[ProfessionalDevelopment 2573] Re: The "Decoding" of words, sentences, and paragraphsVirginia Pulver virginia at nmcl.orgMon Sep 29 11:44:03 EDT 2008
I am enjoying the discussion. While my experience is anecdotal, it is far more significant to me than theories and research, because I needed to learn so I could progress with my work. I had a fulfilling 27 months on the eastern-most tip of Crimea and my success was in part, due to the fact that my tutor used a variety of approaches to help me move forward. When I was "dropped" into Ukraine and eager to begin my business development/facilitator projects I needed to learn to read and write Russian very quickly. Initially, like the Chinese student, I found myself overwhelmed and having nightmares. Once I changed my focus from deciphering the words on the printed page and negotiating through the meaning of every word and instead took a more holistic approach, my skills improved substantially. Hearing the spoken language, listening to how sentences flow and discovering patterns in the spoken word, I became far more adept at using prediction and contextual clues to improve my ability to read and write. I was grateful to have television because I could follow the basic plotlines and absorb many nuances of language in a way that did not produce the performance anxiety that comes from reading and decoding under the eye of a tutor or coach. I imagine given the systems of education generally used in Chinese systems, the student mentioned earlier would be even more inclined to suffer from performance anxiety than would those of us brought up attending US schools!) My immersion into Spanish was also accelerated once I began to find ways to simply hear the language rather than deciphering individual words. (I lived in Spain for about ten years total and arrived with only a very small vocabulary and extremely limited experience with hearing the language.) Life is good. Virginia J. Pulver, AmeriCorps*VISTA Recruiting Consultant, NM Coalition for Literacy 3209-B Mercantile Court, Santa Fe NM 87507 virginia at nmcl.org YOU can become a volunteer adult literacy tutor or refer adult learners for FREE 1-1 tutoring! 1-800-233-7587 Visit our Website: <http://www.nmcl.org/> www.nmcl.org From: professionaldevelopment-bounces at nifl.gov [mailto:professionaldevelopment-bounces at nifl.gov] On Behalf Of Steve Kaufmann Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 11:43 AM To: The Adult Literacy Professional Development Discussion List Subject: [ProfessionalDevelopment 2558] Re: The "Decoding" of words, sentences, and paragraphs 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 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/professionaldevelopment/attachments/20080929/a1ea9a17/attachment.html
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