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Influential accounts of visual word recognition argue that lexical access is entirely mediated via preliminary letter identification processcs(McClelland and Rumelhart, 1981; Seidenberg, 1987). Others advocate a role for visual features characterising the whole word (Haber and Haber, 1981). A third view holds that lexical access is, at least in part, mediated by sublexical units which are recovered by the action of a parsing mechanism operating on identified letter codes through the application of specific rules (e.g., Spoehr and Smith, 1973). Recent work by Alice Healy and her colleagues supports a multi-level view of word recognition incorporating representations not only at the letter and whole word levels, but also at an intermediate level where multiletter units can be activated directly by supraletter features (e.g., Healy and Drewnowski, 1983). The concept of an intermediate level of representation in visual word recognition remains controversial. A priming paradigm was employed to investigate the existence of directly activated multiletter units. Subjects were required to make a discrimination response to test stimuli which could be either targets or foils. Targets were either single-letters or consonant-bigrarns which were present or absent in an immediately preceding word, and foils were either single keyboard characters or a character plus a letter. Experiment I verified an earlier finding that responses to consonant-bigram targets are facilitated when these appear in a prime word, while responses to the constituent letters of those bigrams are not facilitated (Greenberg and Vellutino, 1988). In addition, responses to primed bigrain targets were faster than responses to primed single letter targets. Experiments 2 to 4 revealed that the bigram priming effect occurs only when both primes and targets appear in lower-case type. These observations provide evidence for the existence of directly activated multiletter units. Subsequent experiments supplied converging evidence for the importance of supraletter visual features in the activation of multiletter units and strengthened the view that the multiletter unit effects observed arise at a pre-lexical stage of processing when words are being processed to a level of meaning. Implications for theories of reading are discussed, and related developmental issues are considered.

This study aims to examinet he changesin students'p erceptionso f and attitudes towards learning English in a Malaysian college. Firstly, it aims to investigate how the attitudes of students towards learning English changes during the critical transition period from secondary school, where the medium of instruction is in Malay, to college, where the medium of instruction is English. Then, it examines students' perceptions of their English language classroom environment and teaching methodologies used, the relationship of students with their teachers in both secondary school and college. It also investigates their perceptions of the influence of home background on learning English. Finally, it considers the influence of teacher attitudes on students' attitudes towards learning English. The study focuses on 100 students enrolled in a first level English course during their first semester in Petra College (a pseudonym), and the lecturers teaching these students. Data for this study were collected by student's weekly journals and interviews with students and lecturers. Analysis of the data was done qualitatively using an interpretive approach. The aim of using this approach was to provide a view of the second language learning process that is focused on perceptions of the learners. The findings revealed that there was a difference in students' perceptions of and attitudes towards learning English in secondary school and in college. Students' attitudes towards learning English seemed more positive in college. The students perceived that the environment in college was more conducive for learning English, and they noticed difference between the strategies used by their secondary school teachers and college lecturers. The findings suggest that secondary school teachers used a more structured audio-lingual approach and were not empathetic towards their students' language needs. On the other hand, the lecturers in college used more cooperative and interactive approaches and were perceived to be more empathetic towards students' language needs. The home background of students seemed to considerably influence their perceptions and attitudes towards learning English as well. The implications from the study suggest that teaching methodologies, the classroom environment, the school social environment, and the family background could influence students' perceptions of and attitudes towards learning English.

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This study investigates the association of vocabulary development and reading comprehension, focusing principally on the contribution of context to vocabulary depth learning. Research into reading for vocabulary learning has typically emphasized the learning of discrete items as though they were unrelated. Adopting the viewpoint of cognitive linguistics, this study assumes a cognitively motivated relationship inherent in these to-be-learned items, and thus defines vocabulary depth in terms of the ability to recognize the inclusion and membership properties of semantic categories occurring in a text. In other words, what distinguishes this study from others is its emphasis on extent to which learners are able to recognize the hierarchical relations (inclusion) and internal category structure (membership) of the lexical items found in a text. The research was conducted in a real classroom setting using procedures that are pedagogically valid. This is believed to be the optimal context for revealing the genuine nature of second language learning. Specifically, a Freshman English course incorporating extensive reading as one of its requirements was selected for this investigation since successful reading at advanced level depends upon recovering the instantial categories (i.e. those that exist in some particular instance) established in the text. To compare the effects of the original and alternate encoding options, a selected text was modified structurally and paratactically so as to enable a comparison of the extent to which text structure is associated with comprehension, when comprehension is defined in terms of the ability to recognize inclusion and membership. In addition, the rhetorical properties present in the original text were also taken into account in order to investigate whether common rhetorical properties could result in more successful recognition of category membership and whether distinct rhetorical properties could lead to more successful differentiation of degrees of category membership.

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