Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
Download 0.82 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
teaching-english-as-a-foreign-language-routledge-education-books
Bremen is a prepositional phrase acting as a post-modifier of
programme. The good reader also needs to be familiar with the precise meaning of the particular grammatical devices used, structure words, word order, word forms and broad patterns of sentences. (The text says ‘The airforce had agreed to create a diversion by bombing the other side of the submarine basin but they were late.’ How does this differ from saying ‘and they were late’? ‘The aircraft were due at 3.40 precisely. At 3.46 the first anti-aircraft gun opened fire.’ Why not ‘The first anti-aircraft gun opened fire at 3.46’? The consequences of subordinating one clause to another, or choosing one tense rather than another, or relating sentences by nominalisation (‘The men disappeared into the night. Their disappearing so silently was quite eerie’) and all the multifarious patterns of the grammar in their almost incredible richness are all the proper subject of the good reader’s attention. So also are the patterns of logical relationships within texts. The skilled reader makes use of the information, the Reading 96 signals, passed to him by the lexical and grammatical patterns to discover the architecture of a passage, the framework upon which it is built. He can perceive that this sentence is a generalisation, that this paragraph which follows is one bit of the evidence upon which the generalisation is based. Here, and here, and here are time adverbs showing the temporal sequence of the events in the story, and so on. It is from this general overview that he is most likely to gain an understanding of what the text is really about. There are three other kinds of relationship which concern written texts. The first of these is the relationship which exists between the author and his text. The skilled reader is aware of the author’s attitude and purpose whether he intends the passage to be taken seriously or whether he is writing ironically, or with his tongue in his cheek, or whether he is writing light-heartedly or with humorous intent. The author may be writing something purely descriptive, attempting to encapsulate a bit of experience in words, or he may be attempting to present a narrative, expound a theory or develop an argument. An anecdote may be recounted to support a contention, emotion may be deliberately invoked to cover inadequate reasoning, but at every point the author is using what he writes for some end in human communication and it is essential that the reader should be aware of what this is. Reading a joke as though it were serious exposition is a very radical kind of misunderstanding. The second sort of relationship concerning written texts is that which exists between the reader and the text. Obviously the author’s purpose will be related to the reader’s reaction to the text, but there is one kind of reader response which involves a kind of extension of the text and which can therefore be very important for a full understanding of it. It may be, for example, that the text is so constructed that it leads the reader very powerfully towards adopting a particular point of view, or accepting a particular generalisation, or value judgment, yet the conclusion may never be explicitly stated in the text. So the logical implications of a text may need to be explored as well as the syllogisms expounded explicitly in it. To fully comprehend the point of a short story, for example, it may be necessary to imagine what the next incident in the Reading 97 narrative might be and the good reader has the ability to make this kind of projection. The third kind of relationship which is relevant to the understanding of a written text is that which exists between the text and the culture, in the anthropological sense, of the community in whose language the text is written. The understanding reader is aware of the precise cultural value of verbal expressions. It is not sufficient to know that an expression like Spiffing! means Excellent!, or some such thing, it is also necessary to be aware that such an expression places the user, socially, educationally and temporally. The whole realm of literary allusion and quotation, comes in here. It may be necessary to know who wrote the text, when he wrote it and for whom, in order to understand it fully. Such information is often not derivable directly from the text and has to be acquired from some outside supplementary source. There is, however, something of a tendency among teachers to provide too much of this supplementary information at the expense of paying attention to the text itself and what it says and the priority must always be to ensure that the text itself yields up as much as possible of what is really relevant to its understanding. Knowing who wrote it and when may not be relevant at all. It is not only the cultural value of words and expressions that is important; the ability to identify the kinds of situation, the topics, the social classes, the geographical regions, and the points in time to which they belong; but the value which the text as a whole may have in a particular society. In order to understand a play like Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, or a novel like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe and to appreciate why they are regarded as important in post-war British literature it is necessary to have at least some idea of the nature of the social changes that took place in the 1950s and 1960s in England and the kinds of conflict that these changes generated. All of this is part of comprehending a text. It is clearly some way from understanding the plain sense and is beginning to approach literary appreciation, but it remains true that even quite ordinary pieces of writing like advertisements offering French lessons at your home may be misunderstood if the cultural context in which they appear is not known. Reading 98 Finally every reader must make some kind of evaluation of the texts he reads. Until he does this he cannot be said to have fully comprehended them. He has to relate what the text conveys through its vocabulary and grammar and its rhetorical and logical structure and the attitudes and cultural meanings which it has to his own experience, his own conception of reality. He needs to judge if this is really the way men and women behave under the influence of fear, love, or hate. The whole question of the truth of fiction needs to be examined (is the story of the Prodigal Son a ‘true’ story?) and so too must the validity of logical and rhetorical structures. (Are the conclusions which the author draws from the evidence he presents justified? Are the conclusions the author leads us to draw valid? Is the language used in this apparently objective description in fact ‘loaded’ so that we find ourselves approaching this following section of the text with prejudice? and so on.) It is only when all of these dimensions of understanding have been seriously contemplated that full comprehension may be achieved. This then is a brief exploration of the nature of reading, of the kind of thing it is, and the factors that enter into it. How then is reading to be taught and what part does it play in teaching English to foreigners? Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
Ma'lumotlar bazasi mualliflik huquqi bilan himoyalangan ©fayllar.org 2024
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling
ma'muriyatiga murojaat qiling