Misunderstanding comprehension
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Michael Swan ; Catherine Walter [1]
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[1] University of Oxford
University of Oxford
Oxford District, Reino Unido
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- Localización: ELT journal: An international journal for teachers of English to speakers of other languages, ISSN 0951-0893, Vol. 71, Nº 2, 2017, págs. 228-236
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
Lessons designed to teach reading and listening typically concentrate on the use of higher-level skills and strategies, such as predicting, scanning, inferencing, understanding text structure, or activating background knowledge. Given that these normal communication skills are already available to students for mother-tongue use, they should generally be accessible in the new language without further training, once fluent and accurate low-level decoding and parsing have been automatized enough to free up mental space for higher-level processing. With some exceptions, any remaining comprehension problems are likely to arise from specific linguistic features of the input: for instance unknown vocabulary, textual density, syntactic complexity, or difficulty in dealing with the phonetic characteristics of fast speech. Such difficulties are best addressed not by top-down skills-and-strategies work, which often fills valuable class time to little purpose, but by more closely focused training based on a careful assessment of the real problems involved.
