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APREMELGO- ASSOCIA��O VIRTUAL DOS PROFESSORES DE L�NGUAS DAS REDES ESTADUAL E MUNICIPAL DE GOI�S |
Material desenvolvido por: |
Beverley L. Zakaluk, Ph. D. 1982/96
E-Mail: [email protected]
Helen Bochonko
E-Mail: [email protected]
University of Manitoba
Created on June 24, 1996
Last Updated on October 9, 1998
Just as in the case of lexical knowledge, the section on syntactic or grammatical knowledge will be separated into two parts: syntax as it affects word identification and syntax as it affects comprehension.
As suggested in the foregoing regarding the interactive mode of the reading process, lexical features or knowledge of how words pattern may also assist in helping readers predict and confirm word identity. In addition to the cues inherent in the visual or graphic display, lexical knowledge related to word meanings serves as a redundant cue to confirm word identification. Syntax (or one's sense of how words string together) also functions as an additional informational source to support word identification. Examples outlined by DeStefano (1978) illustrate and help clarify how syntax functions in word perception. Skilled readers, because of the predictable language pattern, would experience no difficulty identifying words in such statements as the following:
Practice in this type of activity would be advantageous in helping struggling readers employ redundant syntactic cues. Similarly, stories with redundant patterns are also appropriate for first ensuring reading success and second, providing opportunities to help students realize the value of their syntactic knowledge. The progressive exposure technique (Holdaway, 1979) is an effective approach to employ in the application of syntactic knowledge for generating predictions about what the upcoming words might be. Cloze activities completed as a group with the text being shown on an overhead transparency and discussion taking place regarding the appropriateness of the words predicted by various students may also be valuable to raise consciousness about how to apply syntactic cues.
There is a widespread notion that once children have learned to decode, their reading problems will be solved. This conviction is mistakenly based on two false assumptions (Adams, 1980). First that children are linguistically competent enough to grasp the meaning of the text, and second that the processes they use to interpret spoken language are adequate for interpreting written language. Problems stemming from these premises are clear.
To address the first issue it has been broadly assumed that children's language acquisition is essentially completed by five years of age (Brown, 1965; Menyuk, 1963). This is very different from saying that young children can actually produce sentences of the same syntactic complexity as a mature person. While children probably need little syntactical sophistication to understand what is said to them, the same is not true for reading. Entwistle and Frasure (1974) found considerable variance when investigating the ability of five to eight year old children to repeat syntactically well formed sentences, although a developmental trend was evident. Children increased noticeably in their ability to use grammatical cues across the ages of six to nine as measured by their skill in sentence processing. Palermo and Molfese (1972) concluded that children continue to demonstrate gains in the ability to understand syntactic structures until they are at least 13 years old. It would appear that young children do not have as much syntactical sophistication as was previously believed. Since it has been demonstrated that good readers impose an intonation pattern on the text (Cohen and Freeman, 1978) and good readers encode in phrasal units (Levin and Kaplan as cited in Adams, 1980) syntactic competence should facilitate the processing of print.
Kleiman (1975) hypothesizes how this process might function. As readers progress through textual material they evaluate the word strings to judge whether a phrase has been completed. The phrasal information is then collapsed and recorded into a composite idea which is subsequently stored in memory. The reader then advances to the next syntactic unit or phrase. Adams (1980) points out the significance of breaking up the print in this way suggesting that the human mind is a "limited-capacity processor." If readers recode after each word they miss the way in which the ideas of the message relate to each other in thought patterns, and memory capacity is simply overloaded. Thus, for the sake of comprehension, words need to be processed in thought units.
The second issue regarding syntactic knowledge and its effect on reading comprehension revolves around the difference between spoken and written language. Spiro (198) distinguishes succinctly between the two, indicating that in listening, the speaker's intent is all that needs to be communicated implying that if the intent is apprehended, the goal of communication is met and understood. Spoken messages are also more easily understood because there are accompanying cues in the intonation patterns of stress and pitch, and in both pauses and timing. Even gestures may be present, so that to group the utterance into meaningful segments and to understand most of what is said requires little syntactic sophistication. But the written word is different. While punctuation may serve as a form of cue, readers are mainly left on their own to separate the text into meaningful units. Also, Spiro (1980) intimates that in terms of wanting to communicate, there seems to be a more urgent and specific intent in the case of textual material, such as the desire on the part of the author to impart knowledge and information. The purpose of reading text, nonetheless, may be obscure. In school, correct pronunciation rather than comprehension may be stressed (Anderson and Shifrin, 1980). Because of the differences between oral and written language outlined, comprehending print may be a laborious effort.
Another factor related to syntactic knowledge which may have an impact on reading acquisition is found in regional dialect variations. This is over and above the ability to separate written language into its phrasal constituents and the sophistication or facility to process more complex syntactic units. Some of these possible variations, the rules for which do not hold true absolutely, include:
the deletion of the verb to be in which case Standard English is contracted. For example: the use of "S/He go", for "S/He goes", "do" for "does", "talk" for "talks". These variations usually affect the third person form she or he only;
the employment of the contracted form when the possessive is required as in: "Man hat" for "man's hat" or the hypercorrect "he had" for "his";
the alteration of the verb to be to form "It don't be all her fault," for example; and
the use of the verb to be to imply a repeated but not continuous occurrence as in "Sometimes he be up there and sometimes he don't"; or
For the reader whose language pattern or grammar differs somewhat from the language of the text there is a potential problem. It is conceivable (Hall and Guthrie, 1980) that the dialect speaker must carry out an additional analysis of the text and have to translate the Standard English into idiomatic speech to facilitate comprehension. The danger lies in having to carry out this extra step successively, should it be necessary, over and over again across large amounts of text. For speakers of regional dialects, grammatical interference may have a tiring effect as much as an impeding consequence. To date, as described earlier, studies regarding the effect of grammatical interference on reading comprehension do not adequately identify sources of difficulty. Methodological flaws cast doubt on their validity.
Far from the common belief that once children have "cracked the code" their reading problems are over, the manner in which the written word differs from the spoken leaves the task of breaking written communication into thought units to the reader alone. This is a potential problem since children differ in linguistic competency - in the ability not only to produce but to isolate syntactic units. Difficulties with reading comprehension and the ability to recall what has been read may also be related to syntactic competence. Sentence complexity also may inhibit sentence comprehension.
If readers fail to read with correct phrasing, specific instructional strategies as follows may be helpful.