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

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

From: Steve Kaufmann <steve at thelinguist.com>
Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 2555] Re: The "Decoding" of words, sentences, and paragraphs
To: bcarmel at rocketmail.com, "The Adult Literacy Professional Development Discussion List" <professionaldevelopment at nifl.gov>
Date: Friday, September 26, 2008, 12:58 PM



I am not sure if this refers to native speakers learning to read their own language, or non-native speakers learning to read another language. If it is the latter, then I think it is normal for a learner to focus on decoding individual words. By decoding individual words, the learner gets some idea of the overall meaning, but still an unclear idea. There is nothing wrong with the overall meaning being unclear, and I believe it is important to convince the learner that this fuzziness of meaning is absolutely normal and OK. The language will only become clearer over time. In the meanwhile it is important to keep listening and reading and learning words. In my experience, the learner's time is best spent on acquiring more exposure to the language, rather than trying to fully understand what he or she is reading or listening to, or for that matter trying to produce the language with any accuracy.

I believe that insofar as immigrant language learners as concerned, greater benefit would be achieved if a large number of  immigrants were assigned a personal tutor with whom he or she met infrequently, either face to face, or by phone or computer. This language coach could then provide advice and encouragement and guidance. The present instruction-intensive format does not take advantage of the potential energies and learning efficiencies that would accrue from a more learner-centred approach. And if the learner is not interested in learning, chances are that he or she is not learning very much in class either.

Steve

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 7:38 AM, Bruce C <bcarmel at rocketmail.com> wrote:

Hello List:
I believe that decoding is an extremely important component of reading, but it is not the only component. Understanding conventions of print and different genres, using and having background knowledge, being able to relate text to self/text to the world/text to other texts, using context to inform decoding, and being able to make predictions are among the many other skills needed to be a good reader.

I did some in-depth interviews with beginning readers and found "decoding" was all they cared about. Comprehension was not the goal for them. Decoding was the goal. I believe many beginning readers would feel satisfied and successful if they accurately decoded each word of a text yet did not comprehend its meaning.

This is sadly reinforced by many teachers who teach as if they believe the same thing.


>From Bruce Carmel

Turning Point
Brooklyn NY









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