Language Competence and Reading Strategies: A Comparison of First‐and Second‐language Oral Reading Errors1

The French oral reading errors of two groups of seventh‐grade English‐speaking students with intermediate and advanced competence in French as a second language were analyzed and compared to the errors of native French‐speaking students. It was found that the intermediate students made a significantly lower proportion of deletion and insertion errors than did the advanced and nativespeaker students and a significantly higher proportion of substitution errors that graphically resembled the text than did the native speakers. Also, the intermediate students made a significantly higher proportion of errors that did not conform to the syntactic, semantic, or discourse constraints of the text than did the advanced and native‐speaker students. It was concluded that both native French‐speaking students and students with advanced competence in French as a second language appeared to use an interactive strategy of drawing on both graphic and contextual information in reading French. In contrast, students with less competence in French did not use contextual information to the same extent and instead employed a more “bottom‐up” strategy of relying primarily on graphic information.