Thanks, Steve: good thought. I'll ask him if he has one of thos digital stick recorders. These Chinese students are so tuned into tech that he thought he could text my office phone...
Bonnie

--- On Fri, 9/26/08, Steve Kaufmann <steve at thelinguist.com> wrote:

From: Steve Kaufmann <steve at thelinguist.com>
Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 2558] Re: The "Decoding" of words, sentences, and paragraphs
To: "The Adult Literacy Professional Development Discussion List" <professionaldevelopment at nifl.gov>
Date: Friday, September 26, 2008, 1:43 PM



Of course the situation of someone like this Chinese student is different. I was referring to students at an earlier stage of learning a language. For your student I would recommend that he spend a lot of time listening to recordings of his lectures or recordings of material on related subjects. Even asking native speakers fellow students to record their own essays or writing, or even to talk to each other in these subjects would help. This student then needs to spend a lot of time listening. Listening creates the rhythm that often brings the meaning alive. He also probably needs to improve his vocabulary of words and phrases. He needs to force feed himself the exposure that he has not had.


On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 10:34 AM, Bonnie Odiorne <bonniesophia at sbcglobal.net> wrote:






What you say works for most types of reading, but not academic--maybe even literary--reading,  where the ways the words connect are crucial, and an overall idea may not be sufficient. I have a Chinese student now under considerable stress because he cannot make the jump quickly enough to academic language to understand the textbook material, let alone the professor. Any tutoring he gets from me in reading strategies, finding the important concepts, and explaining the meaning of the words in paraphrase, giving the pronunciation in the hope that when his professor uses it he can understand it, doesn't really seem to help the fundamental problem: he needs more time to assimilate the language. As someone has said, depending on sight words, context clues et al. to "guess" the most likely meaning of a sentence or paragraph can only take one so far, and some of that misperception of connection, grammar and syntax can be crucial to meaning. But tell that to the
 young man who's having nightmares, and is so tired he can barely stay awake.
Bonnie Odiorne, Ph.D.
Director, Writing Center, Adjunct Professor
Post University, Waterbury, CT
bonnisophia at sbcglobal.net

-
-- 
Steve Kaufmann
www.lingq.com
1-604-922-8514
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