Affiliated Events

How Teachers Teach and Readers Read: Developing Reading Comprehension in English in Norwegian Upper Secondary School

Lisbeth Brevik, an associate professor at University of Oslo, in Norway will give the first lecture in the Foreign Language Learning Colloquium Speaker Series.

This talk will address adolescent readers as individuals in order to explain variance in L2 reading models and theories (Bernhardt, 2011). In her doctoral work, Brevik collected data on L2 reading from secondary school students across Norway; observing classroom instruction and use of reading comprehension strategies, interviewing teachers and their students, and investigating a group of students labeled “outliers” due to their extreme scores on national reading tests. Her work specifically addresses the characteristics of the outliers as good L2 readers but poor L1 readers, and identified three learner profiles; the gamer, the surfer, and the social media user. This research has implications for reading instruction in countries where English is an additional language, and where English is the majority language (e.g, US, UK).

If you have questions about the event, please contact Professor Cindy Brantmeier at cbrantme@wustl.edu.

The Washington University Foreign Language Learning Colloquium Speaker Series is sponsored by the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Department of Education, and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.