ABSTRACT
To become expert readers, English L2 readers must pass through the various stages of acquisition posited by Chall and Ehri. The Chinese and Japanese students did not appear to use English strategies to read English. Instead, they seemed to continue using their L1 strategies because their brain activation was the same for both languages. However, there is some evidence for a positive effect from instruction on brain activation from a few studies of dyslexic children. In fact, the bottom of the reading processor serves the top because the more efficiently and quietly the bottom functions. Language processing skills are one subcomponent of more general cognitive processing; linguistic knowledge is just one area of the complete knowledge about the world. The fully alphabetic strategy may be a good jumping off point for English as a Second Language (ESL)/English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students.
