewho gives the general impression of having just stum-bled out of bed, different listeners may respond withdifferent degrees of helpfulness in each case. If the

listener hears This is yet another example of hardwork by the left said by a left-wing politician, thelistener will infer that the expression is used positivelyand appreciatively, but if the very same remark isuttered by a right-wing politician, the listener willinfer that it is used negatively and critically. Secondlanguage listeners may feel uneasy about importingstereotypical knowledge of the world from theirown culture into interpreting what is said in anotherlanguage.

They may also fail to notice when they havenot properly understood what someone says, asyoung L1 listeners have been shown to do in theirown language (Markman, 1981) or blame themselvesfor not having understood when native speakersexpress the content of their message inadequately.Robinson (1981), working with native speakers ofEnglish, showed young children who hear ellipticalor ambiguous messages from adults may be ‘listenerblamers,’ who attribute their difficulties in under-standing such messages to their own inadequacy,rather than ‘speaker blamers,’ who are capable ofrecognizing that the speaker has produced a confusedand confusing utterance. If second language learnershear a native speaker assert something that the listen-ers cannot make sense of, like ‘listener blamer’ chil-dren they may believe that they have not interpretedwhat the speaker said correctly, simply because theyare reluctant to question the authority of a nativespeaker.

The Context of Discourse

The discourse context is created by whatever theconversational participants are currently paying at-tention to and by what has already been said on thetopic. It is the structure of what has already beenestablished in the discourse context that allows thelistener to determine what anaphoric expressionsrefer to and what, within the discourse world, newexpressions refer to (Gernsbacher, 1990; Smith,2003). How much the listener must carry in memoryfrom the previous discourse varies with the type ofgenre at issue. In genres such as instructions on howto complete a task, where each instruction is followedby a pause while the listener completes that step in thetask, there is minimal burden on memory. Instructiontasks may be made easier by limiting the number ofparts or participants and making them clearly distinctfrom one another. Narrative genres, where an under-standing of what is happening now depends on yourunderstanding of what has happened earlier, are like-ly to impose a greater burden on memory. Again,narratives can be simplified if events are narratedin the order of occurrence (‘ordo naturalis’), if the

Second Language Listening 87

number of participants is limited, and each partici-pant is physically clearly distinguished from the otherparticipants (Brown, 1995). The more complex thetask, the more difficult it is to arrive at a secureinterpretation, culminating in the problems of follow-ing abstract arguments in academic lectures (Chau-dron, 1995).

Listening as ‘Input’ to Second LanguageLearning

When we consider the complexity of the demandsmade on the learner listening to a second language,it seems truly remarkable that such input can formthe basis for learning the second language. Neverthe-less, it is clear that to a greater or lesser extent, indifferent contexts of acquisition, some learners dosuccessfully learn to control a second language to animpressive extent, largely from absorbing aspects ofspoken input while simultaneously putting that inputto use in constructing an interpretation of what aparticular speaker intends to convey on a particularoccasion of use. How this is achieved is the subject ofextensive speculation in the second language acquisi-tion literature (for a useful critical overview of theliterature and an initial stab at a theoretical approachthat distinguishes between the procedures of proces-sing language for meaning and the processes of lan-guage learning, see Carroll (1999)). The mostpromising research thus far on this topic is thatconcerned with the acquisition of lexis, given spokeninput (see, e.g., Ellis and Beaton (1993); Vidal(2003)).

See also: Phonetics, Acoustic; Second Language Acquisi-

tion: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax; Speech Perception.

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Second Language ReadingE Bernhardt and M Kamil, Stanford University,

Stanford, CA, USA

� 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Second language (L2) reading research is one of theolder fields represented in the psychology literature(Bernhardt, 2003). In some sense, early L2 readingresearch might be characterized as something for cu-riosity seekers: a second language was used as a foilfor a first. In other words, to examine one phenom-enon (reading), scientists looked at a similar one froma different perspective (L2 reading) in order to verifyuniversals in the process they were actually investigat-ing. After this hothouse use of reading in secondlanguages, the field of second language reading re-search lay dormant for many years. In reality, fromWorld War I to the end of the Vietnam War, an interestin language (beyond grammar translation in the aca-demic arena for literary use) was by and large focusedon language for defense purposes or national interest(Moulton, 1963). An abrupt shift occurred in the mid–1970s, spurred by the massive global immigrationbrought about by war, economics, and technology.Language teaching became suddenly multipurposive,focused on preparing millions of nonnative speakers (ofwhatever language) to survive, work, and build lives inforeign cultures and countries in a manner in whichprevious generations could never have imagined. Ef-forts such as the European Unit Credit System (Trim,1980), as well as the Oral Proficiency Movement in theUnited States (American Council on the Teaching ofForeign Languages, 1986) and the massive growthof professional organizations such as Teaching Englishto Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and the In-ternational Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA)are concrete reflections of the response to this globalstate of affairs. Most of the effort was expended on thedevelopment of oral skills with a survival-level readingand writing focus.

From the mid-1970s to 1995, reading in an L2 wasby and large the domain of applied linguistics, and

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some significant work was conducted by applied lin-guists that led to both knowledge and theory devel-opment in the field. Volumes such as Alderson andUrquhart, 1984; Bernhardt, 1991; Carrell et al., 1988;and Mackay et al., 1979 populated the scene. Theoverwhelming portion of the work cited and collectedin these volumes focused on adult readers, who moreoften than not came to the L2 reading process true tothe concept of second. In other words, they had al-ready acquired a native language and a native literacy.

The 1990s saw the awakening of education scho-lars to the concerns of second-generation immigrants.This second generation had frequently not beenschooled in a home country (with, therefore, little orno native literacy) but rather needed to be schooled ina country where neither the language of schoolingwas spoken nor read in the home environment. Thisawakening brought about the widened expansion ofinterest in the field by literacy educators – i.e., scho-lars interested principally in mother-tongue literacysuddenly confronting the multilinguality that charac-terizes the overwhelming majority of classrooms aswell as adult settings internationally. This expansionhas brought welcome visibility to the area, as wellas some communication difficulties across academicareas. Public and private efforts signifying an expandedinterest in L2 literacy include Teaching children toread, the National Reading Panel Report (NICHD,2000); the RAND Reading Study Group, Readingfor understanding, RAND, 2002; National LiteracyPanel for Language Minority Children and Youth Re-port, (forthcoming, 2005); as well as the Handbookof reading research, volume II (Barr et al., 1991) andthe Handbook of reading research, volume 3 (Kamil,et al., 2000). Scholars (Kern, 2000; Pennycook, 2001)also expanded their visions about L2 literacy, exploringthe implications of a global technology that affordedimmediate and essentially cost-free access to billions ofwritten pages, as well as of the politics and social forceof literacy.

This expanded interest and extended perspectivesand objectives brought forth a set of academic andtheoretical complexities surrounding L2 reading.