Don’t read the below word. I mean look at it, but don’t read it. Don’t think about what it means, don’t try to think of its definition. Just look at it as some ink on a page.
Oh no! You read it didn’t you. You probably read it before you even got to the break in the page. The truly amazing thing is that you read and processed that word in less than 100 milliseconds. Less than 1/10 of a second!
Yes. 100 milliseconds to understand a written word is pretty awesome. But it’s also super important. Your brain can only hold new information in its working memory (aka short term memory) for up to two seconds. That’s quite the time-window.
What does this mean for you the reader? Firstly, if you come across an unfamiliar word you’re not going to be able to identify it in 100 milliseconds, or probably even two seconds. If you get tripped up on a word and the context is of no help, then after two seconds the word floats out of your memory and you have to revert your attention back to it. This is why reading in a foreign language is so slow and painful.
Comprehending a word (or in fancy scientific language: lexical access) is only a “low level” working memory process. Lexical access, combined with syntactic parsing and semantic proposition formation make up the three low level processes. These processes can best be thought of as similar to the fuel and engine of a car.
The rest of the car — the really awesome parts like turbo, air conditioning, and leather seats — are equivalent to our working memory’s “high level” processes: text model of comprehension, situation model of reader interpretation, background knowledge use and inferencing, and executive control processes. These are the processes that let you understand what a word means in the context of its sentence, paragraph, and entire document.
What About Second Language Learners?
Why have you never had to worry about analyzing the way you read? Because fluent first language readers can recognize 98-100% of the words they encounter. Fluent readers not only can recognize a word in under 1/10 of a second, but they don’t even realize they do it and it can’t be stopped.
That’s a powerful advantage for fluent readers. But for second language learners, reading is not such a piece of cake. Depending on their vocabulary base, they may need to frequently stop reading to look up words, causing them to stop their high level processing and making reading incredibly inefficient.
Some techniques to combat this: word and phrase recognition exercises (think flashcards), timed semantic connection exercises that make you examine the relationship between words, and lexical access fluency exercises like matching words to definitions under time pressure.
All research for this piece was drawn from Teaching and Researching Reading by William Grabe and Fredricka L. Stoller.