Development Of L2 Reading And Writing Skills

While this student seems to have developed literacy skills in L1, one cannot assume that the development of L2 reading and writing skills is clear-cut. This draws on the threshold hypothesis, which “challenges assumptions about the ease with which literacy skills can be transferred” from L1 to L2 (Ferris & Hedgcock, 2005, p. 37). In other words, one cannot assume that this learner is more likely to transfer his or her L1 literacy skill to develop L2 unless he or she shows some control over L2 language, text comprehension, and fluency.

However, Many L2 composition research indicated that proficient writing skills in L1 tended to transfer to L2 writing (McCarthey, Guo, & Cummin, 2005; Zamel, 1983). If the current learner already has developed writing strategies of planning, organizing, inferring, and editing in L1 writing, he/she is more likely to use these strategies for composing L2 text. Further, it can be inferred that as this learner has a regular contact with print in L1, he/she seems to have a sufficient background in reading for comprehension, decoding the written message, recognizing words and structures, and making meaning and inferences from the text. Such literacy skills in L1 might lay the foundation for developing L2 literacy skills. This prior L1 literate knowledge and processes would foster L2 learners’ tendency to use this knowledge for reading L2 text and improving L2 text production. In this sense, the connection between L2 reading and writing might be bidirectional in a way that familiarity with one of these skills can inform and transfer to the other. That is to say, if the learner can read and make meaning out of the text, he/she will be able to construct a written text that represents a meaningful content. Al...

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...ading a lot of in a specific field of study or profession would help the learner to mimic the style of writing and use some of discipline specific words to express his/her original ideas and status.

Moreover, engaging the learner in writing tasks would enhance his/her meaningful interaction with the written texts. Writing practices would allow the learner to effective participate in a specific discourse community of practice. Overall, integrating reading in writing instruction would increase the learner’s opportunity to build his/her academic and professional literacies and enhance the effective participation in a particular community of practice through the mastery of its communication skills. Moreover, writing texts in L2 would enhance the learner’s ability to read critically in order to analyze written text and make inference out of the writer’s intended meaning.