Better info retention from reading to learn a language than from reading just to read?

[Khayyam]

IME, reading for the sake of learning a language tends to result in better information retention than reading just to read. I think this is because the learning process forces me to be active and engaged. It's hard to be so engaged when I'm reading in English, unless I'm reading something so tough that I have to focus as if I were learning a language.

Thoughts?

[leosmith]

I think it depends on how you are reading. In English, my native language, I just read something once. I'm intermediate or better in all my foreign languages, so I often only read them once too, the difference being I sometimes glance at word definitions on the fly. In this comparison, I definitely understand/retain the English better.

However, if you are comparing a single read in English with multiple reads in your foreign language, listening to audio, looking up and memorizing words, doing grammar drills to familiarize yourself with unknown grammar points, memorizing the entire passage, etc., then it's very likely that you will retain more in your L2.

[garyb]

I've had the opposite experience: when reading in another language I tend to focus on the language to the detriment of the meaning, especially if it's challenging and I need to look up words in order to follow the text or if I'm doing any sort of more intensive activity like highlighting sentences to make into flashcards.

[Cainntear]

Well I'm not really sure about how reliable the studies were, but there were a few things that seemed to suggest that difficulty reading leads to better retention of information -- the idea being that if it's hard to read, your brain has to be active to deal with it, so it sticks. Of course, the other side of that is that if it's really hard to read, you'll have to devote so much brain power to the sheer mechanics of reading it that you have no brainpower left to deal with the content, but that was unfortunately less talked about. I believe (might be my memory playing tricks on me) that there was a buzz on the internet about making stuff *really* difficult to read in order to make it really effective learning.

So yeah... I can kind of get that learning stuff in a strong L2 instead of your L1 might trigger the sort of effect that the researchers were talking about, and I can totally recognise garyb's experiences too -- I've often been so engrossed in the technical act of reading in a weak language that the actual message has actually completely passed me by.

[Le Baron]

garyb's description makes sense to me. In our native languages (or ones in which we're comfortable) the actual language structure is almost invisible and only the message remains. Like when you start learning to drive as compared to having been driving for years. By that time you don't even think about the process and it becomes a motor skill. What you notice are any anomalies.

I retain anything better where I'm not having to leak a fair percentage of effort into the structure of the medium rather than the message.