(no subject)

[conuly]

Metafilter is having a, uh, lively discussion on whether or not this study proves that contemporary English majors can't read.

There's a lot of potential ways to divide the commenters into two groups, but the one I expected the most was "people who think the correct way to deal with unfamiliar references in literature is to immediately look it up" and "people who think the first group needs to learn to use context clues already".

As always, I am in the second group, and every time the first group appears in real life I find myself wondering if they somehow weren't taught this skill at school. I well remember the worksheets! (To be honest, they were a little hit or miss for me - 95% of the time they just used text with words they assumed the students would be unfamiliar with, which I was never actually unfamiliar with. But the other 5% of the time they used text with made up words or with blacked out bits of text, and that was fun, and presumably we all learned a great deal. Or at least in theory... one of the reasons I had such a good vocabulary as a kid was because I read so much and never looked anything up except for fun, so... well, the point is, my classmates probably learned something! And I use that skill every time I try to read something in Spanish.)

Anyway, I'm really posting this because of two reasons.

1. Somehow, nobody has posted about the lawyer cat from the pandemic. Did they all forget? Or not see that?

2. This paragraph: One of the interesting thing about the Inns of Court is that we have some early dance choreography and melody lines not found anywhere else, in a collection that was used there to teach the law students how to dance. Of course the choreography document predates Dickens by a couple of centuries...

Somebody needs to explain wtf is up with this because wtf.

Edit: No, I thought of a third thing, which I forgot because of the second thing.

3. When your kids are very little, every well-meaning person everywhere will tell you that it's all right for them to watch a little TV, just so long as you watch with them and discuss what you're watching, and ask them questions about it. Watch actively, and train them to do so. And it wasn't until the niblings were in middle school that I realized I wasn't actually doing that the way people keep saying - instead of talking about the plot and "what do you think happens next" my running commentary during TV shows and movies goes "Wow, that background music is awfully forboding for such an apparently hopeful scene" and "Ugh, he put a blanket over her, I guess they'll hook up now" and "That transition sure is cheesy!" and, once, "You think you'll be happy when you get to Omashu , but obviously not", which prompted the kids to ask why and I had to actually think about it. (Because they left the secret tunnel and then had to climb a mountain which blocked their view of the city while chatting about how amazing it'd be to get to the city. If everything was hunky-dory then there would've been no mountain, they would've emerged from the tunnel and seen the city right there.) I don't know if the way I did it was better or worse than what people kept saying to do, but it doesn't seem to have hurt the kids and their ability to pick up on foreshadowing!

Comments

[sovay]

I find myself wondering if they somehow weren't taught this skill at school. I well remember the worksheets!

That is fascinating to me because I don't believe I was taught how to construe from context with worksheets, I just read everything within reach and acquired the skill of necessity.

Somebody needs to explain wtf is up with this because wtf.

I am afraid I immediately looked it up.

[conuly]

Well, at least somebody looked it up, thanks!

[ethelmay]

I remember having a 1960s reading textbook around the house when I was growing up (I think it was a teacher's version that my mother had bought secondhand) that had little stories about kids reading for context clues - someone figuring out what "aileron" meant was one, and there was another about figuring out what it meant that a girl put on "her mother's old mules" to run outside, or something like that. (Apparently it was called Reading for Meaning: High Roads.)

[sovay]

little stories about kids reading for context clues - someone figuring out what "aileron" meant was one, and there was another about figuring out what it meant that a girl put on "her mother's old mules" to run outside, or something like that.

That's very neat.

[ethelmay]

It was more concrete instruction of that sort than I was getting in class, I am pretty sure. Though it's entirely possible that I paid no attention.

[conuly]

It's also possible that you just don't remember your lessons in elementary school that clearly. I cannot tell you how many times I've gotten into it with people who say, in all sincerity, that it only took a day or a week for their entire class to learn how to do long division (or multi-digit addition and subtraction, or multiplication and division of fractions, or how to do any arithmetic using negative numbers).

None of them have ever been able to tell me what the hell their class did for the other 39 weeks of the school year, not to mention the remaining few years before moving into prealgebra. It's like they remember exactly one math lesson and believe, therefore, it's the only one they ever had.

(I do remember, actually, that in 8th grade we seemed to spend a lot of time going over and over and over negative numbers. Our teacher was really big on cumulative review, but more than that, when I taught the niblings I discovered that they just could not internalize things like "If you start out with 5 - x, and then you subtract 5 from both sides, one side will be left with -x - not "just x"! We spent so much time going over the basic concept of "how to work with negative numbers". When they went to high school they each came back and reported to me, independently, that their classmates all really struggled and they were glad I'd spent so much time drilling them on that specific thing the year before. It turns out that for most students negative numbers are conceptually easy enough to grasp, but doing anything with them past putting them on a number line involves a major cognitive leap. If I remembered my 8th grade math teacher's name I might look her up to thank her! I did not appreciate her efforts nearly enough.)

[ethelmay]

Generally speaking I thought of myself as learning most things at home and very little at school, but I suspect I picked up more at school than I realized. But that seems to have been a fourth-grade textbook and I was reading it in first or second grade, so it isn't surprising or discreditable if they weren't teaching at that level in my classroom.

[spiralsheep]

I danced a branle (pronounced brawl) on New Year's Eve but I haven't done a French galliard for years because they're too fast for me these days. We did a copy-cat branle so everyone else in my set had to copy my floor-crossing move and I chose the Adam Ant's well-known voguing from Prine Charming. Very historic dancing, lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p__WmyAE3g

[sovay]

We did a copy-cat branle so everyone else in my set had to copy my floor-crossing move and I chose the Adam Ant's well-known voguing from Prine Charming. Very historic dancing, lol.

For one brief shining moment I thought you had linked me footage of you historically voguing! How did everyone else who had to follow your lead do?

(I can pronounce a branle, I just can't dance one.)

[spiralsheep]

No recording at New Year's! :D

Folk dancers are stylin' and everyone got a turn to lead across the floor so we all got our chances to shine. Our oldest dancer, who is extremely spry, pantomimed doddering across the room with a non-existent stick, some people did dainty steps and some people bopped. Nobody complained I'd given them 80s flashbacks, lol. A friend and I used to punk pogo and chest-bump the freestyle sections in partnered bourree, which was exhausting but fun (would've been better in cap n bells, obv).

[sovay]

Our oldest dancer, who is extremely spry, pantomimed doddering across the room with a non-existent stick, some people did dainty steps and some people bopped. Nobody complained I'd given them 80s flashbacks, lol.

Excellent.

[spiralsheep]

I like how by pantomiming doddering he was celebrating his luck while also making people acknowledge ageing as a reality, and he can communicate that in follow-the-leader movement when he would never say it in words. We were taught movement as expression at school and it was such a valuable lesson.

[cellio]

What fun!

Italian balli (15th-century dances) have a step called movimento, which is also very fast. Researchers are not entirely sure what it is, but the historical dancers I know have interpreted it as any sort of quick gesture, bounce, nod, etc. In dances like Petit Vriens where each dancer executes a set of steps in sequence, we sometimes get little action scenes or dialogue via gesture -- fun stuff!

[spiralsheep]

I don't know much about Italian historical dance but I love tarantella music. And some dance historians claim English Morris dancing is related to moresca. I'll have to watch some Petit Vriens videos. The French seem to favour toe-pointing as a fast move, but the English are known for bouncing inelegantly, lol.

[gatheringrivers]

I tend to look stuff up when I don't get a reference, but that's years of my dad telling me "Go look it up, you don't need me to answer that!" and pointing to the encyclopedias.

I never saw "lawyer cat" originally, but damn, that IS amusing! Thanks for sharing, I needed that giggle. :)

[conuly]

We all needed that giggle, during the worst part of the pandemic.

Also, your father paid good money for those encyclopedias, of course he wanted you to use them!

[gatheringrivers]

hahaha, that he did, but it never FELT like they were expensive when I was growing up. Back in the old days of "sure, let's take a vacation" and still have a job when you get back, lol.

[cactuswatcher]

Well, you can't 100% rely on "looking it up" or "using context."

I've been translating some Agatha Christie novels for my own amusement. I'm not exactly a kid anymore, and there are a very few words in the text, that I've seen many times in many places, but if you asked me to define them, I wouldn't come close because I don't use them actively. I've used the "in context" method in English so much that basically I ignore the word and only care about the context. That's fine if you are reading to get on with the plot and you don't need to care about some stray adjective. But when translating, yeah, I need to stop and think and probably look it up to be sure.

Why can't you rely on just looking it all up? Well, that's fine if you are looking up one word in a page or even as many as one in a paragraph. But studying Russian many times I'd have to look up three words in a sentence, and literally would forget the definition of the first word by the time I was looking up the third, particularly if every sentence on the page had three words I'd needed to look up! It gets to be a horrible grind. At some point even in a foreign language you have to use what you understand to help get through the parts you don't, or you'll just give up.

[conuly]

Well, you can't 100% rely on "looking it up" or "using context."

Definitely not! And I'm reasonably sure that all the "looking it up" people can rely on context at least a little because if you can't you could never learn how to talk.

But sometimes context just isn't enough. Like that time fantasy writers all learned the word "lambent" and started applying it, of all things, to eyes.

(It means "flickering or gleaming, like a candle". But if you don't set that up properly in the text I guarantee your readers will all think you're talking about sheep.)

[cellio]

I read a lot as a kid and had a father who actively encouraged curiosity and learning. We had a good dictionary and an encyclopedia (this was way before home computing and the Internet), but we also had conversations. I think I learned to work things out from context in the home (definitely not in school), and sort of settled into a middle ground of "work it out from context; if I can't and it seems important enough to interrupt what I'm doing, go look it up".

What's the question about Inns of Court? I've seen some of those sources and have danced and/or played music for some of the dances.

[conuly]

Dancing, why? Seriously, why?

That's the question.

[spiralsheep]

But why wouldn't young men want to dance together? It's normal. And good practice for dancing with girls. Of course most boys want to learn to dance. Not dancing is culturally exceptional and usually a state inflicted by authoritarian control, such as religion or (anti-)social segregation.

[conuly]

Yes, that’s fine. What’s strange is storing your dancing instruction notes at your law school for several centuries.

[spiralsheep]

An artefact of the Inns of Court keeping all written precedents, lol, or more likely merely that they had the space so why turn anything out (which is why unused rooms in older buildings are often crammed with historic artifacts - it takes more effort to throw them away).

[cellio]

In terms of "why learn to do it?", this was part of "cultured society" at the time, like table manners are (or at least were) in our time. We ordinary folks just learn this stuff as we go, but just like hoity-toity rich kids get tutors and special instruction, these lawyers were of a class that was trying to operate in higher-class circles, so it makes sense that there would be some manuals or instruction. Plus maybe it helps them pick up girls?

In terms of "why does a law school have these documents?", I have the impression that they were packrats and dance was not particularly special when it came to preservation priorities. But I haven't researched what else is in that stash; I came at this as a musician and dancer, not a law-school-history researcher.

*reads with interest*

[minoanmiss]

I remember discussions of words and context, though not written material about it. We discussed that a lot with _Watership Down_, because the book teaches one a conlang as well as being written in unsimplified English.

[gwydion]

I have always mostly used either context cues or defaulted off of things I already knew, like similar words or words from other languages.

Sometimes you can't though. Every pride I come across flags with identity labels I don't know because they are rare or new. I look them up because that is something I never want to screw up because I could hurt somebody.

Re: watching TV as a family. I was always asking what jokes meant if I didn't get them (We always waited for commercial to talk). It was the '70's so it was usually drugs, politics, or cultural references from before I was born. Or kink. Sometimes it was kink. (Picture my dad explaining foot fetishes to a ten year old). We also discussed things, like themes, symbolism, and biases a lot. Sometimes we analyzed commercials....

We were like that with books, movies, anything really in my house. I remember a long conversation with my mom as a tween about faux feminism in the Betty Davis movie we just watched, for example. Or that time I got Fountainhead out of the library at thirteen with no clue who Ayn rand was. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to discuss, because I saw problems I couldn't articulate and needed help processing.

It was all part of one thing for us, I think.

I also remember going to movies with my lovers in high school and doing what you were doing quietly in movies. It was so easy for me to predict stuff on context cues, narrative logic and the two of them would be like "How do you DO that." It was so obvious it was hard to explain. We'd been discex=ction media for fun my whole life.

[ethelmay]

I used to ask about everything in Tom Lehrer records. My dad bravely answered "What's a necrophiliac?" with "Someone who falls in love with dead bodies."

[gwydion]

Same! I remembering him having to explain masochism tango to 8 or nine year old me.

[siliconshaman]

I don't think I was ever taught how to read, beyond the basics of Janet & john... I kind of just grabbed the ball and ran with it (see Spot run! Run Spot, run!) and raced ahead of formal 'teaching'... mostly picking stuff up from context but with a dictionary to hand for the chewier words.

[sabotabby]

I try to teach the kids reading from context! But also, we have such a range of ability even in my small class. So I have the ELL kids running everything through a translator, autistic kids who get frustrated if they have to read in a way different than they're used to, low-level readers who hit barriers with nearly every word, university-bound kids who just want to run everything through ChatGPT and don't get why they should have to read a book, etc. Granted, most aren't becoming English majors.

That said, while inference skills were hot about a decade ago, there's not a lot that I've encountered on how to teach reading for context. And nothing in the curriculum now. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

[glaurung]

The "they don't read very well" paper is an appallingly poorly designed study on at least two levels.

1. I am in their top 5% of readers, and I would have struggled and been incredibly frustrated if someone asked me to read the beginning of a Dickens novel one sentence at a time, explaining each sentence as I go along. That's not how novels work, especially 170 year old Dickens novels - you CAN'T read them sentence by sentence and expect to have any clue what's going on. They are designed to be read and understood on a larger scale than that. Reading a whole paragraph and then going back and analyzing it sentence by sentence, sure. But that's not what their moderators asked of the study participants.

2. Making generalized judgements about the reading skill of Americans who struggled with 170 year old British prose is confounding two very different things - their actual reading skill, and their ability to handle not just archaic prose style, not just foreign terminology and vocabulary, but also historical references from a distant era they're unfamiliar with (being English, not history, majors). This is the worst kind of bigoted, classist, prior knowledge based intelligence testing, and the authors of the paper should be fucking ashamed of themselves.

Not sure if this merits being a third point:
41 percent of their participants were "English education" majors, not traditional English literature majors. Which means they were interested in learning how to teach children how to read, not in reading and analyzing 19th century English novels. That they did not break those people out and report on whether or not the education majors differed from the literature majors in their ability to understand the opening of Bleak House makes me raise my eyebrows quite a bit.

That said, I am unsurprised that a lot of the students struggled with the passage. It's dense, even for Dickens, and primary schools turn out tons of students each year who have never really learned to read well. Some of those students are going to end up as English majors, despite the poor fit, because they don't actually love books or reading/learning, they are just obtaining a degree credential that they need in order to pursue their chosen career in which they will never need to know how to read and enjoy any novel, let alone a 170 year old British novel. (that there are school teachers out there teaching children to read, who don't themselves love reading and learning, is a huge problem, but that's getting way beyond the question of "can English majors read")

[conuly]

It’s worth noting, too, that before college these students scored on average in the 60%ile on the ACT. We might argue about how meaningful that really is, but 75 years ago most of them would not have attended college at all, and 50 years before that many would not have graduated or even gone to high school.

One obvious consequence of expanding access to higher education that everybody always acts shocked by is that you’re going to have a harder time comparing students of today with students of way back when.

[amado1]

I might have simply missed it, but I was wondering also ... what kind of instruction did they give the tested students? Did the subjects *know* that they were expected to rephrase every sentence in as much detail as possible? Some of the examples made me think, "This kid probably knows exactly what this sentence is; she just doesn't think it's necessary or wanted for her to break it down all the way." I think even if they did tell students, "Use as much detail as possible," it's not likely the students understood HOW MUCH detail was needed unless an example was provided for them, maybe using a different text like Moby Dick and having the facilitator demonstrate the type of translation expected for a high mark.

I don't think giving such an example would have skewed test results. I got the impression there was a disconnect, in some cases, between what the professors considered a good reading and what the students considered a sufficient answer; the students are working with 12+ years of education where rambling at length in your answer is generally frowned upon, after all. They might assume that the facilitators want them to keep it brief, even when the facilitator says otherwise.

This next part isn't necessarily in response to you, just in general:

I do understand the professors' frustration, though. I was taking a class this past spring on Elizabethan Poetry, and there came a time, after a few assignments, where the prof had to stop and recalibrate. We spent a class period going over the parts of speech together -- what's a verb, what's a noun, how do clauses work -- and we analyzed a sonnet together as well. I was a little unnerved to see how little my classmates understood from a very simple poem.