Curiosity and comprehension

Topics 2

Curiosity and Comprehension

Introduction:

We should “throw our pupils in at the deep end” by making them study literary classics in archaic language. Certainly not.Normally they should read what they can read without excessive difficulty.

Exploiting the student’s curiosity

Most people have an innate curiosity about things and ideas, people and events. When they read stories, especially those concerning crime, love, or adventure, they not only want to find out what is happening or has happened, but they generally make some kind of guess as to what is likely to happen next. Where there is no such curiosity on the part of the reader, a detective story becomes a pointless tale of violence that few intelligent people would take the trouble to read.

A useful technique

One method I tried was to get the students to make up their own pre-questions on the basis of a brief sketch of the subject-matter. This was fairly successful, but needed careful control to prevent the questions from wandering too far from the text they were to read, or from concentrating too much on one aspect of the subject.

A “discovery” approach

Another method that I used to arouse curiosity and deepen comprehension as well as to provide oral practice— may be suitable only when dealing with narrative or other material in which the content is arranged in chronological order or some other predictable sequence. The teacher read a part of a story and stops. Learners guess or discover what will happen next. The teacher should train students in imaginative thinking as much as in language skills, but it is surely wrong to dissociate the two faculties of thought and speech.

Reactive skills

It is surely true to say that a language is not really known until it is put to use for purposes that are interesting and important to the user.The use of language for purposes of real communication is difficult to achieve, however, because in the typical classroom situation the use of target language as a means of communication is apt to be artificial and redundant, however well simulated. Plenty of oral practice is essential to acquiring the language, but unless the learner is in a country where it is the native language, he does not usually rely on it as his means of communication with the people around
him, with his fellow learners and companions, nor, as a rule, with his teacher. Comprehension will be greatly improved, and its benefits increased, if the material used is interesting and informative in content, and if the learner forms in advance, and as he progresses, predictions and conjectures about what it has to tell him, so that the language operates on what is already in his mind.

Practicing Curiosity

As always with the brain, we need to practice to get good at something. If you want expand your access to your innate bottom-up circuitry, you have to practice curiosity. Sometimes, curiosity involves actually doing a little research and finding out, but more often, it just is a doorway to imagination and open-ended wonder. Top-down processes are aligned with those parts of the brain that want to get clear answer and leave no questions hanging. Bottom-up circuits are all about the messy open-endedness of ongoing life as we experience it. Curiosity involves toning down the inner skeptic and allowing one’s self to be surprised by one’s immediate experience. The more one practices, the more vital and interesting the entire world becomes.

If you practice curiosity consistently, you will have a powerful skill on which to draw when you read GMAT Reading Comprehension. If you read with genuinely curiosity and wonder, you will get far more out of Reading Comprehension, and be far more successful on those questions, even if you haven’t learned any additional RC strategies. Yes, those strategies are also useful, but even the best RC strategies are not going to make up for the profound edge genuine curiosity gives.

Types of reading for comprehension:

1-Literal comprehension involves what the author is actually saying. The reader needs to understand ideas and information explicitly stated in the text including what, who, where, and when of the passage. The readers, who are at this level, believe that they have adequately comprehended text if they can recognize the content words and can understand most of the sentences. Generally, the readers at this level only identify lists of facts, definitions of concepts and other easily memorized materials.

2-Inferential comprehension refers to the ability of the readers to establish, guess correctly the logical inference of the authors. The readers, at this level, must be able to order authors’ ideas coherently and find out the intended messages conveyed by the authors in the passage. Inferential comprehension is harder than literal comprehension for the readers are not only recognize the author’s ideas stated explicitly in the text, but they have also to be able to guess the author’s intention either explicitly or implicitly stated in the text. Inferential comprehension includes text connecting inferences which are required to integrate information from different parts of the text and to establish coherency and gap filling inferences in which information from outside the text (general knowledge) is

incorporated with information in the text to fill in gaps in missing details and to help formulate a coherent representation of the text as a whole (Danielle, 2007).

3-Critical comprehension refers to deep comprehension of understanding a text. Critical comprehension emphasizes thinking ritually about text meaning and intentionally making connection between text and relevant knowledge of the world beyond that text. Fisher (2001: 8) relates critical comprehension to critical thinking. It

includes how to identify the elements in a reasoned case, especially reason and conclusions, identify and evaluate assumptions, clarify and interpret the ideas and expressions, recognized unstated assumption and values, render accurate judgment about specific things, evaluate arguments of different kinds, analyze, evaluate, and

produce explanations, draw inferences, and produce arguments. So, among all, critical comprehension is the most difficult level to reach because at this level, the readers arrived at evaluative stage.

A famous saying

The ancient Greeks believed that wonder was the mother of thought. Thoughtful curiosity may often be the parent of speech.

View other resources:

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2-A Classroom Language Journal.

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4-Story Theater in Teaching English.

5-Merging environmental education and language instruction( CBI).

6-Generation Y Students.

7-Using original video and sound effects to teach English.

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