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9 Metalinguistic Awareness, Bilingualism, and Reading Continuing on the theme of literacy and metalinguistic awareness, we now examine another way that the self-monitoring of text processing may be related to this connection . Chapter 8 described how children reflect on language forms when they revise and correct their own writing. This chapter looks at how self-monitoring works in reading. Again, it is error correction that offers a window into the mechanisms of this kind of attention to text patterns. Here we will focus on reading comprehension: what kinds of strategy do children make use of when they commit a reading error or “miscue” and notice the error, prompting them to self-correct? An important distinction will be made between two types of self-correction: one for which context prior to the miscue did not provide a prompt to self-correct, and one that does have the benefit of prior context. One of the original objectives of this assessment was to propose an outline for a typology of oral-reading self-correction strategies. Conceivably, a metalinguistically aware posture toward the decoding of texts should be related in some way to effective comprehension. So the question was, what is the profile of this kind of skilled reading? Recall that the participants in these studies had been selected to take a random sample of average to above-average achievement levels among children who knew both languages of the community. Related to this selection was the need to exclude children with serious vision problems (we realized that this would be a potentially confounding factor when it came to our attention that none of the children at the school wore glasses), dyslexia, and other unidentified disabilities. Thus, our interest in the self-correction study was in describing a strategy that characterizes the best readers among the 45 children who participated in the project, themselves part of a preselected group. Note that in this study, differences in selfcorrection strategy (e.g., how context is utilized by the reader) are being considered as a contributing factor in sentence comprehension, not primarily as a direct indicator of how readers make use of context for lower-level decoding (word identification ). Without a doubt, higher-order comprehension and lower-level decoding are related in many important ways. But since a different set of component structures 232 Chapter 9 and processors intervene in each case, the questions of how context affects sentence comprehension and what role it plays in word identification should be considered separately. Serious work on this distinction awaits further study. 9.1 Modular Approaches to the Study of Reading Sadowski and Paivio’s (1994) Dual Coding Theory (DCT) of reading comprehension, and Paivio’s (1991) bilingual version of the DCT, offer a perspective that coincides in a number of ways with the bilingual proficiency models discussed so far. Sadowski and Paivio distinguish between verbal and nonverbal systems, which are separate but interconnected. Central to the DCT is the idea that this distinction flows from two different kinds of mental representation and from the different ways in which verbal and nonverbal information are processed. The former is organized into units that are more discrete and separable; the latter is “stored in a more continuous, integrated way” (p. 585). Extending this idea to biliteracy (as the DCT suggests), the two verbal subsystems, which share similar mental representations, maintain one kind of interaction with each other and a different kind of interaction with the less modular nonverbal (or shared conceptual) system. To the latter correspond, in addition to concepts, those literacy-related proficiencies that are not strictly language-bound, such as certain key components of discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness. So, to be sure, the awareness of language forms is a kind of knowledge that is different from the knowledge that the verbal systems are built from. One way to think of the difference is in terms of explicit versus implicit knowledge (the distinction that came up in the discussion of M. Paradis’s (2004) model in chapter 6). Perfetti’s (1994) componential framework and Stanovich’s (2000) modular approach to the study of reading ability are other important points of reference. In regard to our object of study, reading self-correction, another possible starting point is the concept of nonlinear processing. Online reanalysis that compels the reader to return to previously decoded text for the purpose of rectifying an error should be one aspect of academic language proficiency. The more...

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