Reading in a Foreign Language October 2007, Volume 19, No. 2 ISSN 1539-0578 pp. 76–105 Beginning to read extensively: A case study with Mako and Fumi Takako Nishino Temple University Japan Abstract Research has shown that extensive reading offers a wide range of learning benefits to second language (L2) learners. However, most studies on L2 extensive reading are conducted collectively on groups of learners and do not provide a detailed picture of individual experience. Moreover, there are few studies conducted on the reading experiences of early L2 learners. This paper presents a longitudinal case study on the reading strategies and motivation of 2 Japanese middle school students beginning to read extensively in English. During this 2.5-year study, the researcher conducted interviews 4 times, gave tests regularly, and observed participant behavior in each reading session. The results show that the 2 participants used a variety of reading strategies and that their L2 reading motivation changed as they became increasingly fluent readers. The findings reveal significant individual differences in the use of reading strategies and support a dynamic view of L2 reading motivation. Keywords: extensive reading, graded readers, English as a foreign language, reading strategies, motivation Day and Bamford (1998) defined extensive reading in a second language (L2) as “an approach to the teaching and learning of second language reading in which learners read large quantities of books and other materials that are well within their linguistic competence” (p. viii). Research on extensive reading has shown a wide range of learning benefits for L2 learners (Day & Bamford, 1998; Krashen, 1995). In addition to gains in reading fluency (e.g., Bell, 2001; Kusanagi, 2004), extensive reading programs can lead to the development of good reading habits (e.g., Nash & Yuan, 1992), listening proficiency (e.g., Elley & Mangubhai, 1981), writing ability (e.g., Hafiz & Tudor, 1990; Krashen, 1989), and larger and more highly automatized vocabularies (e.g., Nation, 2001). As a result, students become more interested in foreign language texts and gain confidence as readers (Day & Bamford, 1998; Mason & Krashen, 1997). Although studies conducted in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts have revealed the efficacy of extensive reading and its major pedagogic implications, most of the participants in these studies have been junior college or university students. As these learners can read with little direct support from the teacher, the results cannot be readily applied to beginning readers. Also, the majority of studies have been conducted collectively with groups of learners; thus, detailed pictures of individual experiences with extensive reading have not been provided. One http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 77 counter-example is the qualitative self-study by Leung (2002), in which she explored both the benefits and difficulties that she encountered during her 20-week reading experience as a beginning Japanese learner. Although this study is a valuable contribution to the extensive reading literature, Leung’s knowledge of Chinese characters may have helped her understand the Japanese texts, differentiating her from the average beginning reader of Japanese as a foreign language. Indeed, factors such as language distance (Muljani, Koda, & Moates, 1998) and first language (L1) orthography (Koda, 1990) have been shown to influence the ease or difficulty of acquiring reading skills in English. In order to depict the longitudinal experience of extensive reading from the EFL learner’s perspective, I conducted the present case study of two Japanese secondary-school students. In this paper I will investigate the learners’ experiences of reading English extensively with a focus on the development of reading strategies and motivation. Reading Strategies and Extensive Reading Reading strategies can be broadly defined as the mental operations performed by a reader to achieve the goal of textual comprehension (Barnet, 1988; Kern, 1989). Successful L2 readers as well as L1 readers have been found to use a number of different reading strategies (Block, 1986; Hosenfeld, 1977). Hosenfeld (1977, 1979) employed think-aloud, introspective, and retrospective protocols to investigate two American high school students’ use of strategies in reading foreign language texts. The participants in his study, secondary school foreign language (FL) learners, as well as his general approach in which they were not explicitly taught reading strategies are similar to the present study. Hosenfeld (1984) summarized the results of his two studies and presented a list of reading strategies that successful L2 readers used, approximately half of which are directly related to vocabulary. Hosenfeld’s learners (a) skip words that are not important to understanding the whole text, (b) identify the grammatical category of words, (c) use orthographic information (e.g., capitalization) and recognize cognates, (d) refer to side glosses but use the glossary only as a last resort, (e) look up words correctly, and (f) evaluate guesses. This emphasis on vocabulary is not surprising given that larger vocabularies are related to better text comprehension (e.g., Grabe & Stoller, 2002) and that guessing the meanings of unknown words using context clues facilitates reading comprehension (e.g., Huckin & Bloch, 1993). In the words of Day and Bamford (1998), “a cognitive view of the reading process makes clear that reading depends on a large sight vocabulary and background knowledge, and that students acquire these through reading large amounts of easy and interesting material” (p. 165). Vocabulary learning strategies appear to greatly influence the success of extensive reading. Previous researchers have examined learners’ use of reading strategies both qualitatively (e.g., Block, 1986) and quantitatively (e.g., Carrell, 1989; Kern, 1989). However, unlike Hosenfeld (1977, 1979), these researchers investigated whether reading strategies could be taught or how strategy use was related to reading comprehension. Moreover, most of the participants in these studies were tertiary school students (e.g., Barnet, 1988; Hayashi, 1999) or adult second language learners (e.g., Anderson, 1991). There is a need to understand more about the untutored Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2) Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 78 use of L2 reading strategies by secondary school students. L2 Reading Motivation and Extensive Reading In addition to reading strategies, motivation plays an important role in successful second language reading. Day and Bamford (1998) defined motivation as “what makes people do (or not do) something” (p. 27). They proposed the expectancy value model for L2 reading motivation. The model consists of four major variables: reading materials, reading ability, attitudes, and the sociocultural environment. Day and Bamford claimed that materials and attitudes are the critical variables determining motivation to read in the L2. Empirical support for the expectancy value model (Day & Bamford, 1998) was provided by Takase (2003), who investigated Japanese university students’ FL reading motivation in an extensive reading program. She administered questionnaires to the participants and divided them into three groups (high, middle, and low reading groups) based on the amount that they read during the academic year. The results confirmed Day and Bamford’s proposal that appropriate reading materials and attitudes are more important than reading proficiency level and sociocultural environment. The results also showed that intrinsic motivation toward reading English, one of the L2 reading motivational sub-components that Takase identified, was one of the strongest predictors of the amount that the participants read. Moreover, Takase found that her participants’ motivation changed greatly as they proceeded through the extensive reading program. Prior to Takase’s (2003) study, Mori (2002) examined FL reading motivation by administering a questionnaire to Japanese university students. The participants took reading courses in which the Science Research Associates (SRA) multilevel reading laboratory was used extensively. Mori found that in terms of long-term reading behavior, intrinsic value of reading and learning English (one of the L2 reading motivational sub-components she identified) were significant predictors of the amount that the students read. Mori also reported that when the students had worked on the same task (i.e., reading SRA) for a long period of time, the sense of accomplishment or satisfaction that they gained from doing the task diminished; eventually, some readers experienced decreased motivation for continuing that task. Mori then proposed that more studies are needed to investigate how motivation changes over time. Among the sub-components of L2 reading motivation identified by Mori (2002) and Takase (2003), intrinsic value (or intrinsic motivation) appears to be one of the strong predictors of the amount that students read. Certain important aspects of this sub-component, such as curiosity and involvement, are related to learners’ decision to engage in an activity as well as their decision to do the activity for its own sake (see Deci & Ryan, 1985). Although intrinsic motivation is a construct in general motivation models, it is also likely essential for FL reading because it (a) prompts learning activities outside the school setting (Maehr, 1976), (b) is strongly related to the amount and breadth of reading (Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997), (c) facilitates a positive emotional experience (Matsumoto & Sanders, 1988), and (d) lowers learners’ anxiety levels (Schmidt, Boraie, & Kassabgy, 1996). Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2) Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 79 However, if students do not have a pre-existing interest in reading in an L2, it may be difficult for them to develop intrinsic motivation. In such instances, situational interest plays an important part in enhancing intrinsic motivation (Hidi & Harackiewics, 2000). Thus, Hidi and Harackiewics pointed out that “(a) certain text characteristics such as ease of comprehension, novelty, surprise, vividness, intensity, and character identification contribute to situational interest, and (b) interesting text segments produce superior reading comprehension and recall” (p. 153). It can be inferred that those same text characteristics can increase foreign language learners’ situational interest and therefore enhance their intrinsic motivation. In sum, the success of an extensive reading program may be determined to a substantial extent by the types of books that are made available to students. Direct support for this idea was provided by Takase (2003), who reported that providing appropriate reading materials was a crucial factor for enhancing her participants’ L2 reading motivation. Indirect support exists in the work of Hidi and Harackiewics (2000), whose work endorses the notion that reading materials can positively affect students’ intrinsic motivation, as well as the studies of Mori (2002) and Takase (2003), who both concluded that intrinsic motivation is related to the amount that students read in the L2. These studies indicate that how reading materials influence reading motivation is an important issue to consider when designing an extensive reading course. With respect to motivation in general, Dörnyei and Skehan (2005) claimed that “motivation does not remain constant, but is associated with a dynamically changing and evolving mental process” (p. 240). Likewise, FL learners’ L2 reading motivation might change as they continue reading extensively. Although a few researchers (see Mori, 2002; Takase, 2003) have investigated changes in the reading motivation of groups of students in extensive reading courses, there is a need to closely examine individual learners’ motivational changes qualitatively. In order to address the gaps in the research reviewed above, I conducted the present longitudinal case study. The primary purposes of this study were to investigate (a) two EFL learners’ use of L2 reading strategies and (b) their L2 reading motivational changes over a period of two and half years. Two research questions were posed: 1. What reading strategies did the two participants employ in extensive reading, particularly when they came across unknown words? 2. How did the participants’ L2 reading motivation change during their 2.5-year extensive reading experience, and how did the reading materials influence this motivational change? Case Study Stake (1995, 2000) defined a case study as the study of the particularity and complexity of a single case, whether that case is represented by a person, a group of people, or an institution. The case in a case study should be viewed as a “bounded system” (Smith, 1978), a single coherent Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2) Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 80 entity. The bounded system can also include the broader context in which the system is situated. Although case studies have a role in providing rich insights about teaching and learning processes in second language acquisition research, there are potential drawbacks. They include (a) unsystematic procedures, (b) the influence of biased views on the direction of the findings and conclusions, and (c) insufficient basis for scientific generalization (Yin, 2003). In order to mitigate these drawbacks as much as possible, the present study provides a rich description, using multiple data collection methods (i.e., methodological triangulation). The main method of data collection in this study was face-to-face interviews conducted at intervals of 9–12 months over a 2.5-year period of study. These data were supplemented by observational and testing data. The observational data were obtained by observing participants in their four weekly reading sessions. I then recursively analyzed these notes for salient patterns and exceptions. These patterns and exceptions were then correlated with the other data source, the testing. Lastly, I checked my interpretations with two critical readers who were not connected to the study as well as with the two participants. Participants 1 The participants in this study, Fumi and Mako, both aged 14 at the beginning of the study, were 2 nd cousins and good friends. When the study began in 2001, both were 2 -year female Japanese students attending two different private junior high schools in Tokyo. Although they were beginning readers of English, they had passed The third-grade Society of Testing English 3 Proficiency (STEP) test, a nationally administered English proficiency test in Japan. While most public junior high schools offer three or four 50-minute English lessons per week, as students at private schools, Fumi attended six 50-minute classes and Mako four 70-minute sessions per week. In addition, Fumi had one 50-minute English conversation class and Mako had one 70- minute conversation class a week, both of which were taught by native English speakers. nd Fumi and Mako became high school students in April 2002, the 2 year of the study. In high school, Fumi had four 50-minute reading classes and one 50-minute grammar class per week, and Mako attended four 70-minute reading sessions and one 70-minute grammar session. In both girls’ reading classes, they usually translated English sentences from textbooks into Japanese and were provided neither extensive reading nor rapid reading activities. As supplementary reading, they read a single graded reader chosen by their English teacher as a summer vacation st assignment. For instance, in their 1 year of high school, Fumi read Titanic (Penguin Readers Level Three: 1,200 headwords), and Mako read Matilda (Penguin readers Level Three: 1,200 headwords). When they started extensive reading, Fumi and Mako’s reading rates were 72 and 58 word per minute respectively. During the 2.5-year period of study, Fumi and Mako nearly doubled their reading rates (see Table 1). It is interesting to note, however, that Fumi and Mako’s reading rate on the fourth measurement were lower than on the third one. The third measurement was administered soon after reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (hereafter Harry Potter IV), using a Stage 2 graded reader (700 headwords), whereas the fourth one was administered after reading Stravaganza: City of Masks (hereafter Stravaganza), using a Level 4 graded reader Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2) Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 81 (1,700 headwords). It may be that the level of the book used for the fourth measurement was much higher than that of the book used in the third measurement (see the instrument section for the method used in the reading rate measurements). Table 1. Reading rate test results (words per minute) Feb. 2001 Nov. 2001 Apr. 2002 Jun. 2003 Fumi 72 106 183 137 Mako 58 99 128 111 Procedure Fumi and Mako started extensive reading in February, 2001. Around that time I tutored the two girls when they needed help preparing for midterm or final examinations. They had studied English for 2 years at school but had no experience with extensive reading. Because of their lack of experience with extensive reading, I decided to introduce them to it and to study the results. At the outset of the study, I told Fumi and Mako that extensive reading had two purposes: (a) to develop their English reading fluency and (b) to allow them to enjoy the natural pleasure of reading. I also explained that, while extensive reading could benefit them in these ways, they could quit any time they wished. I also advised them to (a) select the books themselves, (b) stop reading if they did not find the book interesting, (c) do not look up words in a dictionary but ask me questions or consult the glossary, and (d) read for pleasure. In addition, I asked them to be participants in my case study, and I obtained consent from them and Mako’s mother to use the interview and observation data for research purposes. During the study, I acted as both researcher and tutor. As a tutor, I sat close to them, read materials of my own silently in English, and responded to their questions about stories and word meanings. I also helped with their book choices and added glosses to several books. Fumi and Mako had 15-minute reading sessions 4 times a week. They came to my study whenever they wanted to read. They did not come if they were busy preparing for their midterm or final exams or for special school events. Aside from these busy periods, they continued to read for approximately 15 minutes each session. However, when they were reading Harry Potter IV (see Appendix C for a record of their reading times) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (hereafter Harry Potter V), they read for more than 15 minutes. Fumi and Mako sometimes sat together and read graded readers, but usually they came and read separately. However, as they started to read extensively, they often talked about their reading experiences when they met. Neither ever said that they wanted to stop extensive reading prior to the end of the project in August, 2003. Materials Graded readers from the Oxford Bookworms Series (Oxford University Press), Penguin Readers (Pearson Education Limited), and Sanyusha Rainbow Series (Sanyusha) as well as three books written for native speakers of English, Harry Potter IV, Harry Potter V, and Stravaganza, were employed as reading materials in this study (see Appendices A, B, & F for a list of the books Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2) Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 82 they read). Graded readers are classified into several levels according to the number of headwords. The levels of Oxford Book Worms Series are called stages; they are Stage 1 (400 headwords), Stage 2 (700 headwords), Stage 3 (1,000 headwords), Stage 4 (1,400 headwords), Stage 5 (1,800 headwords), and Stage 6 (2,500 headwords). The levels of Penguin Readers are called levels, which are Level 1(300 headwords), Level 2 (600 headwords), Level 3 (1,200 headwords), Level 4 (1,700 headwords), Level 5 (2,300 headwords), and Level 6 (3,000 headwords). The levels of Sanyusha Rainbow Series are shown by using the number of headwords (e.g., 800 word, 1,000 word, and 1,200 word levels). The participants began with Stage 1, moved to Stage 2, and then to Stage 3. This process was based on Nation and Wang’s (1999) suggestion that the learners be exposed to high-frequency words repeatedly by reading graded readers. Nation and Wang argue that learners will successfully acquire vocabulary if the following conditions are met: (a) the learners read a minimum of five books at each level, (b) the reading is done at a rate of around a book per week, and (c) direct study of the new vocabulary occurs for the first one or two books when learners are just getting started or moving to a new level. It was difficult to satisfy conditions (b) and (c) in the present study, but Fumi and Mako read 5–10 books at each level, spending approximately 1– 2 weeks per book and progressed to higher level graded readers smoothly. Although learners should ideally choose books for themselves in an extensive reading program (Day & Bamford, 1998), I selected the first two books (The Wizard of Oz and The Monkey’s Paw) for Fumi and Mako in order to provide glosses. In the first book they read, I provided marginal glosses for the words that Fumi and Mako had not yet learned in their English classes, as represented in their English textbooks. Ko (2005) summarized the benefits of glosses as (a) helping readers understand new words accurately, (b) helping readers build a bridge between prior knowledge or experience and new information in the text, and (c) making students less dependent on their teachers and allowing for greater autonomy. Nation (2001) advocated that glosses are most effective when placed in the margins of the text in order to minimize interruption while reading is in progress. Regarding the effect of glosses given in an L1 and an L2, research has shown controversial results (see Bell & LeBlanc, 2000; Jacobs, Dufon, & Fong, 1994; Ko, 2005), but Ko suggested that L2 glosses can be more effective for the learners at a high proficiency level. However, I still decided to provide L1 glosses because Fumi and Mako were beginning readers of English. I advised them to check the gloss when they did not know the meaning of a word. For the second book, I listed all the running words by using RANGE (Nation & Heatley, 2003), compared them, and added marginal glosses for the 42 words that Fumi and Mako had not yet encountered in their first graded reader. As a result, they seemed to be able to start the extensive reading without much difficulty with vocabulary. From the third graded reader onward, Fumi and Mako made their own choices from the books I brought to the session. The choice was free for each of the individual participants although they tended to choose a book that the other was reading. As for Harry Potter IV, they asked me to let them read it in English because they had thoroughly enjoyed reading the first three books of the series in Japanese. From the third graded reader onward, no glosses were provided except for proper nouns. However, copies of the glossaries in the back of the graded readers were annotated with Japanese translations for easy reference. Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2) Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 83 Once Mako and Fumi began to read the Harry Potter books and Stravaganza, however, I provided approximately 20 marginal glosses on each page for the words they had not learned at school. The vocabulary levels of the participants seemed much lower than those of the young L1 4 readers targeted by these books. Regarding grammar, Fumi and Mako had no apparent problems while reading graded readers, and even in Harry Potter and Stravaganza, there were only a few sentence structures (e.g., subjunctive and subject-verb inversion) they had not explicitly been taught at school. Instrumentation Data were collected primarily through interviews while observations during the reading sessions and testing were used for additional information (see Appendix E for interview questions). Semi-structured interviews. The two participants engaged in semi-structured interviews in Japanese four times: June (Mako) and July (Fumi) 2001 (while they were reading at Stage 2), April 2002 (Harry Potter IV), December 2002 (Stravaganza), and January 2004 (4 months after they stopped extensive reading). The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. The excerpts from the interviews introduced in this paper are all translated from the original Japanese by the researcher. Observations. During each reading session, I took fieldnotes on their behavior (e.g., asking a question, yawning, and laughing) and on their statements (e.g., how they enjoyed reading, how 5 difficult books were for them, and to what extent they understood the stories ). As a researcher, I acted as a participant observer, as well as an interviewer and test provider. I had read all the graded readers and books and often talked about the stories and characters with them in the reading sessions. To help me interpret their thoughts and feelings and achieve an emic (insiders’) perspective, I attempted to have similar experiences to Fumi and Mako. Reading rate measurements. The participants’ reading rates were measured four times: February 2001; November 2001; April 2002 (after reading Harry Potter IV), and June 2003 (after reading Stravaganza). In the first and second measurements, their reading rates were calculated as they read Stage 1 graded readers (The Monkey’s Paw for the first measurement and One Way Ticket for the second). In the third and fourth measurements, a Stage 2 graded reader (Earrings from Frankfurt) and a Level 4 graded reader (Women in Business) were chosen respectively, because Stage 1 readers were considered to be rather easy for them at this point. The lengths of the texts st nd rd were 4,720 words (1 measurement), 5,620 words (2 measurement), 6,590 words (3 th measurement), and 14,690 words (4 measurement). For each measurement, the two participants read the whole book using 4–8 reading sessions, and the reading rates were then calculated by dividing the running words of the book by the time (minutes) they spent reading it. Results and Discussion Research Question 1: What reading strategies did the two participants employ in extensive reading, particularly when they came across unknown words? Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2) Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 84 Fluent and skillful readers seem to use more strategies than the average reader (Ahmad & Asraf, 2004). Fumi and Mako mentioned a number of lexical reading strategies, which suggests that their extensive reading experience in the study may have allowed them to develop use of these strategies. Their interviews and my observations suggest that they used the strategies shown in Table 2. The taxonomy of reading strategies was mainly based on Hosenfeld (1984), but additional strategies reported by the participants, such as grouping words and using a dictionary, were added to the reading strategy list. Table 2. Reading strategies Fumi and Mako used Referring to glossaries and marginal glosses Grouping words Using background knowledge Guessing word meaning, evaluating guesses, and learning vocabulary Using a dictionary Referring to glossaries and marginal glosses. Fumi and Mako consulted glossaries and marginal glosses when they came across unknown words, and this is likely to have helped them comprehend the stories. Fumi said in the second interview that she would have given up reading The Wizard of Oz (the first book) without the help of marginal glosses and that it was easier and quicker to look up a word in the glossary than to check a dictionary. During the period when they read graded readers from Stage 1 to Stage 3, Fumi and Mako referred to the glossaries quite frequently (they marked the words they looked up in the glossaries). Fumi looked up 11 words while Mako looked up 9 in the glossary when they read The Death of Karen Silkwood (Stage 2); Fumi looked up 14 words while Mako looked up 7 when they read Tooth and Claw (Stage 3). However, when reading at Stage 4, they did not refer to glossaries as frequently. Moreover, except for The Hound of The Baskervilles, all the graded readers they had read since the middle of July 2002 were Penguin Readers, which had no glossaries. That is to say, Fumi and Mako gradually reduced the number of words they consulted in the glossaries of graded readers, and they finally were able to read without referring to glossaries. Both Fumi and Mako accessed glossaries and glosses in different ways. Fumi stated that she did not think about the pronunciation of the words she looked up in the glossaries—she was concerned purely with meaning: When I check a word meaning, I don’t think about pronunciation. I pick up only the meaning from the Japanese word so I can continue reading in English. For example, if I learn that trousers means zubon, the pronunciation of zubon does not come to mind. Only the meaning stays in my mind. I also extract meanings from words when reading in English, so there is no English sound in my mind. A word meaning comes into my head, so the glosses in Japanese do not bother my reading of the story in English. (Fumi in the nd 2 interview; hereafter [Fumi, 2]) Mako, on the other hand, always “heard” pronunciation of words in the text while reading. I always hear the sounds of English pronunciation in my mind while reading in English. [Mako was reading Harry Potter.] If I cannot pronounce an unknown word, I stop reading and check the marginal gloss first. But when I can pronounce an unknown word, Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2) Nishino: Beginning to read extensively 85 I continue reading until the end of the sentence. If I cannot understand the meaning of the nd sentence, I go back to the word to check the gloss. (Mako in the 2 interview; hereafter [Mako, 2]) She further stated, When I check the meaning of a new word and understand it in Japanese, I read the sentence again by substituting the Japanese translation for the word. For instance, when I learned radioactive meant hoshano in the glossary, I understood the sentence “Hot means radioactive” [in Death of Karen Silkwood] as “Hot means hoshano.” (Mako, 2) Thus, when Fumi consulted glosses or glossaries, she picked up only the image of a new word’s Japanese meaning, substituted the word for the image, and understood the whole sentence. In contrast, Mako reported that when she came across an unknown word that she could pronounce, she read a sentence including the word once, went back to the word, consulted the glossary, substituted the word for the Japanese meaning, and in that way understood the sentence. Mako’s way of consulting glosses seemed inefficient, but for her it must have been the best strategy without interrupting the flow of her reading. This appeared to be Mako’s main approach at least around the time of the second interview. Grouping words. Fumi and Mako said in the second interview that multi-word groupings came to their minds while reading in English. Fumi’s examples were I don’t know, he said, in English, and next to. Mako’s examples were there was, hotel doors, went to, look for, and white hair. These examples might show they could group words into noun phrases (e.g., white hair), verb phrases (e.g., look for ~), and prepositional phrases (e.g., in English). They also picked up formulas like I don’t know. Fumi and Mako did not really remember when they had started to use such a word-grouping strategy, but this strategy is one of the factors that probably enabled them to read English faster. Using background knowledge. Both learners revealed that they used background knowledge extensively in L2 reading. They said that knowledge of stories that they had previously read in Japanese or seen in movies (e.g., The Wizard of Oz and Pocahontas) facilitated their reading comprehension. Fumi stated, I sometimes guess the meaning of a word while reading Harry Potter. From seeing the movie and reading three books from the Harry Potter series, I have learned the personality of each character. I also know a lot about Hogwarts’ [the wizards’ school’s] life. So I can imagine the settings, and I can guess what a person wants to say. For example, funny things by Ron, nasty things by Malfoy, magic theories by Hermione! This helps me guess word meanings. (Fumi, 2) She also stated the following: Even if the level of an English book is higher than our reading abilities, we can read it if we have knowledge about the topic. Of course, it depends a lot on the vocabulary level whether the book is accessible or not, but if a topic is familiar to us, we can read a book Reading in a Foreign Language 19(2)