Reading Strategies in a L2: A Study on Machine Translation
ABSTRACT
This article aims at understanding cognitive strategies which are involved in reading academic texts in English as a L2/FL. Specifically, we focus on reading comprehension when a text is read either using Google translator or not. From this perspective we must consider the reading process in its complexity not only as a decoding process. We follow the paradigm of psycholinguistics in the reading area and we also describe reading strategies classified by some authors as global or local and cognitive or metacognitive. In order to compare how reading strategies are used when readers either utilize Google translator or not 10 students from the Language Institute from the University of Pittsburgh were tested. The methodology Think aloud protocols was used so that we could compare and analyze if machine translation was a benefit to reading comprehension. Keywords: reading strategies, reading comprehension, machine translation