Classroom Reflections
Several experiences last week showed that keeping up with professional development is hardly “just academic.”
Continuing through the 80 supplemental DELTA articles I’ve been sitting on for the past several years, I came upon a long piece by Keith Stanovich from 1980. In it, Stanovich argues that theories regarding reading acquisition as either bottom-up or top-down processes both fall short.
A better way of understanding and gauging how readers process a text is the “interactive-compensatory” model, where, when met with difficulty, a reader compensates for, say, not knowing a word, with context clues to decipher its meaning or pronunciation. Similarly, if a reader can sound out an unknown word using familiar sound patterns, they might be able to figure out what it means through inference.
One study cited in the paper indicates that “good” readers are more likely to read an error in a given text (“A green frog came hopping oven the snow”) rather than fix it to “over,” which “poor” readers were more likely to do so. This finding suggested that the latter group relies on conventions of fluency while reading, and the former relies on the graphic information.
In my work as a voice actor, I often run into texts, translated from Russian into English, that look suspiciously incoherent.
Last week I was expected to read something along the lines of “It’s not just survival of the fittest. Here, each animal finds a place to feel comfortable.”
Do those two sentences look like they belong together?
Does the second sound at all natural?
Delving a little deeper into the original text, two Russian-speaking coworkers improvised something more like “It’s not just the strong that survive. It’s the animals that get used to these conditions that make it.”
The authority of the printed (or at least written) word is powerful.
People need to stay alert and not defer to it unquestioningly.
In class during a gap-fill exercise, one of my students was puzzled by this sentence:
My sister was actually thinking of taking her to a doggy hotel but I volunteered to watch her instead.
The task was to fill in several gaps with different forms of “take,” some instances were parts of phrasal verbs while others weren’t.
Why was it “taking” in the gap and not “take”?
I realized that she didn’t see the frame “thinking of + NOUN,” which allows the gerund “taking.” Instead, she was looking at “take” in all its forms and context to only function as a verb.
In “The Idiot’s Guide to Big Grammar Items 4,” Nick Shepherd notes how “gradience” works in language, where in some cases words look like verbs but are in fact “deverbal” (based on a verb) nouns and in others are verbal nouns or participles.
Explaining this idea clarified the text enormously for her.
In Susan Sheerin’s article “Listening comprehension: teaching or testing?” some very salient methodological issues are raised. Sheerin notes that students aren’t really being taught how to listen in most listening activities: they are being tested on what they have heard. Recently, I’ve been explicit about listening to audio files 2–3 times in class in order to build actual listening skills.
While doing the usual gist + details tasks, I deliberately included an item that seemed easy to catch — the price of a pet parrot — that I was sure the students would miss. Guesses went from “I have no idea” to “$400?” After playing it a second time, the students were certain that a price was mentioned but couldn’t repeat it themselves. Why?
Because the speaker said “fourteen hundred” rather than “one-thousand four hundred.” The former form is not taught in Russia and often causes frustration and confusion (I personally *hate* saying “one-thousand-anything” and have loved the -hundred version ever since I first came across it while watching Jeopardy! as a kid).
