I found this article very interesting, particularly because it spells out reading strategies that I've subconsciously used before. When I began learning German, I focused almost exclusively on structure and the meaning of individual words, nearly to the point of ignoring the overall meaning of the passage. As I've made progress over the years, I've moved towards reading primarily for meaning, occasionally ignoring difficult words and tricky grammatical structures. I think that Coles and Dodd described my reading strategies exactly.
As I thought about this article, I also realized that I've been using variants of the same reading strategies in other languages I speak. I speak Chinese at a relatively advanced level, and am at probably a low intermediate leven in Korean. Although some of the Coles and Dodd techniques play on particular aspects of German (such as the fact that nouns always begin with capital letters, or the fact that the meaning of long German words can be inferred by looking at their parts), other strategies could work well for other languages, such as using "word gaps," pre-scanning sentences to identify negatives and logical connectors and so on. I plan to use these techniques more deliberately to hopefully improve my reading comprehension in all three languages in the future.
Before reading a text in a foreign language do you think of particular technique you intend to use? I assume you know the peculiarities of a languge and what to consider in each case. What would you point out for reading German?
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