Restructuring or Automaticity? Reading in a Second Language

In this paper we discuss the notion of automaticity as used in information‐processing accounts of learning and recent criticism of this concept. It is suggested that improvement in performance can sometimes be due to a restructuring of the components of a task so that they are integrated and reorganized in new ways, thereby allowing procedures involving the old components to be replaced by more efficient procedures involving new components. We describe a study of reading in a second language that suggests there are at least two modes of learning — that achieved by the gradual accretion of automaticity and that achieved by restructuring.