Levels of Reading

 

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.