Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper reports a reading intervention programme, the LMVS (Linguistically Mediated Visual Search) amongpre-adolescent Chinese EFLs. It sets out to test whether managing the process of silent reading might modify text complexityas perceived. The paper is a combination of two studies. The first study was the development and assessment of a reading com-prehension test. The second study piloted an intervention for pre-adolescents. Item-by-item analysis of students’ performancein the post-test show changes in the perception of item difficulty after the intervention. Chinese EFL struggling readers werefound to be weaker in lexical analysis. They also faced difficulties in decoding main ideas in compound/complex sentences. Inresponse to the analysis, strategies were developed for automatic syntactic processing. The paper proposes seeing language asa process, rather than a product so that learner management skills might be prepared for reading intervention.