This study maps compensation strategies in English as a foreign language used in immediate receptive situations by students of English and other modern languages. By mapping these strategies, language learners’ thinking processes are made visible, which in turn may assist teachers in modifying teaching methods. The study is comparative and highlights the difference in the use of strategies between learners who exclusively study English and learners who study at least one other modern language apart from English. The focus is on two major components of second language acquisition, viz. grammaticality and unknown words in context. Two major strategies have been used: (1) a quantitative analysis, and (2) a qualitative analysis, of sentences and words in context. Data have been collected from two surveys and two sets of recorded introspection with ten informants. This study proposes a classification of receptive compensation strategies including a division of achievement and avoidance strategies. The findings from the comparative study point out the major differences between learners of English only and learners of other modern languages. Finally, a discussion about what these results may imply for teaching is given.

Following up on research suggesting an age-related reduction in the rightward extent of the perceptual span during reading (Rayner, Castelhano, & Yang, 2009), we compared old and young adults in an N+2-boundary paradigm in which a nonword preview of word N+2 or word N+2 itself is replaced by the target word once the eyes cross an invisible boundary located after word N. The intermediate word N+1 was always three letters long. Gaze durations on word N+2 were significantly shorter for identical than nonword N+2 preview both for young and for old adults with no significant difference in this preview benefit. Young adults, however, did modulate their gaze duration on word N more strongly than old adults in response to the difficulty of the parafoveal word N+1. Taken together, the results suggest a dissociation of preview benefit and parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Results are discussed in terms of age-related decline in resilience towards distributed processing while simultaneously preserving the ability to integrate parafoveal information into foveal processing. As such, the present results relate to proposals of regulatory compensation strategies older adults use to secure an overall reading speed very similar to that of young adults.