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
Now, the question arises, if
our brain contains only limited number of drawers, slots, why
can an expert process so many more words faster than the novice
can. "Although the capacity of working memory is severely
limited in the number of units or chunks that can be held simultaneously,
it is possible to expand the total amount of information by packing
more and more information into one chunk" (Howard, 104).
The expert differs from the novice in the richness of the chunks
he creates. This has been demonstrated in many domains like chess
players, bridge players, musicians, volleyball players, basketball
players, electronic technicians, and computer programmers.
Applied to reading Latin that
means that if the word is a chunk for you, and you are in perfect
control of morphology and basic syntax, you will be able to process
with ease a sentence consisting of seven words. If the morphological
and syntactic properties of those words are not on the level
of automaticity for you, you will have to store the morphological
and syntactic properties in some of the slots in your working
memory as you process the sentence, which means that may be only
a four-word sentence or part of sentence would be easy for you
to process at a time. All teachers know, however, that even when
morphology, syntax, and semantics are all in place (which is
rarely the case for students in the second year), students still
combine words in odd ways to produce ridiculous translations.
Very often the reason is that they try to transfer procedures
from their native tongue onto Latin.
The fact is that the brain contains
not just information, but also processes (strategies) to solve
problems, search in memory, understand, and produce speech. We
use strategies and procedures to digest, interpret, memorize,
decode, and classify information. If you have strategies for
assigning syntactic roles to individual words as you go, you
can recognize familiar patterns even with words that you do not
know and you will be able to process more words faster. Even
if you do not understand what "Babby bubbs the crabbit"
means, due to the processing procedures that you store in your
brain, if you are an English speaker, this made up sentence is
not a completely unintelligible group of words for you. You understand
that some creature does something to another creature or thing.
This means that along with teaching vocabulary, morphology, and
syntax, we also need to teach awareness of processing strategies.
We need to make our students aware of the two factors involved
in processing their own language: syntactic and semantic; as
part of syntax we need to increase awareness of the word order
patterns in which these syntactic units can positioned. In this
way we are going to make students aware of the processing strategies
that they already have and drill them a new set of strategies,
for which they do not have an equivalent in their native tongue.
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