Textual cohesion patterns for developing reading skills
A corpus-based multilingual learning environment
This chapter proposes a systematic methodology for developing top-down processing strategies for L2/L3 reading, and the creation of contrastive linguistic resources that support them. The work specifically focuses on acquisition of reading strategies to support text comprehension using a multilingual electronic thesaurus of textual connectors for Russian, Ukrainian and English, which were systematically derived from large corpora and classified according to the author’s semantic classification scheme. This thesaurus is then used for automatically annotating connectors in texts in the corpus to support reading strategies and to find texts of similar type or genre for teaching reading. This methodology was developed primarily for students of Russian learning to read Ukrainian, but it can be applied to the development of reading and writing skills in any L2.