Perspective Chapter: Reading Comprehension – A Matter of Skill or Knowledge of the World?

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to understand how insights in psycholinguistics could help in the creation of reading comprehension exercises for various language proficiency tests. The author of this chapter has created and adapted reading comprehension questions for students in engineering, therefore the psycholinguistic theory insights will be applied to her experience and to the domain of engineering when it comes to the topic of the text. The psycholinguistic perspective could offer insights regarding how the reading process takes place. For example, how does the interaction between language and thought occur? In order to prepare reading comprehension questions, we should know which types of questions can be helpful in order to improve the students’ skills. There are many courses and sites claiming that they can help us read a whole book in only one day or in the shortest time possible. Psycholinguistics could highlight useful skimming techniques.

1. Introduction

We can say that we can truly understand a foreign language we have studied when we can make use of all four skills that are frequently checked in proficiency tests: listening, reading, speaking, and writing [1]. Even foreign language lessons are structured around these four skills [2]. These are the basic forms under which using language can be classified. Other tests can include sections based on multiple choice consisting of vocabulary and grammar. The four main skills are, however, used to check the practical aspects of knowledge of a foreign language. By studying a foreign language, it is expected of students to use it based on the same criteria as their native language, and to show that they understand what they are being told or communicated by various means, as listening and reading comprehension are followed by questions with multiple choice answers, and that they can be part of a dialog in the respective language, as in the case of speaking and writing, meaning that in these two cases students need to address a topic that they are told to speak or write about, precisely.

The present paper will deal with reading comprehension, which was chosen on the basis of several reasons for requiring special attention in a paper dedicated individually to it. One of these reasons is that the Engineering students will need to work with other papers when doing various research projects starting with their lives as students, but, first of all, they will need to go through the courses of lectures, under their form of notes, course lecture support, or textbooks. They will need to work through with the information, and practically they will read them in order to find the needed answer to their questions. Another reason why reading comprehension is considered a special case in this paper is the fact that the readers interact with the written language by creating in their mind a visual image of what they read. Reading is always not only pictured, seen mentally, but also interpreted by the reader, as understanding the message is a process coming through interaction with the text. Nowadays, we are told that we live in a communication culture [3], and entire novels are used by the authors to offer readers an interactive and communicative experience. At the same time, the readers are asked, by some novels, to have a background about other literary works, about certain cultures, about historical events, in order to understand the references that they should be able share with the author, as part of their common knowledge, so that the exchange could be possible. Therefore, nowadays, communication is not simply done through talking. Various media are used, and written communication is as conversational as spoken communication. Since ancient times we have had the example of the art of rhetoric, meaning to use expressive language in order to prompt emotional reactions in the audience, whether they were listeners or readers. Any text can be understood as communicating information that has as a purpose to raise awareness in the readers not only at the level of the acquisition of knowledge, but at the level of their further emotional experiences regarding the topic they have read about.

While listening comprehension can be clearly seen as an example of collaboration and dialog established between the recorded speech or dialog, and the students checking for the answers to the questions, based on multiple choice, in the case of a text the students can feel more left to do the work themselves. They will need to go back to the text a few times in order to be sure they have understood the text clearly.

While reading comprehension exercises can simply mean practicing in order to master them, just like drills, and are not necessarily built for the students’ enjoyment and motivation for further action, they do have to address their needs. Thus, according to psycholinguists, language acquisition plays a major role, as well as the way students learn; those that learn with pleasure and motivation learn more efficiently than those with no enthusiasm for learning [4]. In the case of teaching foreign languages for specific purposes, such as, in this case, teaching English for engineering students, the focus of the chosen text should be on a technical and scientific topic. Generally, we could understand reading as “a process” involving the following skills: “experience, prediction, confirmation and correction” [4]. This leads to the conclusion that the students, while reading, are supposed to select the relevant information that they can get from there, and to start making prediction about what the main idea of a certain article is; meanwhile, the teachers’ role is to heighten the students’ interest in the text they are given to read and to assist them when they are solving the activities related to reading comprehension [4]. The motivation can be provided in the case of a test by the wish of the students to pass, and therefore the text itself may not be as significant from the point of view of capturing their interests, and making them think about it further, regarding the future implication of the topic in their future career and possible research they feel would be important they should do. As an example, a text about anything regarding the environment, such as climate change, alternative sources of energies, wind and solar energy usage, smart homes, smart cities, noise pollution, flood protection, can be relevant to the current intentions of the engineering students, if they wish to work in the domain, or to apply for further studies, or even start collaborating on a project related to these issues. The personal interest of the students in certain issues can be used during their training in reading comprehension during class, as a genuine interest in the texts could motivate them to work harder on the materials selected by the teacher for them and to make them get better results on the proficiency tests.

The mechanism at work during reading comprehension exercises should be examined, as understanding how the process of understanding a text could help in designing efficient activities by the teacher in order to help students train for this section in foreign languages proficiency tests. To this purpose, examining psycholinguistic theories about the process of doing reading comprehension should be useful. While teachers can work out their way through observing the students in their class in devising ways for training them, a theoretical approach has the advantage that it can already offer some landmarks that have been noticed regarding solutions to their questions. Generally, teachers rely on their pedagogical training, on what they notice when they work together with their students for reading comprehension, various difficulties students can have at times, and how teachers could advise them to go about the text in order to be able to answer the questions correctly. One of the issues of foreign language proficiency tests is that the students have a limited amount of time to complete the entire text. Therefore, they should devise a strategy when they train for every section in order to divide the time efficiently. By training through exercises, students can begin to notice how fast and how slow they are with various sections, and therefore not spend more time than necessary on certain sections. They may be tempted to train by using the methods that are popularly advertised on various Internet websites and on social media, which claim that they can take a course in reading any book, no matter how big, in only a few hours, by skimming and scanning the text. However, such methods may not be helpful for reading comprehension exercises, since the students need to pay careful attention to processing the information and to get the exact meaning of all multiple choice answers, which can differ to a very slightly visible point. We could claim that, in many situations, the multiple choice answers simply test the attention of the students, not necessarily the way they work through the information.

The teachers can search for various strategies that they could share with their students, and these strategies could be devised based on the existing literature review of psycholinguistics, as well as on the strategies given by various trainers for various language proficiency tests with respect to the reading comprehension section. Devising questions about the text in the reading comprehension section is also, in turn, for teachers, a challenging task, as they need to take into account the way that students should work through their way in understanding the text. Ultimately, it is not a simple understanding of the text the proficiency tests have in view for students with respect to the listening comprehension section, but also their ability to work with the information and to make various connections and implications. It is not a simple skimming and scanning of the text for missing information in the questions that such sections of foreign language proficiency tests have in view. Therefore, an active reading should be developed for the students in order for them to be able to pass this section of the proficiency tests. In this case, the teachers’ knowledge of Linguistics, Foreign Language Teaching and Psychology should be expected to help to improve the teachers’ didactic method, as it offers a complex approach. The issue could be approached from a variety of perspectives. Yet, the psychological training of teachers, which is considered to be taken for granted in their training and based on their working with students, may also need, besides notions of foreign language teaching and linguistics, simply to make a connection between psychology and linguistics, in order to understand how the process of reading comprehension actually works. The understanding of its mechanism can be the basis from which they could start devising a strategy for training their students and for devising supporting activities for helping students to improve their strategies for this section of foreign languages proficiency tests.

2. Psychology and linguistics: a meaningful way of explaining the reading comprehension process

First of all, a definition of psycholinguistics is needed, in order to situate the context of analyzing reading comprehension from the point of view of this theory. Psycholinguistics can be understood as explaining the psychological means through which our use and understanding of language works while interacting with our mind, as well as the way language is expressed, or produced, and understood by us [5, 6, 7, 8].

To put it shortly, the domain of psycholinguistics is a mixture of theories and methods taken from other two sciences, namely psychology and linguistics, helping researchers to form a complete understanding and picture of the way human language works [9]. If we go into further details, we can see how these two domains are combined together under the methodology of psycholinguistics: namely, psycholinguistics researchers use the “experimental methodology and a body of knowledge about processes in perception, memory, attention, learning, and problem solving” which they take over from the field of psychology [9]. They also use the “detailed descriptions of specific languages, rigorous accounts of the shape of grammar, and ideas about the nature of human language” which they take over from the domain of linguistics [9].

Psycholinguistics is, therefore, a science that can be summed up as being psychology and linguistics at the same time [10]. A psycholinguist can be concerned with the following aspects: if he is first and foremost a psychologist, he can be preoccupied with reaching an understanding of and finding explanations for the way various structures and process function at mental level, and that are always at work when we, human beings, start using language [10]. Yet, in order for a psychologist to actually become a psycholinguists, such a specialist needs additional preoccupations, such as having the concern with reasons why our language shows universal features, as well as differences related to certain languages, and which are specific to them, and also the way these specific and universal features influence the way the various languages are processed [10]. If the psycholinguist is concerned with the patterns through which language works, he will also need to deal with those patterns that can be found in the use of language, as well as with finding explanation as to reasons why those patterns occur, as well as with various studies done in the environment of the laboratories, using “highly controlled processing tasks” [10].

The reading comprehension deals with the way students search for a certain piece of information by reading a text, and then they “make a correct and reasonable information output according to the problem after their own thinking processing” [4]. This issue has been studied since 1960 [4]. It is considered a difficult process, since it deals with complex sentence structure and with the understanding of information, together with performing all these operations within a limited amount of time [4]. Vocabulary is considered a crucial item to reading: it could be compared to a key that grants students access to a door that allows them to get into the reading experience [4]. Vocabulary facilitates the understanding of a text, as words and phrases are a part of any sentence. Without understanding meaning of most individual words, we cannot understand the meaning of the text, and see clearly what the topic is about. We could notice that, “from the perspective of psycholinguistics, the two schema structures that most influence reading are vocabulary and comprehensive experience” [4]. The two, however, are interrelated. Vocabulary implies understanding, starting from a small level, from words to paragraphs and entire texts.

One model about reading comprehension, confirming the usefulness of testing it through the standard, already existing exercises, is that of Goodman [11], which he developed in 1966, which looks at the way we understand and build the meaning of the text as part of the usual and continuous process occurring when we, teachers and students, want to test our understanding of the text we read [12]. Therefore, the reading comprehension exercises could be seen as a natural way of testing the understanding of a text in a foreign language, as the exercises are built on the usual way we all deal with texts in our native language and in other languages we already know. The model developed by Goodman deals with the following: according to this model, readers make predictions, then confirm or contradict their own prediction. Additionally, if readers guess correctly, then they do not need confirmation through hints found in the text [12]. Goodman’s model can make us see how asking and answer questions in reading comprehension exercises is our usual way of dealing with any text, in any language. The questions sometimes are about finding hints regarding what will be discussed next, or to make predictions about how the action described there will continue. This model is considered a basic one. Later on, Coady [13] further developed it in 1979: Coady’s model referred to the way that readers use various conceptual skills and also strategies, which are combined with their background knowledge in order to be able to reach an understanding of the text that is being read [12]. The background knowledge could refer to knowledge of the topic, or of the foreign language itself, grammar, meaning of words, phrases, sentences.

2.1 How understanding a text works: insights from how we understand words, phrases, sentences, and entire paragraphs

The way we understand language is of relevance to the way we can get a clearer perspective on the way reading comprehension works, as both teachers and students. To this purpose, we could take into account the fact that psycholinguistic research is concerned with the way we understand the meaning of the words, together with their semantics, consisting of connotation and denotation [8], as well as the meaning of the sentences [8]. Denotation refers to the way we can find a word defined in a dictionary [8], while connotation refers to “a word’s emotional overtones, presuppositions, and other nonexplicit meanings” [8]. The two of them can only be understood as a combination of meanings, found in connotation and denotation, in order to allow us to completely grasp what a word means [8]. Another aspect of importance is that the connotation of a word may not be the same for different people, and, therefore, “there can be variation in the meaning formed” [8]. An example could be the following, related to how we understand the connotation of the word snake, which is, generally, that of danger. On the other hand, a biologist that studies, specifically, snakes, and who is named a herpetologist, is going to see the word snake in a positive way, related to his research [8]. With respect to the domain of engineering, it is clear that the connotations of a word should be shared by everyone, as the domain implies the existence of one single, shared connotation. In the case of technical, and domain-specific words, connotation and denotation should coincide and have no variations of meaning between them.

What is specific to psycholinguistics is that language is made up of symbols, from which the way we understand it in various media, written or spoken, can start: thus, everything, when we read a text, begins from the way language creates relationships between symbols and whatever it is that they can represent. Symbols can stand for “an idea, a thing, a process, a relationship, or a description” [8].

In the case of a text from the field of Engineering, the symbol and the word should always have a fixed meaning, as the words cannot be assigned changing symbols. Terms need to be specific and fixed at all times, unlike in usual conversation and unlike in general information articles, or even literary texts.

As an extension to the aspect, symbols will be included in the very way the language is structured: thus, the symbols are arranged according to certain patterns, which give them a specific meaning [8]. Additionally, there are several levels for the language’s structure: “[…] sounds, meaning units, words, and phrases […]” [8].

One of the issues with reading comprehension is that learners get with it on uncertain ground. This is because of the following aspects: plenty of new utterances can be continuously created by any users of language [8]. To detail this issue further, we should mention that one of the properties of language is that it is creative, in the sense that we, as speakers, can create new sentences that we have never heard before throughout our lives [8]. In the understanding of the text, the students should be able to reproduce information under the form of a few ideas expressed in new sentences, not only just those present in the text. The reading comprehension questions and multiple choice answers are based on the creation of new sentences and new ways of expressing the ideas in the text.

Therefore, reading comprehension means a higher level of language knowledge than the obvious one given by the usual drills exercises. For engineering students, however, language cannot be as creative with respect to the precise meaning assigned to certain terms. Engineering terms and concepts cannot be called otherwise than their fixed, assigned meanings. In a contrary case, they would mean something else or they would make no sense for the professionals in the domain. From this point of view, there is not much room for creativity in the Engineering text.

The only creativity in the case of reading comprehension exercises for text in the Engineering domain is with respect to combinations of phrases and sentences, which are not the same. One useful exercise for students to train for understanding an Engineering text could be for them to be asked to read the text first, then to say in a few sentences of their own what it is about. A usual exercise is that of telling students to read a text, then to ask a number of questions about it themselves. It could also be useful in this case, as the questions asked would reflect the main ideas of the text.

The utility of these exercises could be explained in relation to the way we understand a wide variety of texts, in our own and in other languages that we have learnt: words and sentences are small levels when it comes to our need to comprehend a text, or simply small units. We need to understand what the meanings of large conversations and written texts are [8]. The domain of semantics refers to the way we can study how meaning is formed in any language [8]. Therefore, the main concern of such a researcher in the domain of semantics would be that of understanding how words, together with sentences, can help us express the meaning we want to communicate to our interlocutors or to our readers [8]. We should note that discourse refers to levels of language that are higher than the sentence, e.g. “conversation, paragraphs, stories, chapters, and entire works of literature” [8]. The Engineering text can be understood as examples of discourse, and the way students make sense of them can be explained, at the linguistics level of psycholinguistics, through semantics.

Paying attention to the formal and content features of texts can help students for the future, such as in the case where they would need to write a research paper, report, or project proposal. Reading comprehension exercises can be understood as laying the basis of other uses of language, such as discussing about a certain text, asking questions during a conference, or even using the knowledge about the way the texts are structured to write such texts themselves. Engineering texts have the features of the technical texts, which include use of long, complex noun phrases [14], which are the technical terms, passive voice, and objectivity. Passive and active voice, however, are both used and express different attitudes of the writer. Those structures which are passive can be efficient to be used “for expository purposes,” in the description of procedures and data presentation by the author [15]. As for active structures, they “are […] appropriate for argumentative purposes,” and they can be best used “in […] sections where the author is criticizing previous research or advocating a new thesis” [15]. The figurative language is not usually associated with such texts. However, when it comes to the expressivity of the text, of the need to persuade readers that the discovery or issue is of great interest, a few such phrases, in a figurative language, together with some emotional involvement, could be used.

Sentence structure is significant when we use language, and it should be taken into account when teaching reading comprehension. The teacher could draw the students’ attention to the way they are formed. We should take into account the fact that sentences are easily formed by anyone speaking orally, yet we also need to be aware of the many rules that stand “behind our creation of these sentences” [8]. Syntax, a domain which is concerned precisely with the way words are used by us speakers, as well as writers, in order to build sentences, is, through its way of presenting rules, a basic field of study that helps us understand how we can speak about a language’s structure [8]. Some notions could be presented to students to make them aware of the specific syntax of Engineering texts. Thus, any sentence can be seen as being composed, first of all, by a noun, which is usually a sentence’s subject, grammatically, and which, in its turn, can be accompanied by descriptors such as “big” and “fast,” and, second, by a verb phrase, which makes up the predicate of a sentence [8]. The verb phrase can include a verb, minimum, and whatever the verb acts on, if anything” [8]. Long noun phrases are specific to technical texts. Such notions about the technical texts’ features can serve to provide additional background knowledge for the students about the way they should write such texts in a foreign language.

There is a distinctive way in which psycholinguistics uses grammar. Namely, while usually grammar refers to the way we are supposed to create the structure of our sentences [8], for psycholinguistics it refers to patterns. Thus, we can find in a sentence patterns which are about the way words function and form relationships. The patterns can be found at other levels as well, namely at discourse level, as well as at the level of various words’ pronunciation and meaning, taken separately [8]. Two kinds of grammar can be taken into account: prescriptive grammar, which “prescribes the ‘correct’ ways in which to structure the use of written and spoken language” and descriptive grammar, which aims “to describe the structures, functions, and relationships of words in language” [8]. Descriptive grammar is the one that is the most important to the interests of psycholinguists [8].

Students can improve their knowledge of these patterns in a foreign language through reading exercises.

It is only intuitive for any beginner in the foreign language teaching domain that the reading comprehension process makes use of knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, which can be explained through psycholinguistics. The context in which certain words are used also matters, just as in the vocabulary and grammar sections of the text. In the reading comprehension section, students can find, just like in other sections, words or phrases whose meaning they do not know and for which they cannot search in the dictionary during the test, yet they can guess the meaning from the larger context.

The significance of reading on a practical, everyday life basis should also be considered. Students that are trained for the reading comprehension can immediately see the utility of acquiring this skill, since they also use it in their everyday lives, perhaps without even realizing it. They can read various “signs, billboards, labels, and notices” [8]. What is significant to underline is that all of these include “information that helps us make decisions and understand situations” [8]. This leads us to draw the following conclusion: that “the ability to read is fundamental to our everyday lives” [8], and also that we need to teach and learn various skills related to it. Therefore, the reading comprehension exercises should prepare them to gain skills that they can afterwards apply in a variety of situations: scientific research, general information, popular science articles, news articles, reading reports, and any other situations students may encounter, not only those related to their domain. Engineering students need to have, after all, a basis of general foreign language before they go to the next level, that of foreign language for specific purposes.

2.2 Psycholinguistics insights on how the process of reading works

What processes could we say that are at work during reading from the point of view of psycholinguistics? The minimum could be reduced to the following schema: “perception, language, memory, thinking, and intelligence” [8, 16, 17, 18, 19]. This means that readers need, first of all, to recognize letters, then the words that they form, with their meaning. Afterwards, readers need to preserve the meaning of these words in their memory until they read sentences and paragraphs. After they finish reading sentences and paragraphs, the readers will decipher what the author of the text meant to say [8]. This statement about the meaning of the sentence and paragraph in regards to the text read is definitely always taken into account in the reading comprehension exercise, as the questions and the answers that can be selected test precisely this skill in a foreign language, of making sense of the meaning. The Engineering students can need the following aspects in order to do so: knowledge of the foreign language, knowledge, to some extent, related to the Engineering field or at least to the concepts and theories presented there, as well as knowledge of the respective terms, or at least some terms, in the foreign language. The foreign language comprehension tests do not require knowledge of the world, as we could call background knowledge about various areas of Engineering. The text chosen, together with the questions and answers suggested, acts on testing language skills and understanding, offering the needed information, and only requiring of the students to pay attention and interpret the information.

We also need to consider the duration of reading, in order to choose a right length for the text selected for the students’ training. The duration of reading can be understood as follows: reading goes on quite fast as a process. We should consider that, usually, an adult reader manages to read as many at approximately 250–300 words every minute [8]. The ability to read and to understand a text can be taken for granted, yet in order to truly be able to answer the reading comprehension questions the students need to work their way through understanding a text in order to get the correct answer in a foreign language applied to their domain.

The factors that can bring about their influence over the way we understand a text we read [8] can be found in the research by Walter Kintsch, who created his own observations-based model for understanding a text that we read [20, 21, 22]. Our active memory tries to preserve as much information as it can when we are reading a text. Yet, we do not preserve the same words that we find in the text we read in our working, or active, memory. Instead, we work out our way through getting the basic ideas we can find in the way the words are grouped. The basic ideas are then kept in a simple, representational shape, in our working memory [8]. This process can explain why students are able to guess from the context, at least approximately, what a certain word means. Some reading comprehension questions include those questions related to the meaning of a certain word or phrase in a particular context.

The language-related skills tested in foreign language proficiency tests can be connected with one another. Reading comprehension includes knowledge of vocabulary, for instance. This is because knowing what individual words mean can help readers understand the entire text [8]. As a result, vocabulary can help when reading a text: those readers with a rich vocabulary are good at reading and understanding a text, since the words make up a text [8] and need to be understood both in themselves, as well as in relationship with the entire text. Not too many unknown words should be found in a text so that it is understood, by making guesses about them starting from their position in a context. Knowledge of vocabulary is a solution to master reading comprehension: from this point of view, those reader with larger vocabulary are at an advantage, since they can get their lexical information faster than those readers that have small vocabulary [8, 23].

How do we guess the meaning of a word from context? When we encounter, as readers, a word that we do not know, and, thus, do not have it “already stored in memory,” we are only left with the alternative to understand its contextual meaning, by looking for hints about it in the text [8]. Alternatively, we could search for that word in a dictionary, or simply ask our teacher what it means [8]. How is vocabulary learned? Most people will learn it through indirect methods. This means that they will not search up these words in external sources, such as dictionaries, but instead they will try to guess the meaning from the context [8, 24].

Where does learning vocabulary fit in the process of reading? Taking it step by step, we can notice the following: visual symbols are translated into sounds, and, afterwards, sounds are translated, or simply expected to, form words [25]. The next stage consists of identification of the word and of its meaning. These stages, or steps, make up a process that goes on until we, as readers, get to compose one sentence. We will, of course, form sentences during all the time we keep on reading the text [8].

To detail the process further, there are in fact two processes involved in reading: lexical and comprehension processes [8]. Letters and words need to be identified, and they are recognized through the lexical processes. Additionally, lexical processes activate basic information regarding these words in the readers’ memory. As for comprehension processes, their role is to help readers understand the entire text, “as a whole” [8].

The speed at which reading occurs is an aspect that matters for training students for reading comprehension. What happens in the case of reading speed is the following: the movement of our eyes occurs in “rapid sequential movements” [8] which are focused on “successive clumps of text” [8], and not on pages or lines, as we’d expect. Such fixations can be seen as “snapshots” [26], and their length varies [27]. Longer words allow readers to fixate for a longer while than on shorter ones. Less familiar words also lead to the readers’ longer fixation. These words refer to the ones that are less often encountered in the English language. Familiar words also require less fixation time for readers. These latter words are those that are more frequently found in the English language. The fact that the word that occurs last in any sentence lets readers fixate on it for a longer period of time is a phenomenon that has been named “sentence wrap-up time” [27, 28].

The number of words that are fixated should also be taken into account, as well as their type: it can reach as high as 80%, meaning that only this percentage can be fixated by readers from a text. What are these words that are fixated up to a rate of 80%? They can be nouns, or verbs, as well as function words, e.g. the definite article “the,” or the preposition “of”, which are supposed to support the other words, that carry content [8].

How much does the process of working with fixated words take? We, as readers, can get the information we find useful from a text if we deal with “about four characters to the left of a fixation point and about 14 or 15 characters to the right of it. These characters include letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and spaces […]” [8, 26, 29].

As far as the reading speed for a text, fast reading is not a solution in the case of reading comprehension exercises. The techniques for very fast reading cannot help [8], since too much information and too many details are missed, and, thus, not kept in mind by the students [30]. If students read at high speed, they will only get a main idea of a text’s passage, and not any detailed comprehension of it [31]. In this case, speed reading can be detrimental.

The comprehension is crucial for this skill tested in language proficiency tests, which works as follows [8]: the meaning of the words is obtained from the way they are used in the context of the read text, and this helps readers create a mental model with respect to what the text is about. The mental model is related to what is happening in the real world [32, 33, 34]. What is more, every reader creates their own model with respect to the mental representation of the text, reflecting their understanding of it. This mental representation is made up of the text’s basic elements [8].

What is needed for mental models formation? It seems that we only need to understand, as readers, what is not said directly, but left for us to understand, just as in the case of allusions or inferences [8].

What does reading comprehension consist of, from the point of view of psycholinguistics? We could sum it up as follows, according to source [8]: one of the skills we need as readers, when we seek to understand a text, is related to understanding what the words themselves mean. We can resort to our memory of vocabulary, or we may simply guess based on the context they are used in. The second skill is related to understanding the meaning as we rely on the main ideas in the text that we are reading. The third skill is related to the way we manage to extract the main and necessary information and details from the text we read, function of the way we intend to use the information we have found out in the text we have just read. The fourth skill is related to making up some mental models which help us visualize in order to understand what we are reading about.

We could apply this process from the point of view of Engineering students studying English for specific purposes, starting from the way they learn their first words in the English language at a general level, and then how they switch on to English for specific purposes. Both types of knowledge are used.

3. Conclusions

Psycholinguistics provides a framework for dealing with understanding how reading comprehension occurs as a process. Judging from the way it works, teachers can extract those significant aspects and select particularly those exercises for training that they find more useful and justified by the insight psycholinguistics can offer on the process of understanding a text. For Engineering students, such processes have to do with the following aspects: understanding terms, or words, entire sentences, paragraphs, deducting meaning, understanding the text and reformulating, interpreting its meaning and operating with questions and answers. Speed of reading is not significant here, as the text is short enough; rather, special attention to details is advisable. Vocabulary knowledge helps a lot in going faster through reading the text and through understanding it. Vocabulary can help build up an efficient basis for reading comprehension skills. Background knowledge is not the main issue in reading comprehension exercises; it is not even required. The only aspect required is to pay attention to the text and to the nuances of meaning in the questions and multiple choice answers.

We could see how reading comprehension exercises themselves are designed in such a way as to suit psycholinguistics findings about the usual process of reading a text. Text meaning understanding is tested in detail through questions and multiple choice answers.

Knowing psycholinguistics theories can help teachers select those supporting exercises in order to build reading comprehension skills in a way as to improve students’ skills.

The way in which reading comprehension can be taught to Engineering students differs from general English students in that features of the technical texts and specific vocabulary should be improved.

The paper has looked at whether reading comprehension is a matter of skill, or knowledge of the world. While the intuitive answer is that it includes both language skills and knowledge about the topic, the paper has narrowed the question down to the teaching of reading comprehension in a foreign language for Engineering students.