reading difficult words
Reading difficult words | Pinkie | April 19th, 2001
Anyone doing LEX? I've just read a great article by Kate Parry entitled, "Vocabulary & comprehension: Two portraits" (from "Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition," eds. Coady & Huckin). She looks at comprehension of a difficult academic text by two NNS undergraduates in the US: she asks them to translate the text to their own languages, then gets a professional translation back to English and checks how they've done. She finds that both students have big problems with difficult words like "lineage" and "domiciled" (it's an anthropology text about kinship relations in Africa). One student has a rather slap-happy approach to words he doesn't know, which generally doesn't work: he guesses wrongly from context, consults the dictionary mechanically and ineffectively, and in general gets himself into a terrible mess. The author concludes that this sort of don't-worry-be-happy attitude is probably great for general and lower-level language learning, but hopeless in an academic context where precision is critical. The second student is much more careful: she makes context-related guesses, then checks in a dictionary, carefully and effectively, and generally gets the idea; though in the longer term she has problems in part because she's a slow reader.
Fascinating article for me. Though it left me a bit in the air: I wasn't really sure what the author thinks teachers should do in response to problems of this type. Has anybody else read this?
Best wishes,
Pinkie
Spain
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