Does command of L1 override comprehension in ESP reading courses?, por Dr. Susana B. Tuero y Prof. Viviana Innocentini

Tuero, Susana is a full-time professor at the Departmento de Lenguas Modernas, and at the Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. She holds a Master’s Degree in TESOL, and a Ph. D in English -Applied Linguistics from Michigan State University, USA. Her areas of interest are testing, vocabulary, and writing in EFL.

Vivana Innocentini is a language assistant at the Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata. She is also in charge of different English languages courses at KWS. Her areas of interest are ESP, vocabulary development, and acquisition of the sound system.

English comprehension is one of the main problems students are faced with, when majoring in different fields (from Social Studies to Science or Biological Studies) at Argentinean universities. To meet such requirements, many universities offer undergraduates English for Specific Purposes (ESP) courses which vary both in length and objectives, depending on several factors such as resources and needs. In the context of Agricultural Sciences and Food Technology at Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias in Balcarce, learners are expected to read and understand a research article in English as a foreign language.
Results from previous research findings have shown that a positive correlation exists between the teaching of reading strategies and a successful performance on second language reading tasks. Fernandez Toledo (2005) claimed that overt instruction on the use of reading strategies has a positive impact on students’ performance when dealing with foreign language reading.
Such a view has been widely supported by our daily practices as ESP teachers. Even though students seem to improve their reading skills, quite a few have difficulties in putting into words what they have understood / read from a given text. This might be well explained in terms of students’ poor command of the second language. However, there are some reasons to believe that students’ command of their L1 could play an important role in determining either failure or success in L1 written texts a after completing an L2 reading task. Therefore, as Aneta Pavlenko and Scott Jarvis (2001) have stated, there is a need to approach transfer in SLA from a bidirectional perspective as it can influence an individual’s use of the L1 and L2.
The purpose of this study was to assess the influence of both prior L1 and L2 command on L1 written production. This poster presentation will describe the design of the study, and a preliminary analysis of the data that attempts to explain whether errors primarily result from difficulties in L1 or from deficiencies in L2 command.