Vol 10 No 2 TESL Reporter

              1

ML teaching english as a second language
voll10 voi 10

no

2

laie hawaii

winter 1977

DISCOURSE STRUCTURE IN READING

no by ron shook
with the emergence of psycholinguistic theories of reading such as those proposed by frank smith or kenneth goodman scholars in ESL have come to realize that an ESL
reading program which serves the advanced reader may have to be radically different from one which is geared to a beginning reader out of this realization have come a number of excellent suggestions for advanced ESL reader courses been 1973 for instance suggests a

CONTENTS IW
discourse structure in reading by ron shook
page
1 I

the use of stick figures in the
classroom by alice C pack
page
4

bachelors program in american samoa page by john udarbe

8

research on sequencing by jack wigfield

page 10

year of composition workshop page 12 by greg larkin

two track program one track more or less traditionally oriented for the reader who uses mediated recognition strategies and another track for the student who uses immediate recognition of meaning as his reading device another excellent suggestion has been made by eskey 1973 who outlines a flexible but comprehensive program for an advanced ESL reading class both proposals are based on the theory that when a person is learning to read he must develop certain perceptual and cognitive habits but when he is learning to read fast or for meaning the beginner habits are not only insufficient to the task they may actually get in the way o bn this paper will focus abn the beginning ESL reader and the anomolous position that our a reading programs and especially our reading exercises put him in it seems to me an important but much overlooked fact that while ang a e we can divide native languuge readers generally into beginning and advanced we cannot do the same with ESL readers at least we cannot use the same criteria with ESL readers as we do with native readers nor can we use the same sets of exercises on the college level a beginning ESL reader is already a proficient reader in his own language As such he will not be helped by exercises designed for beginning readers and sometimes not too well at that and made over for ESL purposes this becomes significant when we recall that reading is not purely a word recognition game or a phonic exercise but a complex interweaving of perceptual and semantic processes

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TESL reporter

monitored by the readers advance expectations of what is in store for him in any printed text the skills a beginning reader needs to develop in order to be a good reader the ESL reader already has
propose that ESL reading pedagogy reading exercises in particular hinder the ESL reader because they ignore the linguistic facts of life the fact is that reading is an overlaid skill a cognitive function and the ESL reader t i has long since developed those skills many reading exercises presume to be absent the fact is that the ESL reader is unsophisticated in english but not linguistically unsophisticated A beginning reader may have a well developed grammar but is still a long way from linguistic sophistication see hunt 1970 ohare 1973 the fact is that the ESL reader has a weltanschauung and conceptual store far ahead of what is expected of him in the exercises he is given the fact is that the beginning ESL reader is not a beginner reading exercises tend to ignore these facts in a I number of ways 1 wish to examine three general patterns in reading exercises and show how they can do a disservice to the cognitively mature but english naive reader these patterns are 1 profusion of detail as question fodder 2 an oversimplified syntax and 3 an artificial construction that violates the principles of civilized discourse
1 I

process see smith 1971 he makes these guesses on the basis of his intuitive knowledge of the phonological syntactic and semantic constraints on his language the english speaker knows though probably not consciously that the letters st will not be followed by d or g or or w but could easily

f

degrees from brigham young university provo campus and is currently a doctoral student in the university of southern Ca li fornias rhetoric program he is on ca the faculty of BYU HC

ronald shook received his

BA and MA

followed by r or a vowel similarly he will know that a sentence beginning the will almmost certainly not be black followed by white these unconscious rules help him eliminate options and confine his guesses to viable alternatives thus the structure of natural language helps the reader in the task of reduction of uncertainty

smith 1971 in addition the reader constructs meaning out of discourse by referring what occurs in the text to what he already knows about the world smith maintains that the brain oui prior knowledge of the world contributes
more information to reading than the visual symbols on the printed page he gives as an example of the working of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge the sentence the captain ordered the mate to drop the an the mature reader could use a number of clues to finish that sentence first he could predict what letters would not occur after it and from this make an educated guess as to what letters would occur second he could note is almost certainly a that the word an noun and feed this datum into his lexical store third he could ask himself what sorts of things mates are likely to drop at the command of the captain

READING AS THEORY AND CONTRACT
I before 1 begin a detailed examination of ESL reading exercises 1 would like to conI struct a profile of an advanced reader this may be a native english speaker reading english a native thai speaker reading thai a native german speaker reading german and so on this profile is not a balanced one on 1 the contrary it will be built up of elements I wish to examine in the reading exercises and will serve as a backdrop against which 1 want I to conduct my examination A reader reads by outwitting the printed page he plays what goodman 1967 calls a guessing game with his text that is he b attempts to guess on the basis of as little information from the visual array as possible what a certain word sentence or even paragraph might mean he constructs a theory then puts this theory to the test sometimes making changes as he goes for the best and most comprehensive discussion of this

nn uses the first two strategies he will normally have the word anchor in mind before he ever comes to it in the text his prior knowledge
influenced by the setting certainly nautical except in reading exercises will have prepared him for the word and he will need only the barest hint in order to be able to furnish the world from his own store this means that he

actually the mature reader almost never

winter 1977
may not even get the word from the printed page but may get it from his own knowledge of the world and from the nature of the subject matter he is reading
is a theory building process it is also a contractual one As part of being a reader our hypothetical person has developed a set of discourse postulates which lead him to expect certain things of the reader though the expectations vary from culture to culture they always form a sort of contract between

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if reading

me merely remark that the writer who ignores the contractual nature of discourse because he is seeking other ends such as the teaching of vocabulary will cripple the readers ability to abstract meaning from the text further any piece of writing which goes beyond one sentence in length becomes a contract so that a five line reading exercise is not exempt from the readers expectations that it cohere
A college level ESL student then comes to the study of the english language with a fully

writer and reader a set of assumptions about what the writer may and may not do in a discourse situation these postulates have been given a number of names and forms speech acts conversational postulates imiciaturre pl pl catu e situation frames and a host of others but they all amount to rules of procedure in sharing information on the simplest level these rules assure mutual syntactic and semantic trust A reader knows that even a writer who is attempting to cheat deceive and mislead him will have to be honest in some of the functions of discourse even a liar and a cheat must use verbs and nouns in his writing unless a man is insane or playing some outlandish prank he does not say calabash when he means buick he may try to weasel in a new definition of democracy but one is aware that is still an abstraction
a more complex level the reader and the writer share the knowledge that a piece of writing moves in certain predictable ways A narration moves in time a description moves in space an analysis may move inductively or deductively but once the pattern is set it is followed that the time sequence of a piece of narrative writing can be violated is true but even this proceeds according to rules and the reader must be let in on the secret if the reader is not because the writer is inept or terribly avant garde the result is confusion or

developed set of strategies for deciphering written material both cognitive and linguistic he is stripped of his linguistic skills by virtue of being a language learner but he retains his cognitive and pragmatic expectations because he has no other choice he cannot become a child again yet he is often given material that is childish THE MANIA FOR DETAIL

on

detail is important to good writing and therefore to good reading it gives life adds credibility advances knowledge however for detail to work for the reader and not against him it must advance rather than interrupt the flow of information that is it must have a reason for existing other than that it is a detail there seem to be two psycholinguistic reasons for this first our capacity to deal with unintegrated information is extremely limited cf miller and isard 1964 any stray bit of information that is not part of the pattern must be held in short term memory constantly recirculated till a place can be found for it second the evidence suggests that should that information be recalled it will not necessarily be in the same form as originally presented by the writer cf savin

nonsense

to come to grips with and to get concrete about its most often discussed under the heading coherence cf winterowd 1975 or I form cf burke 1953 1 will discuss this nn concept in greater detail later but for now let

our sense of the contractual nature of a piece of writing is very strong notwithstanding the fact that it is a very difficult concept

and perchonock 1965 the meaning may be the same but the form may well be different v passives reported as ac tives etc A supero fluous detail will be simply dropped from the information store 1 have the distinct impression that much I detail is added to ESL reading exercises because something is needed to ask questions about consider the following sentences from a typical reading exercise

bob was sitting on the bank fishing A pail for the fish he was not catching M was at his left side continued on page 15