Conceptual development in technical and textbook writing: a challenge for L1 and L2 student readers

The paper argues that the decoding skills that first year university students - both L1 and L2 students - bring to the kinds of technical writing typically found in textbooks or in academic articles are much more sophisticated than many available accounts suggest. Students need to, and do, ´go beyond the text´ in a number of ways, and decoding is an inadequate term for the skills involved. Students frequently need to use prior knowledge of the field - including what Martin (2001) calls its technicality - to contextualise and explicate concepts found in their reading; so they need to obtain that knowledge and bring it to their reading. The obvious circularity of this condition is a key part of the problem, and solutions are suggested. Readers need to be able to handle higher order abstractions, and they need ´forward inferencing´ skills to bridge the gap between what is said and what is going to be said, supplementing the backward looking processes of anaphoric reference and bridging inferences. These reading strategies reflect the dynamics of the writing process.