The goal of the study

Assuming that students are more skilled readers in their mother tongue than in a FL I wanted to investigate whether there was any aspect of reading in which students show more skill in Polish and which students could improve upon in the process of reading in English. I considered the think-aloud (TA) procedure appropriate for this purpose. My assumption was that gaining insight into subjects’ reading processes could provide an excellent opportunity to observe how students approach text in both languages and what difficulties they encounter and how they handle them. I believed that applying an “on-line” method would facilitate a comparison of students’ reading in the two languages. The following general questions were investigated:

1. – Do proficient readers of Polish (L1) and advanced readers of English (FL) read in the same manner in their L1 and FL?

2. – If they do not, what is the difference in the way they read in Polish (L1) and English (FL)?

It is important to emphasize that the above questions took on a more specific form at various stages of the study. The study consists of six stages, which are presented below (Table III.1.).

It is important to emphasise that the main study was preceded by a pilot study, which aimed to pre-test the think-aloud procedure and to find texts at the appropriate level of difficulty. In the pilot study, five undergraduate students were asked to read a Polish and an English text, and to think aloud when reading.