THROUGH LANGUAGE
3. READING AT THE SERVICE OF ORAL AND WRITTEN MASTERING Although reading and writing are distinct skills in psycholinguistic processing terms,
have written forms which differ only in accentuation (“e”/”é”; “esta”/”está”) – as a matter of fact, attention is not always paid to accentuation by our school children – also helps children to look at written language from another perspective. This way of looking at aspects which characterize language in general emphasizes the continuum between oral and written language.
In general, language is supposed to convey meaning and it is up to the teachers to show the learner that behind the external language organization which corre- sponds to “how to say” and “when to say” there is, a “what to say”. Practising oral and written language in this way, leading the learner to judge the correspondence between thinking and language, also constitutes the basis of maturity in terms of thinking and reasoning, which is required by any domain of study. If the learner is familiar with different possibilities of translating certain mental representations and aware that certain ways of communicating them are more suitable than others, s/he is doubtless prepared to face any kind of topic because s/he has developed the feel- ing that the role language plays in learning and in communicating is essential.
3. READING AT THE SERVICE OF ORAL AND WRITTEN MASTERING
sible to conclude that if the child is acquainted with language (de)composition from an early age, s/he will accept the rules of this language (game) much more easily.
3.1 The Indirect Reading Technique
The indirect reading technique (see Girolami-Boulinier & Cohen-Rak, 1985: 11, note 1) consists of the oral reproduction by the learner of a group of words always corresponding to an idea unit (a semantic group) that is read aloud beforehand by someone who masters reading and who is familiar with this reading technique: a parent, a teacher or an older friend/pupil. It is an exercise which may be practiced both by two people (parent and child, for example) and in a classroom with different children. When this reading exercise is practiced in the classroom it obliges the chil- dren to be particularly attentive because no one knows who is going to be asked to reproduce the semantic group requested. Due to the cognitive effort it requires, it can obviously only be used for short periods. The indirect reading technique is also useful because it may make the child think s/he is already reading, when s/he has no yet learned to read, although s/he is only repeating what someone else has read.
The length of the semantic groups to be reproduced orally varies according to the age of the learner. The learner’s memory span conditions the length of the semantic groups, which may range from a noun-phrase, which may be a single noun or a noun preceded by a determiner, to a whole sentence, depending on the learner’s ability to retain information. In the case of a sentence such as:
“A tartaruga do meu vizinho come bocadinhos de miolo de pão à mão”
(My neighbour’s tortoise eats bits of bread from your hand)
oral reproduction of either the whole sentence or different semantic groups accord- ing to the learner’s age and retention ability may be proposed. When the whole sen- tence proposal is not suitable, it is advisable to propose, according to the child’s re- tention ability, for example,
Two semantic groups:
Three semantic groups:
Four semantic groups:
Six semantic groups:
“A tartaruga do meu vizinho//”
“come bocadinhos de miolo de pão à mão”;
“A tartaruga do meu vizinho//
come bocadinhos de miolo de pão //
à mão”;
“A tartaruga do meu vizinho//
come/ /
bocadinhos de miolo de pão//
à mão”;
A tartaruga//
do meu vizinho/ / come/ /
bocadinhos/ / de miolo de pão/ / à mão.
This procedure is to be respected throughout the text to be read to the child. The main purpose of this exercise is to learn to listen, to retain and to reproduce the se- mantic groups proposed orally, following the model and therefore keeping as close as possible to it. As a result, children not only to develop different aspects of oral language performance but also familiarize as future writers/readers with the correct reading of the written material they may be faced with later.
Depending on the population and aims – because indirect reading may also be practiced with children who can already read –, it may be used to improve articula- tion, to correct pronunciation, to enable children to acquire new words and conse- quently to enlarge their vocabulary, It may also improve attention, memory, speed of articulation (with its implications in terms of working memory), as well as encour- age children to pay attention to the oral stimulus in order to reproduce it correctly.
What is more, it calls the learner’s attention to the sonority of the language – the speech song (“la chanson du discours”), according to Girolami-Boulinier (Girolami- Boulinier, 2000: 83). This reading technique helps children to be sensitive to and respect the logical organization of language, very often in relation to punctuation, which learners will have to use when writing. It will also help children to become familiar with narrative style – in the case of the reading of stories – or with other styles if they are exposed to other types of texts, and with unfamiliar morphological and syntactic aspects of language, which will lead to a gradual discovery of lan- guage as a system full of potential. When this reading technique is used properly and the texts used well chosen, it also encourages the learner to love his/her language, to experiment with it and make it as lively as possible in the different contexts of use.
Language should obviously make sense to the emitter and to the receiver. If, in some cases, indirect reading is practiced using material which at first sight does not make any sense to the learner (even though it respects the semantic groups), it is because the aim of the exercise in this particular case is to improve articulation and call the listener’s attention to the stimulus, without requiring at the same time attention to the meaning of the stimulus. In this special case, the oral stimulus, and not the mean- ing, is the target of the task. In fact, the child may even enjoy pronouncing unfamil- iar words. Besides this pleasurable aspect, this kind of task may also constitute a challenge; it may feed the child’s curiosity about new words and therefore about new meanings, contributing to better mastery of his/her language. All children like novelties, new challenges, and they should not be prevented from enjoying the op- portunity to be confronted with them. Moreover, language and speech are objects in permanent construction, deconstruction and reconstruction and learners cannot but benefit from the resistance they may offer.
Indirect reading is also an advantage when it comes to writing (and speaking).
Effectively, a child’s linguistic experience, also resulting from this reading tech- nique, cannot be ignored when s/he enters the written world as an active agent. Since indirect reading is based on semantic groups, it leads the child not to identify read- ing with spelling or mere decoding. Looking at reading in this way means that to read is not only to spell. Reading should go beyond spelling because it must include the understanding of what is being decoded. That is to say, indirect reading repro- duces the natural way of speaking. Its aim is to produce fluent readers and proficient
writers, who can be expected to produce texts based upon a mental lexicon made up of meaningful lexical items, which are not subject to undesirable interferences which are nothing but the result of language and speech misuse and misunderstanding.
3.2 The Semi-direct Reading Technique
Between the indirect and the direct silent reading technique there is another tech- nique, the semi-direct reading technique (Girolami-Boulinier, 1993: 35-37), which is used by children who are beginning to write. It consists of giving the children the chance to correctly reproduce – not only orally but also in written form (without the presence of the model) – the word(s) they have retained from the semantic groups given to them orally and in written form. In this way, the child begins to become aware of the (ortho)graphic image of the words so that s/he may reproduce them correctly and without interference from his/her mispronunciations or the inadequate auditory images they may possess in their mental lexicon.3
3.3 The Silent Direct Reading Technique
The direct silent reading technique (Girolami-Boulinier & Cohen-Rak, 1985: 11, note 2) is at first undertaken silently by the learners (always respecting the organisa- tion of language in semantic groups). As soon as they feel they can reproduce the first semantic group orally and in written form without looking at the text, they may be asked to do so. They then go on through the text, following the same procedure.
In order to supervise the operation, the teacher may ask the pupils to indicate with their finger the amount of material they are able to retain and reproduce. Reproduc- ing by semantic groups avoids the identification of reading with spelling and follows the principle that the act of reading has to take into account comprehension. More- over, pupils are required to learn to see, to retain and to reproduce/write the seman- tic groups compatible with their memory span because the reproduction takes place in the absence of the model. It is always advisable to ask the pupil to first reproduce orally the semantic group s/he is supposed to write because the teacher sometimes needs to check the way the child reads in order to correct production if necessary.
Neither incorrect pronunciation nor incorrect spelling should be kept in the child’s mental lexicon. This kind of reading technique is designed to improve spelling and punctuation at an early stage as well as to familiarize the learner with agreement rules (thereby avoiding errors of gender and number), with accentuation, with new vocabulary, and with written style. Although punctuation may not seem very impor- tant, its proper use shows us if the child articulates his/her ideas successfully and attributes different degrees of importance to them. The correct use of full stops, commas and semi-colons is proof of perfect mastery of the organization of written material. Portuguese children attending the second, third and fourth year of primary school have been found not to use commas or not to know how to use them in their texts and some children from the second year use no punctuation or only a full stop
3 See Levelt (Levelt, 1989: 6): “[...] mental lexicon–the store of information about the words in one’s language.”
at the end of their texts (Pinto, 1999: 509-510). Through the silent reading technique the child is confronted with this aspect of writing, which s/he cannot help using in his/her writing as a means of showing that language has rules of organization ac- cording to what we wish to communicate.
4. EXAMPLES OF WRITING PROBLEMS AND SUGGESTIONS