Comprehension monitoring in first and second language reading

This paper reports the results of a cross-lingual study on the role of comprehension monitoring in L1 (English) and L2 (French) reading proficiency. Fifty-two undergraduate students from two FSL backgrounds, French immersion (FI) and core French (CF), were given reading comprehension tests as well a monitoring task in both languages. Results showed that successful monitoring, as measured by error detection performance at the discourse and propositional levels, transfers across languages, and that monitoring performance is highly correlated with reading proficiency in both languages. Though students with a F1 background performed significantly better at L2 propositional-level monitoring, there was no difference between the F1 and CF students in any other aspect of the monitoring tasks. Finally, with respect to the variables that best predicted L2 reading comprehension, there appeared to be important differences between the FI and CF students who participated in this study.