Patterns
of Cohesion & Discontinuity as a Teaching Tool for Reading
Caesar and Cicero in the Second Year
by Prof. Donka D. Markus,
University of Michigan
Original text
© 2000 Donka D. Markus
The transition from reading
individual sentences to reading a continuous text is one of the
main challenges for the intermediate Latin student. From short
sentences, the student has to make a transition to a long passage
with sentences that extend over several lines. For this environment
the student has one extremely time-consuming strategy: look up
each word in the dictionary and try to glean whatever meaning
you can. Some students may be a little more sophisticated in
trying to find verbs and subjects and hope that everything else
falls into place around them. For the novice, the word and its
semantic value is a chunk. But how does the approach of the novice
differ from that of the experienced reader? This paper discusses
how raising students' awareness of the processes that are involved
in language comprehension, can not only make them self-reflective
and critical thinkers, but also puts them in a better position
to appreciate extra-textual cues and the aesthetic beauty of
Latin literary prose.
Cognitive psychologists have
discovered that the reason why humans can understand language
quickly is because they have unconscious processing strategies
for their native language. The essence of this processing strategy
is that we use both syntactic cues and semantic information throughout
the processing of the sentence. We do not wait until the end
of the sentence to assign grammatical structure. You can prove
this to yourself by listening to the following sentence: THE
OLD MAN THE BOATS. First, you assigned the role of a subject
to man and when I came to the end of the sentence without giving
you a verb, you had to had to go back and reassign the role of
subject to OLD and repackage MAN, the only ambiguous form as
the verb. So, in our native language processing, our comprehension
does not stem from a lexical look up in the mental dictionary,
but experiments have shown that people 1) assign syntactic functions
before reaching the end of a sentence, and 2) actively divide
up the whole sentence into clauses or phrases that correspond
to underlying structures, which Chomsky had called deep structures.
It would be too long to describe the experiments in detail, but
they all show that people actively segment sentences into constituents
as they hear them.
This is simply the way our brain
works. Chunking is a function of working memory whether we utilize
it in a conscious way or not. Miller in his 1956 article in Psychological
Review, (81-97)"The magic number seven, plus or minus
two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information,"
proposed the chunk as a unit for measuring the capacity of working
memory, determining that our working memory can process seven
(plus or minus two) chunks at any given time. He defines the
chunk as "any highly familiar unit". Of course,
since "familiar" is a very relative concept, what acts
as a chunk for one person, may not be a chunk for another. It
all depends on the referent.
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