Read this paragraph below:
"As Joe walked back to the lodge, his friend met him, wondering what Joe's story would be this time.'How was the Fishing, Joe?' he asked.'Not bad,' Joe said, 'except that I let the big one get away. It ripped a a hole in the net and swam right though it. "It would have been one of the the biggest fish I ever caught'" (Dornan, Rosen, & Wilson, 1997, p. 30).
Even all of you that college readers that are proficient in the English language may not have noticed the two consecutive "a's" or the two consecutive "the's". The majority of you probably pronounced the word "though" as "through," at least I did. When the authors pointed out that the "r" was missing in that paragraph I had to go back and re-read it. It was until I actually re-read it that I realized that the paragraph did say "though"and not "through." I think that if I would have re-read this paragraph again, without the authors explaining what mistakes were in it, I will would have over the looked the two "a's" the two "the's" and the word "though."
The fact that a student does not catch those mistakes does not necessarily mean that he or she is not a proficient reader. It could also be that just like the college student they have become more proficient and instead of proofreading they are actually trying to find the purpose of the paragraph. We all make some kind of prediction when we are reading without even having to think about it. Our reading skills are so developed that we are able to make predictions, "Our linguistic, semantic, and global knowledge allows us to make predictions about meaning and structure, and encourages us to overlook the features that don't fit into out predictions" (Dornan et al., 1997, p.31).
Dornan et al. (1997) also explain how unfortunate it is that students nowadays are taught to read more like "proofreaders" rather than to read to gain knowledge. Training students to become "proofreaders," will only make their proficiency, fluency, and understanding suffer. Dornan et al. (1997) also explain that the most proficient readers are more likely going to overlook these types of mistakes because these readers would be looking for the meaning behind the text, they would be analyzing the text, not looking to proofread the text. (p.31)
You were right! I didn’t catch the a’s, the’s or though. What the author it talking about makes a lot of sense. I guess when I read I am searching for the meaning and understanding of the content of the writing and not it’s grammatical accuracy or its spelling. I also think it is important to keep teaching our students to read for understanding and meaning, and the errors can come later. Both are important but you can still have comprehension with errors, but having a mistake free paper that you don’t understand means nothing.
ReplyDeleteI am one of the sad students who proofreads everything!! HAHA I caught all of the mistakes the first time I read it. I have been proofreading so many papers lately, my own, and my husbands, that I have formed a habit. Which may be a good thing for an English teacher? Anyways, I do think that reading like that has major implications as well. Do we get the material out of something if we are just reading for errors? I really like what Sara said as well, that we need a little bit of both. Mistakes are going to happen because we are human, and at least we can still make out the meaning of the paragraph even though there were errors. A mistake free paper that has no point to it is completely useless as well.
ReplyDeleteI didn't catch any of the mistakes until you pointed them out. This is proof positive of the use of predictions. This is very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI know that I am deffinately guilty of proofreading rather than reading for comprehension. I feel like most of the things I have been reading a lot lately I don't remember because I'm too busy looking at how it is written grammatically. I agree that it is important to teach readers how to read to gain knowledge.
ReplyDeleteMy! All Chinese students are like proofreaders. They are trained from the beginning of learning a language, even their first language. They are good at reading line by line and making multiple choices or true and false questions. But they are poor at concluding the writing purpose or main idea of the article. They are trained to read line by line, word by word so that they don’t make mistake in understanding the grammar. They are good at reading science materials in English but not in literature. Poor guys!
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