Reading in a Second Language: Moving from Theory to Practice by William Grabe

A quick search of the internet for books related to teaching reading in a second language will provide an interested party with 20 or more titles published within the last 3-4 years and seemingly countless older texts.Any number of these texts will almost certainly be useful in various ways to different scholars.Despite this abundance of useful texts on the subject however, Reading in a Second Language: Moving from Theory to Practice by William Grabe is likely to become one of the more important texts in the already crowded field.In this impressive text, Grabe covers an extensive range of topics in a manner that is informative and for the most part clear, without being overly simplified.Despite a few minor issues, which are discussed below, this most recent work from Grabe has much to offer teachers, planners, researchers, and students of reading on many different levels.The first of the four parts of the book (Chapters 1-5) looks at cognitive factors that affect reading comprehension, starting with lower level cognitive factors.By beginning with these cognitive fundamentals of how reading comprehension occurs, Grabe establishes, very early on, his position that at the most basic levels, first language (L1) reading and second language (L2) reading consist of the same complex mental components and processes.As an example of the complexity that Grabe outlines in the reading process, the lower level processes looked at here are 'word recognition,' 'syntactic parsing,' and 'semantic-proposition encoding' (p.22).The first of these, 'word recognition,' is also further divided into 'orthographic processing,' 'phonologic