Reading and Listening Processes in Bilinguals

摘要

In the next 10 to 15 years, the Navy will face decreases in its pool of native English-speaking (NES) recruits. AS a result, the Navy may need to accept recruits from bilingual populations who speak English as a second language (ESL). In the past, the Navy has found that ESL personnel tend to have higher attrition rates, reduced promotional potential, and reduced Navy effectiveness compared to NES recruits from the higher mental categories. The Navy must make effective use of the bilingual personnel. The objectives of this research were to investigate some of the difficulties ESL students have in the comprehension of spoken and written passages and to clarify the role of vocabulary knowledge and decoding abilities of ESL students. Paragraph comprehension, vocabulary, and decoding tasks were administered to two groups of subjects. The tasks were given to 47 NES subjects and 28 ESL subjects. All subjects had scored below the 7.5 reading grade level on the Gates-MacGinitie reading test. The results were that comprehension and vocabulary performance of ESL subjects was worse than that of the NES subjects but that the two groups were virtually identical in decoding performance. The main conclusions from this study are: (1) The ESL and the marginally literate NES groups showed different patterns of performance on the tasks; (2) Vocabulary performance of the ESL students was worse than that of the NES students, but vocabulary knowledge alone could not account for the comprehension difference found between the groups; and (3) The two groups were nearly identical in decoding performance.