ABSTRACT.Technologists read technical manuals and handbooks in a foreign language on a regular basis. Institutions that provide technical education are committed to teaching their students the reading-to-do literacy skills they will need in the domain. Not very much is known about "real-life" manual reading, ie. how the text and the task are processed. The paper presents the core findings of a recent reading-to-do study that was conducted by the author, and gives some outlines for reading instruction. The following suggestions are given for foreign-language teachers who want to meet the challenge of reading-to-do instruction: task-based learning that comprises authentic, meaningful activities; collaborative (pair) activities which make practical problem-solving and reading faster and facilitate synergetic processes; team-teaching for the development of the student's literacy skills across the curriculum. The paper also suggests that classroom activities could explore the reading-writing connection by combining the study of authentic manual texts and the design of technical instructions.

Technologists read technical manuals and handbooks in a foreign language on a day-to-day basis, as shown in needs analysis studies. To meet the need, institutions of technical education are committed to teaching their students the functional (reading-to-do) literacy skills of the domain (Väänänen 1992). These skills are usually taught in connection with foreign language education.

However, not very much is known about "real-life" manual reading - how the text and the task are processed, and what factors come into play in the context. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the findings of a recent reading-to-do study and to propose ideas for the design of literacy instruction.

The study that I conducted (Johnson 1997) looked into the ways in which pairs of engineering students accessed instruction texts in a real-life setting. In reading-to-do sessions, the participant pairs were required to act upon technical instructions. The selection of participant tasks included installing a bus mouse on a microcomputer, setting the clock and timer of a video cassette recorder, and making an audio recording with a tape deck. A word that best describes the results of the sessions is variation. The tasks took from 9 min. to 1 hr. 20 min to complete and the percentage of session time used for reading ranged from 7% to 76%. The tactics of accessing the manual text varied from step-by-step microprocessing, ie. making sense of the text very slowly, to extremely casual top-down reading. Pair participation ranged from individual sub-tasking to shared problem-solving and negotiation of textual meaning.

Procedural, metacognitive, and content-specific knowledge--either instantiated individually or negotiated by the pair--had a crucial role in completing the task and for accessing the manual text successfully. Depending on individual orientation and the approach negotiated between the partners, the lack of "what-to-do" knowledge could be offset by joint reading, shared problem-solving, and heuristics. On the other hand, if the gap of knowledge between the pair was wide and the individual approaches in reading-to-do were very different, the pair was likely to end up in sub-tasking and a low level of collaboration.

The interplay of the real-world task and reading is best put into the form of a meta-orientation: if you experience uncertainty about the problem you need to solve, seek information to resolve that uncertainty; next, work on the information to construct knowledge which will help you solve for the problem in practical terms. The meta-orientation is metacognitive, ie. deals with self-monitoring and evaluation (cf. Block 1986, 1992; Valtanen 1994, 1995). It is also conditional, ie. it explicates that information search and construction of knowledge are optional ie. instnatiated only if necessary. Finally, it proposes that information search and construction of knowledge for the problem are interconnected. The meta-orientation is important as it helps us understand the variation of processes and approaches in reading-to-do.

Current instructional approaches to foreign-language reading instruction are heavily based on a view that componential, "additive" constructs and processes can be readily utilised for reading development (see eg. Grabe 1991, Bernhardt 1991:5-17). These constructs and processes include eg. word recognition; skimming and scanning, or schema activation, and they are derived from cognitive psychology and experimental studies with de-contextualised settings. Similarly, studies of foreign language reading rarely track down reading processes on-line or explore reading development in actual language use (Bernhardt 1991:69).

Reading-to-do literacy and its role in target foreign-language instruction should be reconsidered when validating methods and media in engineering education. I think that a successful curricular design of literacy instruction could be achieved by studying how engineers read and write at work. In other words, we need to identify and "model" the key literacy practices of the engineering community.

A particular type of literacy, such as reading-to-do when installing computer hardware, relates to much more than the linguistic content, mental representations, or reading processes involved (cf. Hutson 1987, Venetzky 1990). The common view that literacy skills are easily transferred from one context to another should be reconsidered and tested. What ultimately boils down to is the function that is embedded in the contextualised situation.

My study showed a wide variation in both the process and outcome. Contextual factors and individual differences came to play in task-and-reading. On the basis of the research findings of the study, what would be an appropriate framework for developing specific literacy instruction?

It seems that the student would benefit from being allowed to develop his/her functional language processing skills in the full context of the task. This would be an alternative to various "activity-driven" approaches with carefully designed student input of linguistic content and learner training that typically attempts to monitor and model the text-processing strategies of the student. I propose a task-based approach where the student proceeds from the whole-task perspective, with instructional exposure and input similar to the real-life context.

Task-based learning (Candlin 1987:5-22) is seen as more motivating and meaningful for the student, and it should compare favourably with the target skills of the specialist domain which the student is being trained for. Materials, media and tools should be chosen that the student is likely to use after training; assessment techniques and student evaluation should support this. Learner contribution in the design stage of the task is highly recommended. But how can the teacher--who in most cases would teach L2 reading in a more piecemeal fashion--manage the (potential) variability of ensuing learning situations and cognitions?

The teacher should tune in for the global aspect. The individual development of professional literacy skills and strategies might be best achieved by promoting context-specific transfer of learning and learner independence. The teacher's main concern would thus be to facilitate the acquisition of literacy practices for successful problem-solving and related cognitive processes. I suggest that a systematic control of how the student processes the linguistic input is not of prime instructional importance.

The tasks assigned to students could be completed collaboratively. The findings of this study indicate that pair collaboration is positive and helpful; it makes practical problem-solving with reading faster, facilitates synergetic processes, and potentially leads to a high amount of shared cognition. In a realistic way, the participants recognise and modify the various roles they have in task-and-reading. The motivation for collaboration seems to be substantial; disagreement on a joint cognitive process is only to be found on a practical issue, not on the foundation of collaboration. The participants also produce a wide range of realistic evaluations about their own and their pair's contribution. This indicates that metacognitive and learning-to-learn skills are naturally acquired in such a setting.

The task-based learning in engineering education requires materials, media, and tools for processing that are rarely to be found in the immediate learning environment of the language classroom. Through team-teaching, teachers could experiment with the introduction and development of literacy skills across the curriculum. This would bring in content teachers with their special professional contributions and enable a more reliable way of recognising domain-specific, context-based discourse practises.

Rather than working from an abstract model of a strategic reader (cf. Rees-Miller 1993), the teacher should set out to establish a climate which supports the development of reading skills as well as roles required in collaboration. It would seem a good practice to observe how the students read and co-operate during the task completion, and to resort to indirect rather than direct feedback while the reflective problem-solving process is in progress. This approach would let the practical task "talk" to the student and "teach" him/her.

Table 1. Examples of participants' written answers to the question "How should one read manual text, in a situation like this?" reported immediately after the reading-to-do sessions.

1. Carefully and in an orderly/systematic manner.
2. Proceed carefully, look at the pictures.
3. Depends on how your experienced you are; if you do not know much, read carefully.
4. Use the manual text as a support and as a resource for knowledge.
5. Look for and read what you need to find following the out headings.
6. Have a problem (a "question") in mind, when you read.
7. Read the text so that you understand it.
8. Read the essential; do not get stuck on every word you do not know.
9. You should get some knowledge about computer technology.
10. Get some basic knowledge of the topic.

After completing the task, the students' reading processes could be discussed in the foreign language classroom. A retrospective discussion of how the text was processed should guide the student to improve his/her literacy skills. A useful support for the didactic discussions would be a post-reading questionnaire filled in by the students after the task. It is likely that a majority of students are capable of verbalising their reading-to-do tactics in a meaningful way. Examples of such tactics employed by participants of my study are given in Table 1.

The curricular objectives of foreign language instruction in engineering education have a focus on technical writing as well. The full scale of domain-specific literacy could be explored by involving the students in a reading-writing connection, ie. in foreign-language instruction where the reading and writing of texts takes place parallelly. Classroom activities could, for instance, combine the study of authentic manual texts and the design of operating instructions for real-life equipment that are available in the language class or in the school premises. It is likely that process writing in a collaborative manner would be especially beneficial for this kind of instructional approach.

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