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
Some of the strategies that
we already use in English are seamlessly transferable onto Latin
and therefore, I call them familiar chunk patterns or patterns
of continuity (handout
1) either because their frequency is higher across different
texts/particular passage or because their recognition requires
no special training, as they are easily recognizable with the
processing strategies already in place in the brain of the native
speaker of English. Students are able to perceive as a chunk
a group of words that form a familiar word order pattern, if
they are familiar with the morphological structure of the words,
even if they do not have an entry for all of them in their mental
dictionary. Semantic information is easily looked up or inferred
in the final stages of the processing of the sentence (the detailed
phase), if they know how each chunk fits into the whole.
As we all know, however, there
is a considerable number of word order patterns that are contrary
to the linguistic intuitions of the English speaker, so the student
is facing the unknown not just on the level of semantics, morphology
and syntax, but also on the level of control-processes. There
is no adequate processing strategy in place to fall back on.
I call these unfamiliar patterns/ patterns of discontinuity/
broken chunks. One can even use traditional terms for them as
bracketing and hyperbaton. In the same way as we store familiar
patterns like (SVD.O.), or Adj.- Noun, we can train
students to store a number of frequently occurring unfamiliar
patterns in the brain and then when faced with a new situation,
the learner will compare the new data to those patterns. Even
better, we can encourage students to observe and create patterns
of their own.
It is essential to divide the
strategies into familiar and unfamiliar so that the learner can
distinguish between the scenarios for which he/she already has
a procedure in the native language and the scenarios for which
he/she does not have a procedure. In this way the student is
encouraged to chart out the unfamiliar territory on their own
terms than imposing the native language procedure (fishing for
subject verb, etc.) onto the procedurally unfamiliar Latin terrain.
Now the goal becomes to create
richer chunks that are encoded not only with labels pertaining
to the morphology, syntax, and semantics of the individual words,
but also with patterns into which the word order arrangement
of the words fall. Students get very excited when they start
discovering and assigning patterns and labels, as it gives them
the sense of control over word order, which previously seemed
random. Chunking becomes a valuable pedagogical tool and also
a motivational tool for students to keep working on their morphology
and vocabulary. Permanent knowledge stored in long term memory
is a critical determinant of how much material an individual
can keep and process in working memory at once. Therefore drilling
of morphology and vocabulary is key to increasing chunking expertise
and the richness of the chunks created.
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