| Phonology in Second Language Reading: | Not an Optional Extra |

Phonology in Second Language Reading: Not an Optional Extra CATHERINE WALTER Institute of Education, University of London London, England In examining reading comprehension in a second language (L2), I have demonstrated that the prevailing metaphor of transfer of skills is misleading, and that what happens is access to an already existing general cognitive skill There is evidence in first language (L1) and in L2 that accessing this skill when reading in an alphabetic language involves efficient use of verbal working memory (VWM) This article reports a study of a component of VWM, the phonological loop, which serves to hold recently read material available in a phonological form The study investigated whether the unreliability of learners’ mental L2 phonological inventories contributed to reading comprehension problems Lower intermediate learners with L2 reading comprehension problems attempted to recall similar and dissimilar sequences of words in L1 (French) and L2 (English) Their performance was consistent with their having unreliable L2 phonological inventories; their upper intermediate counterparts, who had no L2 reading comprehension problems, had significantly more reliable L2 phonological inventories This finding has important implications for the classroom: Rather than attempting to teach components of a cognitive skill that learners already possess, teachers would better to spend the equivalent time increasing exposure to the spoken language, and improving receptive and productive phonology n examining reading comprehension in a second language (L2), I have argued that the prevailing metaphor of transfer of skills is misleading, and that what happens is better conceptualised as access to an already existing general cognitive skill (Walter, 2007) This argument is based on the work of Gernsbacher and her colleagues, who have provided evidence that comprehension—the building of a mental structure corresponding to a narrative or expository account—involves the same cognitive mechanisms and processes whether it is based on listening, reading, looking at picture stories, or watching silent films (Gernsbacher, 1990, 1997; Gernsbacher, Varner, & Faust, 1990; MacDonald & MacWhinney, 1990) In other words, comprehension is not linguistic: It I TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 42, No 3, September 2008 455 is not in the first language (L1), so it cannot be transferred to the L2 Rather, readers of L2 who comprehend well this because they have reached a point where they can access, from the L2, their existing skill in building mental structures Since Alderson’s seminal article in 1984, researchers have been interested in the problems that intermediate L1-literate learners have in L2 reading comprehension; these problems not seem explicable in terms of learners’ general proficiency, and they have sometimes been characterised as a threshold phenomenon, though the evidence for this is not decisive (Lee & Schallert, 1997) In Walter (2004) I provided evidence that lower-intermediate learners with L2 comprehension difficulties have difficulty with the building of mental structures to represent L2 narratives, even when they can understand the individual sentences in those narratives and when they encounter no conceptual difficulties in the text In other words, these readers are good decoders of L2 sentences, but poor comprehenders of L2 texts (while being good comprehenders of the same texts in L1) Further, I have demonstrated a link between this difficulty in building mental structures and the operation of L2based verbal working memory (VWM; Walter, 2004, 2007) The same phenomenon, and the same link with VWM, has been observed in young L1 readers by Yuill and Oakhill (1991); and the discontinuity between decoding and comprehension has further been corroborated in L1 by a functional magnetic resonance imaging study associating text comprehension with increased activity in the right frontal lobe and sentencelevel understanding with increased activity in the left frontal lobe (Robertson et al., 2000) In this article, I report on a study which examined one of the possible sources of the problems that good L1 comprehenders have in comprehending their L2, despite being good L2 decoders This possible source is the way in which phonological information is represented within a component of working memory, the phonological loop WORKING MEMORY, THE PHONOLOGICAL LOOP AND READING Working memory (WM) can be thought of as a (largely unconscious) mental workbench, where information is processed and stored during complex cognitive tasks such as playing chess, making a medical diagnosis, or comprehending a story The tools on this workbench have three functions: (1) access to information from external input and from long-term memory; (2) temporary storage of the information while it is needed for the task at hand; and, perhaps most importantly, (3) processing of the 456 TESOL QUARTERLY information in order to carry out the task The WM workbench is not infinite in size or functionality: If there is too much information, or if too much processing is demanded, something will fall off the workbench, or one of the tools will not have enough power to function well My aim in this study was to examine whether part of this WM problem consists of difficulties in a component of verbal WM called the phonological loop In Baddeley and colleagues’ Multi-Component Model (Baddeley, 1986, 2000; Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998; Baddeley & Logie, 1999; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993) WM consists of a central executive plus slave systems One of the slave systems is the phonological loop, a short-term memory mechanism that stores information in phonological form and automatically rehearses that information by unconscious subvocalisation (Another slave system is the visuospatial sketchpad, which performs an analogous function for visual information.) The existence of the phonological loop is widely accepted, even by researchers whose models of WM are somewhat different from that of Baddeley and colleagues (Cowan 1999; Engle, Kane, & Tuholski 1999; Kieras & Meyer, 1994) Indeed, even frameworks that appear very different from the Multi-Component Model, for example, distributed processing models like the Interactive Cognitive Subsystems framework (Barnard, 1999) and the CAP2 Hybrid Architecture (Schneider, 1999), or the biologically based computational model of O’Reilly, Braver, and Cohen (1999), are compatible with the construct of the phonological loop There was some debate about the characteristics of the phonological loop in the 1990s and early 2000s (Caplan, Rochon, & Waters, 1992; Cowan, Nugent, Elliot, & Geer, 2000; Lovatt, Avons, & Masterson, 2000); but Mueller, Seymour, Kieras, and Meyer (2003) re-examined these characteristics using more rigorous metrics than the earlier studies and provided evidence confirming the model’s predictions and disarming the criticisms The phonological loop holds about seconds of speech, which listeners record automatically when they hear speech It is thanks to the phonological loop that when my partner says I haven’t been listening to what he’s just been saying, I can deny the charge and repeat back his last sentence word for word (even though he was right: I wasn’t listening, but what he said automatically went into my phonological loop) So has evolution given us a phonological loop in order to keep couples together? Not according to Baddeley et al (1998), who suggest that the phonological loop may principally serve in language acquisition, carrying out “a fundamental human capacity to generate a longer lasting representation of a brief and novel speech event—a new word” (p 158) That is to say, the phonological loop may have evolved so that people could hold the phonological representations of new words in focal attention long enough to construct more stable, durable representations In support of this idea, studies such as Gathercole and Baddeley (1990), PHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 457 Gathercole, Hitch, Service, and Martin (1997), and Michas and Henry (1994) have shown that children of equal nonverbal ability and spatial memory skill, but differing phonological loop capacity, differed in their ability to remember phonologically unfamiliar names for toys (Pyemass), or familiar–unfamiliar pairs of words (fairy–bleximus), but not in their ability to remember phonologically familiar names (Peter) or familiar– familiar pairs of words (table–rabbit) In adults, similar evidence has been offered: Saying an irrelevant series of words is known to interfere with the functioning of the phonological loop (articulatory suppression), and Papagno, Valentine, and Baddeley (1991) found that articulatory suppression hindered recall of L1–L2 pairs of words but not of L1–L1 pairs; Papagno and Vallar (1992) found that word length (important because of the limited time span of the phonological loop) had an effect on recall of L1–L2 word pairs but not on the recall of L1–L1 pairs From these and other studies, Baddeley et al (1998) conclude that “the long-term learning of the sound structures of novel, phonologically unfamiliar words depends on the availability of adequate representations of the sound patterns in the phonological loop” (pp 162–163) The phonological loop has been linked to other aspects of L2 acquisition besides word learning For example, it has been shown to play a role in the early development of productive narrative skills in L2 (O’Brien, Segalowitz, Collentine, & Freed, 2006) In this article, I examine its role in L2 reading, where it may also be the case that “the availability of adequate representations of the sound patterns in the phonological loop” is crucial The Phonological Loop in L2 Reading The phonological loop comes into play in a somewhat counterintuitive way in the reading of alphabetic languages Strange as it may seem, L1 readers of languages with alphabetic writing systems store the most recently read material (about as much as the reader can say in seconds) in their phonological loop rather than in their visuospatial sketchpad L1 readers of these languages not mentally see what they have just read: They hear it One kind of evidence for this is that activities that interfere with the phonological loop (like counting out loud), performed while reading, interfere with the understanding of sentences (Baddeley, Eldridge, & Lewis, 1981; Waters, Caplan, & Hildebrandt, 1987) Note that what is in question is not how written words are decoded (which is probably from multiple cues at letter, letter-sequence, letter-cluster, and word level) but how they are temporarily stored, and the evidence is that the visual trace is lost in favour of the phonological product In earlier work (Walter, 2004, 2007), I found that low L2-based VWM 458 TESOL QUARTERLY corresponded to problems with reading comprehension, so I wondered if, inter alia, this problem with comprehension might arise because L2 readers had a problem with phonological storage: If phonological representations of just-read material are unreliable, it may be difficult to use these representations for higher level mental structure building Material in the phonological loop is subject to decay, and if the elements (sounds, or words, or onsets and rimes, or whatever units the reader is using) are not linked quickly to long-term representations (e.g., phonemes, however specified, or exemplars, or lexemes), decay may make it difficult to associate the sounds with meanings There is evidence that underspecified long-term phonological representations are related to the problems of poor L1 readers (Boada & Pennington, 2006; Elbro, 1996; Elbro & Jensen, 2005; Griffiths & Snowling, 2002; Swan & Goswami, 1997) For L2 readers, difficulties in building a mental structure corresponding to a read text may in part result from the lack of a wellelaborated L2 phonological inventory in long-term memory This is what the current study sought to determine If phonemes, as idealised forms, or as prototypes, or even as multiple exemplars of variants, are not well distinguished from one another, even a slight decay in the phonological loop record may cause enough information loss to make words hard to recognise This is not to say that the L2 reader has to have internalised a standard pronunciation of L2 phonemes, but only that she or he needs to be able to distinguish words from one another when they differ by a phoneme; if the reader cannot this, basing comprehension on the word becomes difficult Flege and MacKay (2004) found that some L1 Italian speakers, longtime residents of Canada and proficient users of English, still had problems aurally in discriminating \ɑ\ from \ \, \e\ from \æ\, and \ i \ from \\,1 identifying both members of each pair as the same vowel when listening If the same sort of lack of differentiation occurs in the phonological loop during reading, it might be part of the reason for difficulties in building structures corresponding to texts However, lack of differentiation between two neighbouring phonemes may not be the only source of problematic storage in the phonological loop Lange and Oberauer (2005) give evidence for a model based on competition within a distributed memory representation whereby features of a phoneme can be “overwritten,” which degrades the memory representation If features of a phoneme could be overwritten, then not only similar phonemes in a one-to-two relationship between L1 and L2, but other phonemes as well, might be poorly represented in the phonological loop Where English is represented phonetically here, British conventions for representing standard southern British in the International Phonetic Alphabet are used PHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 459 Note that I am focusing on learners of English whose L1 has an alphabetic orthography There is evidence that learners whose L1 orthography is ideographic may store the immediate products of decoding in the visuospatial sketchpad, rather than in the phonological loop; and that they may transfer this decoding practice to the reading of an alphabetic L2, at least initially (Chikamatsu, 1996) Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion Another possible source of phonemic confusion in L2 is an insufficiently developed grapheme-to-phoneme conversion system If this were the case, a distinctive phonological representation would be available in long-term memory, but faulty grapheme-to-phoneme conversion would lead to activation of the wrong phoneme The wrong phoneme might be activated because an L2 reader applies L1 grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules to L2, as in the encoding of white as \wi t\ by a French learner of English, so that white and wheat would be indistinguishable in the phonological loop RESEARCH QUESTION The study reported in this article aimed to answer the question: Is approximate or erroneous phonemic representation one of the factors that distinguishes unskilled from skilled L2 readers? THE STUDY The methodology used in this study was a partial replication of Baddeley (1966) Baddeley found that phonological similarity has a large adverse effect on recall of word sequences, but semantic similarity has no comparable effect In other words, people have much more difficulty remembering a list of words when the words are phonologically similar than when they are phonologically different, and this finding is true whether the words are heard or read; similarities in word meaning not interfere with recall in the same way This finding has frequently been replicated, recently by Mueller et al (2003) and Nimmo and Roodenrys (2005) The current study uses the same methodology, not to explore the characteristics of the phonological loop, but to examine its possible role in L2 reading Remember that readers of alphabetic languages store the immediate products of decoding in the phonological 460 TESOL QUARTERLY loop (Baddeley et al., 1981; Waters et al., 1987) If one reason for poor comprehension by good decoders of written L2 is a poorly elaborated L2 phonological inventory in long-term memory, these learners will have problems rehearsing lists of words for which they have no long-term memory representation, and they can be expected to show a stronger phonological similarity effect in L2 trials than their counterparts who are good L2 comprehenders Although the task of recalling lists of words is not a reading task, there is no reason to assume that the encoding in the phonological loop that takes place for this recall task should be different from the encoding that takes place when words are read for comprehension Participants A cross-sectional study was designed, with three groups of participants: two groups of French learners of English and a control group of L1 English (L1Eng) speakers French learners of English were chosen because French is an alphabetic language, like English: In both these languages readers store the immediate products of decoding in the phonological loop, rather than in the visuospatial sketchpad The L1 French learners of English were the members of one class each from the middle and upper state secondary schools of a provincial French town; they were from monolingual French families and were accustomed to southern British English accents in their classrooms The poor L2 comprehender (PoorC) group comprised 21 adolescents: 13 girls and boys with a mean age of 14 years, months, in their fourth year of studying English The good L2 comprehender (GoodC) group comprised 23 young people: 19 young women and young men with a mean age of 17 years, 10 months, in their seventh year of studying English The 21 L1Eng participants (12 girls, boys, mean age 14 years, months) were from schools in two southern English counties and their families were monolingual English speakers In Walter (2004), both L2 groups had scored equally well in baseline L1 comprehension measures; in L2, however, only the GoodC group did well, and the PoorC group had the good decoder–poor comprehender profile observed in many earlier studies from Alderson (1984) to Lee and Schallert (1997), and this despite the summary-completion baseline comprehension measure’s being carefully designed to the L2 level of the PoorC group In the 2004 study, both groups did well in resolving anaphora in L1, whether the proform was near to or far from its antecedent In L2 the GoodC group performed nearly as well as in L1 in anaphora resolution; but although the PoorC group could resolve anaphora when the proform was near its antecedent, they had difficulty when the antePHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 461 cedent was remote In other words, in L2 (on identical stories to L1, rotated for language across the group) the PoorC group were understanding sentence by sentence, but were not able to build a mental representation of the text In Walter (2007), the PoorCs (but not the GoodCs) had problems in L2 (but not in L1) in detecting when a main point in a narrative was contradicted by a later statement, and the performance of the PoorCs (but not the GoodCs) in detecting these contradictions correlated with their L2-based verbal WM So a small increase in L2-based VWM gave a poor comprehender a correspondingly better chance of comprehending a text well enough to detect a contradiction Materials To construct the word sequences for the task, four pools of eight words each were composed All words had the pattern consonant–vowel– consonant: FrDiss List: Eight French words, maximally differentiated for French speakers (i.e., eight different initial consonants, eight different vowels, eight different final consonants, or by by 8): benne, chaude, danse, file, gaz, loupe, noir, cinq FrSim List: Eight French words, minimally differentiated for French speakers (i.e., two initial consonants, two vowels, two final consonants, or by by 2): bal, belle, cale, quelle, basse, baisse, casse, caisse.2 EngDiss List: Eight English words, maximally differentiated for English speakers (8 by by 8): cheese, job, fine, yes, soup, nose, date, rich EngSim List: Eight English words, minimally differentiated for English speakers (2 by by 2): men, mine, met, might, when, wine, wet, white All English words were among the 3,400 most common words in L1 English (Sinclair, 1995) Consulting the respondents’ textbooks and teachers indicated that only the word might, though common in L1 English, risked being less familiar to the PoorC group, so this word was reviewed in class shortly beforehand Ten four-word sequences were drawn at random from the FrDiss list, with the constraint that no word appeared more than once in a four2 462 French dictionaries traditionally record different phonemes for the vowels in bale/cale (/a/) and basse/casse (/ɑ/) However, this difference has disappeared in many French dialects, and dictionaries now record /a/ for both cases (Rey-Debove, Rey and Robert 1993, p XXI) In a week’s observation of the PoorC class, I observed no uses of /ɑ/ An elicitation test with 20 young and middle-aged inhabitants of the participants’ town, focused on meaning and not pronunciation, yielded two examples per respondent of these words, all pronounced /a/ TESOL QUARTERLY word sequence, and 10 sequences were drawn from the FrSim list in the same way A randomly ordered list of these 20 sequences was then constructed Likewise, a randomly ordered list of 20 four-word sequences was constructed on the basis of the two English lists (Baddeley (1966) had used five-word sequences in his study, but in the current study, adolescents who piloted the task in L1 with five-word sequences were at floor in recall of the L1 dissimilar sequences.) Design and Procedure Participants were tested in groups of to 12 individuals The L1 English participants worked with the English lists only, and the L1 French participants with both the English and the French lists The words were presented in written form, to allow the participants to encode them in the same way as they would if they were reading Before trials in each language began, participants were shown all the words in that language; in the case of the English words, the French participants were reminded of the meanings and pronunciation Large-type versions of each pool of words in the relevant language were posted beside the viewing area throughout each language trial, and participants were invited to consult them for spelling if they wished (but were told they would not be penalised if their spelling was not perfect) It was explained that any sequence of four words would contain words from only one of the pools, and that no word would appear twice in the same sequence One word at a time was presented on an overhead transparency at the rate of seconds per word After each four-word sequence, the screen was darkened and participants were given time to write down their recall of the sequence on an answer sheet They were told that they would have 30 seconds to write down each sequence, but that the experimenter would say “Ready?” or “Prêts?,” depending on which language they were working in, before showing the next sequence, so that anyone who had not finished could ask for more time In fact, with this size of group it was possible to see that everyone had finished writing before going on to the next sequence, and no participant asked for more time Half the French participants saw the English sequences first, and half saw the French sequences first Trials were preceded by a practice session of four sequences to confirm that all participants had understood the task and could see the display clearly Results Participants received a score of or for each sequence A score of was awarded if all the words in a sequence were correct and in the correct PHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 463 TABLE Means and Standard Deviations of Word Sequence Recall Scores (Out Of 10) By Language, Phonological Similarity, And Group Total PoorC Mean Lang Fr Eng GoodC Mean L1Eng Mean Mean PhonSim N = 44 SD N = 21 SD N = 23 SD N = 21 SD Diss Sim Diss Sim 9.6 6.4 8.9 5.9 0.8 2.5 1.5 2.7 9.5 6.3 8.4 4.5 0.8 2.7 1.6 2.5 9.7 6.4 9.3 7.2 0.8 2.4 1.4 2.3 — — 9.6 8.5 — — 0.6 1.3 Note PhonSim = phonological similarity, Diss = dissimilar, Sim = similar, SD = standard deviation order Words were counted as correct as long as the spelling made it clear that the correct word was intended (so, e.g., whine was counted as correct for wine) The means and standard deviations for the wordsequence recall scores are given in Table Figure shows the recall scores by phonological similarity category, language, and group A 3-by-2 mixed-design ANOVA was carried out on the results of the L1 trials (i.e., French for the GoodC and PoorC groups and English for the L1Eng group), with one between-subjects factor, group (GoodC, PoorC, FIGURE Number of sequences (out of 10) correctly recalled by language, phonological similarity category, and group 464 TESOL QUARTERLY L1Eng), and one within-subjects factor, phonological similarity (L1 dissimilar, L1 similar), to compare the performance of all three groups on L1 sequences There was a main effect for similarity: F(2, 62) = 94.45, with a strong effect, partial ␩2 = 0.60 There was a main effect for group: F(2, 62) = 4.88, p < 0.05, with a weak effect, partial ␩2 = 0.14 Posthoc Scheffé tests showed that the L1 English group performed better than both the GoodC group, p < 0.05, and the PoorC group, p < 0.05, but that there was no significant difference between GoodC and PoorC performance These were the expected results in L1, and they correspond to the results of Baddeley (1966) and subsequent L1 replications: nearceiling performance for recall of dissimilar sequences, with very little variance between participants in any group; significantly less good performance for similar sequences, with higher standard deviations As expected, there was no difference between the performances of the two French groups in their L1 There was a significant interaction between similarity and group, with the L1 English group performing better on the similar sequences than either of the L1 French groups, F(1, 62) = 7.44, with a weak effect, partial ␩2 = 0.19 This difference will be discussed later A 3-by-2 mixed-design ANOVA was carried out for the English results, with one between-subjects factor, group (PoorC, GoodC, L1Eng), and one within-subjects factor, phonological similarity (EngDiss, EngSim) There was a main effect of group: F(2, 62) = 18.15, p < 0.001, with a moderate effect size, partial ␩2 = 0.37; posthoc Scheffé tests showed that the PoorC group performed worse than the GoodC group, p < 0.01, and worse than the L1Eng group, p < 0.001, but that there was no significant difference between the GoodC and L1Eng groups for the overall English results There was a main effect of phonological similarity: F(2, 62) = 94.60, p < 0.001, with a strong effect size, partial ␩2 = 0.60 There was a significant two-way interaction between group and phonological similarity: F(2, 62) = 6.11, p < 0.001, with a modest effect size, partial ␩2 = 0.26 To examine this interaction further, separate ANOVAs were carried out for each English similarity condition For the EngDiss condition, there was a main effect for group: F(2, 62) = 5.13, p < 0.01, with a weak effect size, partial ␩2 = 0.14 Posthoc Scheffé tests showed that the PoorC group performed slightly worse than the L1Eng group, p < 0.05 (with a weak effect size, Cohen’s d = 0.27) No other significant differences were found For the EngSim condition, there was a main effect for group: F(2, 62) = 19.59, p < 0.0001, with a moderate effect size, partial ␩2 = 0.39 Posthoc Scheffé tests showed that the PoorC group performed worse than the GoodC group, p < 0.001, with a modest effect size, Cohen’s d = 0.28, and worse than the L1Eng group, p < 0.0001, with a moderate effect size, PHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 465 Cohen’s d = 0.52 No significant difference was found between the GoodC and L1Eng groups To summarise the results in English, then: The GoodC group performed as well as the L1Eng group on both types of sequence The PoorC group performed slightly less well than the L1 English group on the L2 dissimilar sequences, but markedly worse that both the other groups in recalling L2 similar sequences FOLLOW-UP STUDY Rather than having a problem with the availability of a phonological repertoire in L2, the PoorC group’s difficulty might have had to with nonstandard grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, perhaps based on using French grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules in reading English, even silently This explanation is most likely in the case of vowels, because French learners of English have no significant problems with consonants in this area and because the confusable pairs of words in the similar sequences differed by their vowels Specifically, if the learners were using French grapheme-to-phoneme rules, English words like wine would be decoded with the vowel /i / (ween) In order to ascertain whether the PoorC group’s poor results on the L2 similar condition might be linked to problems with grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, a small follow-up study was carried out Participants The participants were members of French middle school and upper school English classes from the same year groups and levels of English proficiency as those in the main study, in schools in a nearby city One group comprised 16 middle school students (8 girls and boys, mean age 15 years, months) and the second group comprised 20 upper school students (12 young women and young men, mean age 17 years, month) Materials Four-word English sequences were taken from the main study to make up three lists Each list contained five sequences: three sequences of EngSim words and two sequences of EngDiss words Each list contained 466 TESOL QUARTERLY examples of all the EngSim and EngDiss words from the original lists, so that the pronunciation of all minimal pairs could be compared Design and Procedure Each participant was shown all the words before the trial began and was reminded of the meanings and pronunciation of the words The participant then read the lists aloud onto a digital cassette Results Participants’ cassette recordings were scored, with pronunciation of each minimal pair given a (a different vowel sound in each member of the pair) or a (the same vowel sound in both members of the pair) There were very few cases where no distinction was made between the members of a minimal pair, as can be seen by the means and standard deviations of scores for distinguishing minimal pairs in Table A t test was performed, but it revealed no significant difference between the middle school and upper school groups’ performances (t = 0.254, df = 42, p = 0.61) The recordings were then re-examined, and cases where EngSim words containing \a\ were read aloud as \i \ were noted, since \i \ is more easily confused with \e\ than \a\ is No cases of this grapheme-tophoneme error were found in the upper school group, but four individuals in the middle school group who made the error at least once The EngSim scores were recalculated, and \a\-to-\i \ errors were counted as if no distinction had been made between, for example, wine and when The revised means and standard deviations are given in Table A t test was performed, but the small difference in performance between the middle school group and the upper school group was not significant (t = 0.248, df = 42, p = 0.80) This suggests that in the main TABLE Well-Distinguished Minimal Pairs (Out Of 4) By Group Total PoorC Mean GoodC Mean Mean N = 36 SD N = 16 SD N = 20 SD 3.9 0.3 3.8 0.4 4.0 0.2 Note SD = standard deviation PHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 467 TABLE Similar Minimal Pairs Distinguished (out of 4) When /a/-to-/i / Errors Are Counted as if No Distinction Were Made Between /e/ and /i:/ Total PoorC Mean GoodC Mean Mean N = 36 SD N = 16 SD N = 20 SD 3.7 0.7 3.4 1.0 4.0 0.2 Note SD = standard deviation study, the differences between the groups in recall ability for similar sequences are not due to problems of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion DISCUSSION In the L1 trials, as was the case in earlier studies demonstrating the phonological similarity effect in L1 contexts, from Baddeley (1966) onwards, all participants performed less well in recalling similar sequences than in recalling dissimilar sequences There was no difference in performance between PoorC and GoodC participants in either French L1 condition In L2, the phonological similarity effect was present once again, but here the GoodC group performed just as well as the L1Eng speakers, whereas the PoorC group performed worse overall and much worse on the similar sequences Note that the two vowels in the English similar sequences, \e\ and \a\, are not generally considered confusable for learners of English.3 Nor are English \e\ or \a\ considered particularly problematic for French speakers to pronounce: English \e\ is pronounced somewhere between the French phonemes \e\ and \ε\, and although diphthongs are not very common in French, the sound \aj\, very similar to \a\, is found at the end of words like travail, paille, rocaille The follow-up study excluded the hypothesis that the PoorCs’ performance in recalling similar sequences resulted from faulty graphemephoneme correspondences The hypothesis remains that their phonological representations, even their representations of English phonemes that French learners not usually confuse, were weaker or less detailed than those of the GoodC group and the L1Eng group 468 Gimson and Ramsaran, for example (1989), give “advice to foreign learners” (pp 107, 132) along with the description of each English phoneme, where they warn about possible confusions between phonemes; the entries for \e\ and \a\ not mention a likelihood of their being mistaken for each other TESOL QUARTERLY Phonology in Decoding Read Text It is clear that in the L2 recall task there is a heightened effect of similarity for the PoorC group What is not clear is just what mechanism is at work One possibility is that storage and/or recall may have depended to some degree on phonological features rather than phonemes This possibility is suggested by the finding that the L1Eng group performed slightly better in L1 than the other two groups In the EngSim sequences, the minimal pairs contained \e\, a half-closed front vowel, or \a\, an open central vowel gliding to a closed front vowel In the FrSim sequences, the minimal pairs contained \a\, a open front vowel, and \ε\, a half-open front vowel It seems that French \a\ and \ε\ (distinguished mainly by aperture) were more difficult for French L1 speakers to distinguish at recall than English \e\ and \a\ (distinguished both by aperture and by place of articulation) were for English L1 speakers This result suggests that, rather than relying on discrete mental phonological representations of individual phonemes, during L1 storage and recall these individuals were relying on phonological features of those phonemes Another possibility would involve the process that Brown and Hulme (1995), in discussing the recall of nonwords, call redintegration, whereby portions of an activated lexical representation are combined with the incomplete phonological records of another word Perhaps participants recalled a portion of a word in a sequence and unsuccessfully attempted redintegration only to arrive at an erroneous result The probability of redintegration may have been increased by the fact that for any one sequence, only eight words were possible, and the participants could see those words throughout the trial Future investigations, including a detailed investigation of error types and their frequency, might help answer this question Whatever the detailed explanation, this study has provided evidence that the development of a reliable phonological repertoire in L2 provides an important basis for skilful reading This result has important implication for how teachers help learners become better L2 readers EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS The received wisdom in the area of L2 reading is that PoorCs need tuition in reading skills (see, e.g., methodology books for teachers such as Harmer, 2001, or Hedge, 2000) From the study reported in this article, it would seem that tuition in reading is not a good use of classroom time, unless there is clear evidence that the learners are poor PHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 469 comprehenders in their L1 Good L1 readers not need to learn how to comprehend in order to become good L2 readers, but this study has shown that they need to be better at mentally representing spoken language What does this imply? First of all, it means that for progress in reading, classroom time will be better spent in increasing proficiency and exposure to the spoken language generally than in attempting to teach comprehension skills Recent work by Rolla San Francisco, Carlo, August, and Snow (2006) points to a possible link between overall level of proficiency and phonological loop development in L2; these researchers found that familiarity with a large number of L2 lexical items, based on more exposure to the target language, gave young learners a bank of analysable phonological knowledge on which to base their phonological awareness In the current study, the PoorCs had had less exposure to the L2 than the GoodCs, and they may thus have lacked a sufficient bank of phonological exemplars on which to base their understanding Therefore, it may be the case that all the PoorCs need is more exposure to the target language However, in Rolla San Francisco and her colleagues’ study, the learners were in an English-speaking country, and so they had ample opportunities for target language exposure In the non-Englishspeaking situation in which most of the world’s English language learners find themselves, further opportunities for exposure may have to be constructed by teachers This might be, for example, by encouraging students to read books at their level while listening to spoken word CDs or by providing incentives for listening to the radio or watching television in English, according to the level of resource that is available to schools and students It may also be the case that spending time explicitly teaching English language learners to recognize L2 phonemes is a means of more rapidly improving their L2 reading comprehension Even if the phonological confusions that sometimes occur for poor comprehenders may be at the syllable or word level, distinguishing phonemes is a clear and manageable pedagogical target If the learners get to the point where they have a reliable repertoire of L2 phonemes in long-term memory, they will decode written L2 text into well-differentiated words in the phonological loop, and will be able to use these words for comprehension Therefore, activities that improve recognition of minimal pairs, stress patterns in words, and generally the phonological characteristics of the language may well prepare learners to read better In monolingual situations, teachers are well placed to know the particular problems of their learners in distinguishing different phonemes in English Even in multilingual situations, activities can focus on the most commonly confused or poorly understood phonemes Games to differentiate minimal pairs, short dictations of sentences with confusable words, and other ways of sharpening 470 TESOL QUARTERLY learners’ differentiation of different L2 phonemes will help learners to build a reliable L2 phonological repertoire Once learners can distinguish phonemes more reliably, all the L2 input they receive, whether spoken or written, will serve to reinforce this repertoire, making learners not only more confident listeners but also increasing the efficiency of working memory so that they can become better comprehenders of written text ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to John Williams, Dominique Flandin-Granget, and Michael Swan for their help with the design of this study and the elaboration of the article; to Gillian Brown, for inspiring my interest in comprehension and phonology; and to two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments I am very grateful to the learners who contributed to the study, and to their teachers THE AUTHOR Catherine Walter is a lecturer in education at the Institute of Education (IOE), University of London, England, where she teaches in the face-to-face and distance versions of the master’s degree in TESOL Her research interests are in the cognitive aspects of second language learning and use and in the role of teachers’ networks in professional development and social progress She is also equal opportunities coordinator of her faculty at the IOE and is committed to the accessibility of higher education to members of all communities REFERENCES Alderson, J C (1984) Reading in a foreign language: A reading problem or a language problem? In J C Alderson & A H Urquhart (Eds.), Reading in a foreign language (pp 1–24) Harlow, England: Longman Baddeley, A D (1966) Short-term memory for word sequences as a function of acoustic, semantic and formal similarity The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 362–365 Baddeley, A D (1986) Working memory Oxford: Clarendon Press Baddeley, A D (2000) The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 417–423 Baddeley, A., Eldridge, M., & Lewis, V (1981) The role of subvocalisation in reading Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 33, 439–454 Baddeley, A., Gathercole, S., & Papagno, C (1998) The phonological loop as a language learning device Psychological Review, 105, 158–173 Baddeley, A D., & Logie, R H (1999) Working memory: The multiple-component model In A Miyake & P Shah (Eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp 28–61) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Barnard, P (1999) Interacting cognitive subsystems: Modeling working memory phenomena within a multiprocessor architecture In A Miyake & P Shah (Eds.), PHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 471 Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp 298–339) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Boada, R., & Pennington, B F (2006) Deficient phonological representations in children with dyslexia Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 95, 153–193 Brown, G D A., & Hulme, C (1995) Modelling item length effects in memory span: No rehearsal needed? Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 594–621 Caplan, D., Rochon, E., & Waters, G S (1992) Articulatory and phonological determinants of word length effects in span tasks Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 45, 177–192 Chikamatsu, N (1996) The effect of L1 orthography on L2 word recognition Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 403–432 Cowan, N (1999.) An embedded-processes model of working memory In A Miyake & P Shah (Eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp 62–101) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Cowan, N., Nugent, L D., Elliot, E M., & Geer, T (2000) Is there a temporal basis of the word length effect? A response to Service (1998) Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 53, 647–660 Elbro, C (1996) Early linguistic abilities and reading development: A review and a hypothesis Reading and Writing, 8, 453–485 Elbro, C., & Jensen, M N (2005) Quality of phonological representations, verbal learning, and phoneme awareness in dyslexic and normal readers Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 46, 375–384 Engle, R W., Kane, M J., & Tuholski, S W (1999) Individual differences in working memory capacity and what they tell us about controlled attention, general fluid intelligence and functions of the prefrontal cortex In A Miyake & P Shah (Eds.) Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp 102–134) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Flege, J E., & MacKay, I R A (2004) Perceiving vowels in a second language Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26, 1–34 Gathercole, S E., & Baddeley, A D (1990) The role of phonological memory in vocabulary acquisition: A study of young children learning new names The British Journal of Psychology, 81, 439–454 Gathercole, S E., & Baddeley, A D (1993) Working memory and language, Hove, England: Erlbaum Gathercole, S E., Hitch, G J., Service, E., & Martin, A J (1997) Phonological short-term memory and new word learning in children Developmental Psychology, 33, 966–979 Gernsbacher, M A (1990) Language comprehension as structure building Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Gernsbacher, M A (1997) Two decades of structure building Discourse Processes, 23, 265–304 Gernsbacher, M A., Varner, K R., & Faust, M (1990) Investigating differences in general comprehension skill Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 430–445 Gimson, A C., & Ramsaran, S (1989) An introduction to the pronunciation of English (4th ed.) London: Edward Arnold Griffiths, Y M., & Snowling, M J (2002) Predictors of exception word and nonword reading in dyslexic children: The severity hypothesis Journal of Educational Psychology, 94, 34–43 Harmer, J (2001) The practice of English language teaching Harlow, England: Longman 472 TESOL QUARTERLY Hedge, T (2000) Teaching and learning in the language classroom Oxford: Oxford University Press Kieras, D E., & Meyer, D E (1994) The EPIC architecture for modeling human information-processing and performance: A brief introduction (Technical Report TR-94/ ONR-EPIC-1) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Division of Research, Development, and Administration Lange, E B., & Oberauer, K (2005) Overwriting of phonemic features in serial recall Memory (Hove, England), 13, 333–339 Lee, J.-W., & Schallert, D L (1997) The relative contribution of L2 language proficiency and L1 reading ability to L2 reading performance: A test of the threshold hypothesis in an EFL context TESOL Quarterly, 31, 713–739 Lovatt, P., Avons, S E., & Masterson, J (2000) The word-length effect and disyllabic words Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 53, 1–22 MacDonald, M C., & MacWhinney, B (1990) Measuring inhibition and facilitation effects from pronouns Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 469–492 Michas, I C., & Henry, L A (1994) The link between phonological memory and vocabulary acquisition The British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 12, 147–163 Mueller, S T., Seymour, T L., Kieras, D E., & Meyer, D E (2003) Theoretical implications of articulatory duration, phonological similarity, and phonological complexity in verbal working memory Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 1353–1380 Nimmo, L M., & Roodenrys, S (2005) The phonological similarity effect in serial recognition Memory (Hove, England), 13, 773–784 O’Brien, I., Segalowitz, N., Collentine, J., & Freed, B (2006) Phonological memory and lexical, narrative, and grammatical skills in second language oral production by adult learners Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 377–402 O’Reilly, R C., Braver, T S., & Cohen, J D (1999.) A biologically based computational model of working memory In A Miyake & P Shah (Eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp 375–411) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Papagno, C., Valentine, T., & Baddeley, A D (1991) Phonological short-term memory and foreign-language vocabulary learning Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 331–347 Papagno, C., & Vallar, G (1992) Phonological short-term memory and the learning of novel words: The effect of phonological similarity and item length Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 38, 98–107 Rey-Debove, J., Rey, A., & Robert, P (1993) Le nouveau petit Robert: Dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue Franỗaise Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert Robertson, D A., Gernsbacher, M A., Guidotti, S J., Robertson, R R W., Irwin, W., Mock, B J., et al (2000) Functional neuroanatomy of the cognitive process of mapping during discourse comprehension Psychological Science, 11, 255–260 Rolla San Francisco, A., Carlo, M., August, D., & Snow, C (2006) The role of language of instruction and vocabulary in the English phonological awareness of Spanish–English bilingual children Applied Psycholinguistics, 27, 229–246 Schneider, W (1999) Working memory in a multilevel hybrid connectionist control architecture (CAP2) In A Miyake & P Shah (Eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp 340–374) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Sinclair, J (Ed.) (1995) Collins COBUILD English dictionary (2nd rev ed.) London: HarperCollins Swan, D., & Goswami, U (1997) Phonological awareness deficits in developmental PHONOLOGY IN SECOND LANGUAGE READING 473 dyslexia and the phonological representations hypothesis Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 66, 18–41 Walter, C (2004) Transfer of reading comprehension skills to L2 is linked to mental representations of text and to L2 working memory Applied Linguistics, 25, 315– 339 Walter, C (2007) First- to second-language reading comprehension: Not transfer, but access International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17, 14–37 Waters, G S., Caplan, D., & Hildebrandt, N (1987) Working memory and written sentence comprehension In M Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and performance: Vol 12 The psychology of reading (pp 531–555) Hove, England: Erlbaum Yuill, N., & Oakhill, J (1991) Children’s problems in text comprehension Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 474 TESOL QUARTERLY ... the phonological loop in the 1990s and early 2000s (Caplan, Rochon, & Waters, 1992; Cowan, Nugent, Elliot, & Geer, 2000; Lovatt, Avons, & Masterson, 2000) ; but Mueller, Seymour, Kieras, and Meyer... called the phonological loop In Baddeley and colleagues’ Multi-Component Model (Baddeley, 1986, 2000; Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998; Baddeley & Logie, 1999; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993)... sentencelevel understanding with increased activity in the left frontal lobe (Robertson et al., 2000) In this article, I report on a study which examined one of the possible sources of the problems