I love challenges: there is so much to learn from
taking them on and so much satisfaction to derive from meeting them. In fact,
the greatest reward is discovering that your custom solution for a particular
learner can be applied to several other learning situations.
I have encountered many in the long years of teaching,
one of them being preparing students with poor English for exam qualifications with
hardly enough time to do so. The reason for such short notice is usually a deadline
for a postgraduate degree requirement or a condition for the offer of a job.
Candidates with rusty English are certainly hard pressed to achieve this goal.
A crash course is what they ask for but even so there is so much one can
assimilate in a limited period of time that – if not the student themselves – I
feel daunted by the task, at least to begin with.
I will focus on building the appropriate reading
strategies in order that the candidates stand a good chance of navigating a
dense text. The principle is to at least make sense of the main clause and from
thereon work your way down to the different layers of subordination. Getting the
gist is top priority: to do this you have to be able to decide how much to
dwell on a given period/part of the text without wasting time that could be put
to better use if you continued to read, acknowledging your limitations.
Many students who left school long ago would have
difficulty understanding coordination (clauses of the same kind) and
subordination (one clause depending on another). But practically speaking, they
should be able to tell which clause stands in its own right and work their way
down from that to the different levels of subordination. All it takes is
practice and some help from the teacher till they get the hang of it. The idea is that as long as you can understand
the main clause(s) you can comprehend the text as a whole.
The question is how to demonstrate this approach to
the students. I have chosen a colour code to do exactly that. According to this
code, you are to mark main clauses blue and moving to the subordinate clauses you can mark the first
level (subordinate clause dependent on a main clause) yellow, the second level (subordinate
clause dependent on the first-level subordinate clause) green and the third level of subordination purple. Of course, the choice of colours is totally arbitrary
and you can pick your own colours!
Let’s illustrate the approach with a couple of
examples. Of course, you will need to persevere by going through difficult bits
in texts you present to your students several times before they can actually
apply the method themselves.
What follows
is an extract from an article entitled
How we
discovered three poisonous books in our university library
published in The Conversation on 28 June 2018.
The
reason why
we took these three rare books to the X-ray lab was because the library had previously discovered that medieval manuscript fragments,
such as copies of Roman law and canonical law, were used to make their covers.
It is well documented that
European bookbinders in the 16th and 17th centuries used to recycle older
parchments.
The clauses in yellow are subordinate to the main
clause in blue and the clause in green is subordinate to the second clause in
yellow (it is the object of the verb “had discovered”).
The second extract comes from an article entitled The
‘sea-nomad’ children who see like dolphins published on BBC on 1
March 2016.
She thought the first theory
was unlikely, because a
fundamental change to the eye would probably mean the kids wouldn’t be able to
see well above water.
The clause in yellow is a that-clause (“that” is omitted)
and serves as the object of the verb of the main clause. The clause in green is
a clause of reason and is subordinate to the clause in yellow and the clause in
purple is a that-clause and serves as the object of the verb of the clause in
green.
Often a long period is a challenge because there are a
few clarifications either between commas, or in brackets or even between dashes
or because there are a few adjectives defining a noun. You can easily teach the
students how to pare some periods down by ignoring details on their first
reading for gist so as not to be slowed down in understanding a text in its
wholeness or losing the thread while reading.
The following example comes from a publication under the title Scientists Watch a Memory Form in Quanta Magazine on 3
March, 2022.
I have put the details in brackets.
Memory has frequently been studied in the cortex, (which covers the top of the mammalian brain,) and in the hippocampus at the base. But it’s
been examined less often in deeper structures such as the amygdala, (the brain’s fear regulation center). The amygdala is particularly responsible for
associative memories,(an important class of
emotionally charged memories that link disparate things — like that spider in
your cereal). While this type of
memory is very common, how it forms is not well understood, partly because it
occurs in a relatively inaccessible area of the brain.
I also never tire of reminding my students that it is probably a waste
of time to linger on the noun phrase just because they know the adjective (s)
but not the noun or on a clause if they don’t know the meaning of the main
verb.
Let’s look at
an example below from Elephant crashes
into a woman's home in search for food, as natural habitats shrink published on CNN on 22 June, 2021.
"No (single mitigation)
method can address the (multifaceted) causes of the problem, which stems from
increased development of (original) elephant habitat," the study said. (Long-term) solutions must include "efforts to restore
natural elephant habitat, proper land use planning, and crop choices that are
less attractive to elephants," as well as "securing corridors to
allow elephants to move to additional habitats."
I find that these simple ways of reducing a text to
its basics can be particularly useful to dyslexic students/readers though it
can help anyone when struggling with a dense convoluted period.
