Lita Lundquist, Navigating in Foreign Language Texts

Shirley Carter-Thomas (1, 2)

1 Lattice - Lattice - Langues, Textes, Traitements informatiques, Cognition - UMR 8094
2 IMT-BS - LSH - Département Langues et Sciences Humaines

Concepts and theories in text and cognitive linguistics can sometimes appear rather removed from the practical concerns of language learners. In this informative, yet highly accessible book, Lita Lundquist, Professor of Languages for Specific Purposes at the Copenhagen Business School, shows how they can be put to immediate use. One of the main ideas underpinning Navigating in Foreign Language Texts is that increased awareness of the often subconscious cognitive and linguistic strategies used in the reading and decoding of complex academic texts in readers’ own native languages can facilitate the processing of similar texts in a foreign language. Lundquist identifies a number of top-down and bottom-up strategies and demonstrates how they can be used to help process foreign language texts. Four languages are dealt with: English, French, German and Spanish. Although the academic texts examined are mainly business-oriented the techniques presented could be easily applied to specialised texts in other fields.

Mots clés: Reading foreign language texts; Knowledge frames; Context; Parsing; Structure; Lexis

Domaines: Linguistique

Shirley Carter-Thomas. Lita Lundquist, Navigating in Foreign Language Texts. ASp - La revue du GERAS, 2009, 55, pp.111-113. ⟨halshs-00664118⟩