LANGUAGE TEACHERS EVERYWHERE are attempting to improve their students' ability to glean meaning from foreign language texts. These teachers are often frustrated by a mystifying array of stumbling blocks that secondlanguage readers...
moreLANGUAGE TEACHERS EVERYWHERE are attempting to improve their students' ability to glean meaning from foreign language texts. These teachers are often frustrated by a mystifying array of stumbling blocks that secondlanguage readers encounter. Unfortunately, teachers are reduced to guiding students through a procedure, the reading process, that is only partially understood in first language reading-and considerably less well understood in a second language. Before real improvements in reading instruction can be made, the interwoven pieces of the foreign language reading process must be unraveled and made visible for inspection. This research project examined the foreign language reading process of students of French faced with expository French-language texts. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of analogies in reading passages on the reading comprehension of novice and advanced French learners. Students striving to comprehend authentic foreign language texts of all types must deal with figurative language such as analogy. Several scholars have proposed that analogic and metaphoric reasoning form the basis of all cognition (e.g., Muller cited in Honeck and Hoffman). Some theorists have speculated, in fact, that all word meanings might have metaphorical origins (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson). It is critical to examine a small enough thread in the fabric of French foreign language reading in order to be able to decipher some of the features of the process without overwhelming the examiners with all of its immense complexities. Analogy serves this function well, both because considerable data have been gathered about the role of analogy in firstlanguage comprehension (L1) and because of its importance in human cognition. There have been no experimental studies of analogy in secondlanguage (L2) comprehension; and research has shown that it cannot be assumed that the processes of comprehension are identical in a learner's first and second language (Allen et al., Johnson, Lee, among many others). Students of second language acquisition are left with the question of where the differences between L1 and L2 reading processes lie and how to describe the unique features of comprehending in a second language. Generally, in first-language comprehension research, analogy has stood for a broad category of processes that include ordered, formal analogies (such as Aristotelian A:B::C:D analogies) as well as organizations of large blocks of
