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[ProfessionalDevelopment 2565] Re: Where does the reading problem go?Steve Kaufmann steve at thelinguist.comFri Sep 26 20:34:01 EDT 2008
In Canada, and I suspect in the US, employers place great importance on communication skills, as an attribute for employees. This refers to both written and oral communication. There are regular complaints from employers about the communication ability of recent graduates from our universities. >From my own experience with recent graduates, I can say that these communication skills are quite weak, surprisingly weak.This is true for native speakers, and even more so the case with students who spent a long time in ESL programs. The question may not be so much how well these respondents think they read. It may be more a matter of what they read, and how much they have been exposed to the kind of reading content that would enable them to acquire a rich vocabulary, and expose them to different ideas and literary experiences. These are usually prerequisites for good communication skills. I firmly believe that the easiest measure of one's ability to communicate in a language is the size of one's vocabulary, and I mean passive vocabulary. This is quite easily measured in a close test and has the great advantage of simplicity.Many other attempts to describe levels of literacy and language proficiency just strike me as too obtuse and subjective. Steve -- Steve Kaufmann www.lingq.com 1-604-922-8514 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/professionaldevelopment/attachments/20080926/4c71e738/attachment.html
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