The complexity of reading to English language novice students

Abstract

Literacy politics have put the act of reading in the spotlight in the scope of language teaching. Nonetheless, although teachers and learners recognize the importance of reading for citizenship, I notice that the reading habit is not readily adopted, especially when it comes to literary reading. Likewise, in the field of reading for specific purpose in English for beginners, said fact also occurs even if the learner is conscious of the key role the language plays in society. Upon observing that mother tongue literary reading and instrumental reading in English provoke similar rejections from the learner-reader, I hereby hypothesize that the act of reading fictional texts in the mother tongue and non-fictional ones in English are comparable acts, for they require the capacity to metaphorically abstract language representations. In order to demonstrate the complexity of this process, I have established a dialogue between Wolfgang Iser’s reading act theory (1996) and Richard Kern’s available designs and contextual layers in literacy (1996) so as to analyze the relationships of contingency and some mental representations that a given text in English requires form the reader. Hence, I have ascertained that both fictional and non-fictional texts require similar mental processing and metaphorical representations.