Section 1. Guidelines for intensive reading of ESP texts

Context clues

Students often believe they must understand every word in order to read English. In fact, good reading means the ability to process chunks of language larger than single words, so striving for word-for-word recognition will actually slow students down and interfere with their overall comprehension. Rather than reaching for the dictionary every time they do not recognize a word, they should use the context of the passage to understand it.

Context clues include use of functional definitions, as in " Receptive Multilingualism has a far-reaching potential for achieving congruent understanding in various multilingual constellations, applied alone or in combination with other modes." where the meaning of "congruent " (adequate, similar or fitting together well) can be inferred from the words “a far-reaching potential for achieving...”.

Context clues also include understanding the meaning of the other words in the sentence and applying such understanding to infer the meaning of an unknown word or phrase. For example, students can be taught to infer a negative meaning of the word " sloppy" in the sentence "Codeswitching tends to be frowned upon as a sign of deterioration of the language, as a type of sloppy speech."

Text 1-4. RECEPTIVE MULTILINGUALISM

( Abridged from the Toolkit for transnational communication in Europe. Copenhagen Studies in Bilingualism. University of Copenhagen, 2011)

1. The concept of Receptive Multilingualism, or 'Lingua Receptiva' (LaRa), focuses upon understanding processes in intercultural and interlingual interactions in which the participants use different languages/varieties as speakers or as listeners; the term is broadly explained in Rehbein, ten Thije and Verschik (2010). Insights into cross-linguistic understanding go back to the Russian semiotician Troubetzkoy and to Voegelin & Harris and were discussed under the notions of intelligiblity of closely related languages, semicommunication, intercompréhension, and, last but not least, receptive multilingualism (ten Thije & Zeevaert 2007).

In contrast to these previous approaches, the Lingua Receptiva lies emphasis on the receptive component in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication, which also is crucial to grasping the notions of understanding and misunderstanding. In LaRa, specific receptive mechanisms in linguistic, mental, interactional as well as intercultural competencies are looked at, which are creatively activated when interlocutors listen to linguistic actions in their 'passive' language or variety. In particular, speakers apply additional competencies, or repertoires, in order to monitor the way hearers activate their 'passive knowledge' and thus attempt to control the ongoing process of understanding.

2. In LaRa, one distinguishes between hearer's and speaker's competencies. The hearer's component of LaRa consists of all processes that actualise and intensify the hearer's competencies. These linguistic means comprise nonverbal signals that steer the speaker's production, prosodic elements expressing the whole range from agreement to disagreement, formulaic expressions (e.g. 'I don't understand', 'What do you mean?', 'What?'), echo questions, and other linguistic elements).

On the other hand, the speaker's LaRa lists strategies such as reformulations, repairs, recapitulations, rephrasings and other types of meta-discourse elements. Accommodation processes, in particular, lead to lexical and morphological adaptations towards what speakers imagine hearers would be able to better understand in their recipient language. In conclusion, these creative verbal elements within LaRa are often the result of receptive multilingual discourse, which is why their analysis will provide new insights into the emergence of contact varieties, too.

3. All these elements mentioned above occur in communication under normal conditions and can be observed on the surface of communication, both mono- and multilingual. LaRa seems to be an effective mode in various multilingual constellations and thus has a potential for solving communicative problems both by overcoming ideological asymmetries and establishing discursive interculture(s). It also promotes the idea of cultural and linguistic diversity in addressing two languages simultaneously: speakers of community languages (i.e. minority and immigrant languages), for instance, maintain or even revitalise their first language and yet could be integrated into 'dominant' society once LaRa become an accepted mode of communication. Finally, LaRa has been compared to other multilingual modes, e.g., codeswitching, and it has been concluded that this mode has a far-reaching potential for achieving congruent understanding in various multilingual constellations, applied alone or in combination with other modes.

4. Codeswitching is the use of two, sometimes more, languages in the same conversation. This way of speaking is common in many bi- and multilingual communities the world over, especially in informal settings. It comes in many different forms; the specific form it takes is dependent on many factors, including how well the speaker knows the two languages, to what degree the two languages involved resemble each other, how formal or informal the conversation is, and what attitudes people in the community have about the two languages and about mixing them.

5. The two main forms codeswitching takes are referred to as insertion and alternation (see Muysken 2000). In insertion, the sentence is clearly in one of the two languages but one or more of the words is from the other language. An English sentence with a French word in it is a case of insertion. Most of the time, the inserted words will be a content word, i.e. a noun, verb or adjective. This betrays one of the main reasons why people use this way of speaking: the words from the other language name useful concepts that the base language has no word of its own for. The grammar of the sentence, including the order of the words, and all the grammatical words and parts of words, will be in the base language (see Myers-Scotton 2002).

Alternation, the other main form of codeswitching, takes place when parts of a conversation are in one language and other parts in the other. Bilingual speech often shows a pattern of regular alternation between the languages, often at the boundary between two successive sentences. A French-English bilingual, say in Canada, may alternate between English and French sentences, for example.

6. Whether insertion will dominate in bilingual speech or alternation is dependent on many factors. One of the most important ones has proven to be proficiency. If a bilingual is clearly dominant in one of the languages, codeswitching will often be of the insertion kind, with the dominant language functioning as the base language. Balanced bilinguals, on the other hand, tend to prefer alternation. That doesn't mean they won't use any insertion, though. The reason is that insertion is motivated by factors that can always play a role, primarily the need to use the best word available, le mot juste, for a particular concept one wants to say something about.

7. But there are various other factors that influence the kind of codeswitching one gets. One is the degree to which the languages are different. If languages are closely related, such as German and English, there are many more places within a sentence at which it is easy to switch, and often this happens inadvertently: the languages resemble each other so much that many words are shared between the two systems, and their use may well trigger a switch to the other language than the one that was spoken up until that word.

This means that when closely related languages are mixed, the number of points within a sentence at which you will find switches is much greater than when the languages are not related. Insertional codeswitching of German words in a Turkish sentence, for example, in the speech of Turkish immigrants in Germany, mainly involves nouns and verbs or larger chunks inserted into particular places in the Turkish sentence. Often these words have relatively specific meaning, which illustrates why they are used in the first place.

 

8. Another important factor is the nature of the conversation. Codeswitching is particularly common in everyday informal conversation between bilingual friends. Though the specifics are different for every community, the freedom to switch tends to be much smaller if the conversation is formal, if not all participants are well-known to each other, and especially if not all of them are judged to be good at both languages.

In addition, codeswitching tends to be frowned upon as a sign of deterioration of the language, as a type of sloppy speech. When attitudes like that prevail, it will generally only be found in informal speech. Also, it will often be flagged in a way, as if the speaker is apologizing.

OVERVIEW QUESTIONS: MAIN IDEA, MAIN TOPIC, MAIN PURPOSE, ORGANIZATION OF THE TEXT, AND CONTEXT CLUES

 

Instruction: A summary of Context clues includes: a) Numerical statements, b) Rhetorical questions, c) Introductory summaries, d) Development of an idea, e) Transitions, f) Chronology of ideas, g) Emphasis of ideas, h) Summary of ideas.

Students are asked to complete these five activities:

1) to survey; looking over headings, reading introductory and concluding paragraphs, and identifying a definition of the LaRa and codeswitching;

2) to formulate answers for the questions asked in the headings matching assignment;

3) to make a conscious effort to identify description, step-by-step explanation, directions, comparison and contrast, analysis, analogy, and definition in the text as they read;

4) having read the second section, to look away from the book and try to recite the manifestations of lingua francas;

5) to take notes, characterising LaRa and codeswitching.