Grade the task, not the text: authentic materials
An additional resource from A Classroom in Kyiv (Chapter 6)
Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay
Welcome all, whether you’ve come here from chapter 6, or you are just interested in finding out a bit more about guessing meaning from context. This is covered in various chapters in Part I of the book and is written with language learners in mind.
I hope it will prove interesting to non-learners as well.
A key point to remember when approaching authentic texts (regular everyday pieces of writing not designed for language learners): can you understand the text without understanding every word? In most cases, probably.
When you come across unknown vocabulary, maybe you can partially guess the meaning – it doesn’t have to be exact; it can be an educated guess. If you want to learn it, focus on it and put your brain to work. Stop and think about it. Think about other contexts you might be able to use it in.
If you’re not interested in boosting your vocabulary and using too much brain power…relax. It’s fine. Some texts will grab you more than others. There is absolutely nothing wrong with passive reading. Many learners are naturally good at guessing meaning from context; others need practice.
Pay attention to grammar too. You’ll see structures you already know, as well as new grammar or more unconventional ways of using language.
The final and most important point to remember – don’t interrupt your reading every time you come to an unknown word. This is reiterated throughout the book, but it’s best to read the entire piece, or page, section or paragraph, however much you can handle before going back to look at new language. Make sure, first and foremost, that you get the gist of the text. You need to see the whole picture before breaking down the individual parts.
Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Chapter 14: ‘Food, Glorious Food’, pp 263-267, Penguin Random House, 2019
I’ve chosen this more or less by chance. It’s what I happened to be reading at the time I wrote this.
I’m not necessarily a Bill Bryson fan. This is only the second of his books I’ve read, the other being A Short History of Nearly Everything. He’s a clear, accessible and engaging writer, and this is the kind of non-fiction that shouldn’t prove too challenging.
And, who doesn’t enjoy reading about food and eating?
Let’s get cracking.
“We all know that if we consume too much beer and cake and pizza and cheeseburgers and all the other things that make life frankly worth living, we will add pounds to our bodies because we have taken in too many calories. But what exactly are these little numerical oddments that are so keen to make us round and wobbly?”
You should know consume, but you are almost certainly only using eat actively, so you now have a more formal synonym. The structure worth living is an example of verb patterns with a gerund or infinitive (verb + gerund) and is extremely useful. Because Bryson is American, he avoids the metric system and instead uses pounds, which many readers will be aware of, but you can probably guess it’s a measurement like kilograms. Taken in is a nice phrasal verb and these are trickier because they can be harder to notice in context. You’ll see verbs like taken and assume you know them and miss the particle in. It’s so easy to overlook small prepositions. Here, taken in is also a synonym for consume. The last sentence probably isn’t worth focusing on. Numerical oddments is not a natural collocation I’ve ever seen and you don’t need to bother with wobbly unless you want to, but you should know by this point in your life what will happen to your body if you eat too many burgers.
“Until 1964, the official guidance in the United States was for 3,200 calories per day for a moderately active woman and 2,300 for a similarly disposed woman.”
Just go back a few words in the sentence to find the adverb-adjective collocation moderately active, and you’ll be able to work out what similarly disposed means. No need to read any further to guess this one. This is a collocation that will almost certainly remain passive forever, and that’s fine. You probably don’t need it. But there’s a valuable lesson to focus on here – this is a common feature of writing, and it should be fairly easy to pick up the meaning of new language when it is used like this.
“The father of caloric measurement was the American academic Wilbur Olin Atwater. A devout and kindly man with a walrus moustache and a stout frame that showed he was no stranger to the larder himself, Atwater was born in 1944 in upstate New York…and studied agricultural chemistry…”
One more time:
“A devout and kindly man with a walrus moustache and a stout frame that showed he was no stranger to the larder himself, Atwater was born in 1944 in upstate New York…and studied agricultural chemistry…”
The crossed-out portion of the sentence is a non-defining relative clause. It’s adding extra information. If you delete it, the sentence is still grammatically correct. This kind of language can easily be ignored without affecting the meaning whatsoever. Once you get to the end of the sentence and realise this, you can move on, and your understanding of the book won’t be affected.1
For example:
* My sister, who works for an animal charity in London, promised to give me feedback on my book but never did.
* My sister promised to give me feedback on my book but never did.
In contrast, we have defining relative clauses, which are crucial to the meaning of the sentence, and the difference is only two commas. The second one below is defining:
My sister, who works for an animal charity in London, promised to give me feedback on my book but never did. (I have one sister)
My sister who works for an animal charity in London promised to give me feedback on my book but never did. But my sister who works as a nurse kindly gave me feedback and she told me it was a load of gibberish. (I have two sisters and if I delete who works for an animal charity in London, important information is missing.)
Back to that deleted portion: “A devout and kindly man with a walrus moustache and a stout frame that showed he was no stranger to the larder himself…”
With walrus moustache, you might be able to guess that he’s a big person, and larder will probably be unknown, but if you’re a Ukrainian speaker, you might see the word lard and think of salo, which is often translated as lard or pork fat. And from that, you might expect that a larder is a place where fattening food is stored.2
That leaves devout, and there isn’t enough context to tell you exactly what it means, but remember, you don’t need to understand it at all to get what he’s saying. It’s simply additional information added to give the reader a fuller picture of his background, but the chapter is about the impact of food on our body, so do we really need to know that he’s religious? We have kindly used with it, so you can guess it’s probably something positive (though not all would agree). The same applies to stout frame, which is sandwiched in between walrus moustache and no stranger to the larder and once more, is supplementary information. Although not fully understanding all these words will hardly affect your comprehension, some readers will appreciate knowing more of his background. It might be relevant or interesting to some that it was a church-going big man with a big appetite who invented the concept of calories.
Phew…there’s a lot to unpack in such a small sample and it’s a bit like putting a puzzle together. With practice, you’ll find yourself doing this unconsciously. Let’s not forget that your goal in reading a book like this might just be for pure pleasure, so when you first read it, go through it to the end, and if you’d like to focus on any language, go back and re-read sections if you want to make more sense of it.
“The work was so exacting it took up to sixteen people to read all the dials and perform the calculations.”
Reading quickly, you might think the word is exciting, but once you get to the end of the sentence and realise that "up to sixteen people" had to do something, then you have a clearer idea of what it means.
“[He was] especially appalled at the cost. He ordered [him] to take a 50 percent pay cut or hire an assistant at his own expense.”
If you stop after that first sentence, appalled could mean a few things. But read on for the second sentence and you should have a close enough idea. If he was appalled at the cost and ordered a big pay cut like that then he was probably unhappy or annoyed, or something like that.
This is a great example of when you really don’t need to get the exact meaning of a word, and this is often the case with adjectives. They can be very flexible in their meaning. Words like fantastic, awesome, incredible and magnificent are more or less synonyms, but historically there were some differences that have slowly disappeared over the years. Teachers often correct students when they say they like fantastic films when they mean fantasy films, but if you look at the roots of fantastic and the way it used to be used, then it’s not incorrect at all.3
Here is where things get confusing for you as a language learner. It’s fine not to know how useful a word is when you come across it for the first time. You might think “Oh, exacting, hmm, that’s a nice word, let me make a note of it.” And then you put it down in your notebook. And you do the same for appalled.
So, how do you know whether it’s useful or not and whether you might need it?
This is why teachers can be valuable when you are starting out, because at first you might be unsure of which words are more useful or widely used. I’ll share my colleague Galyna’s thoughts here, because she captures this so well:
“[Teachers] will save you from drowning by limiting your ‘to learn’ lists at every stage. A teacher might tell you that a particular word is in the ‘good for using now’ category, or it could go in ‘leave this till later’ or even ‘just forget about this one forever’. Even the very best language learners and teachers will come across words in a book, make a point of memorising them, and then never encounter them again.”
In time, you will get better knowing which words you might need, which is why constant and consistent exposure to language is so important. As you read and listen more, you are probably going to hear appalled being used much more than exacting. You will soon realise that appalled (or appalling) is more widely used and there’s a higher chance this will eventually become active. And because it has different uses and meanings – his behaviour was appalling; I was appalled when my colleague Olena told me my book was rubbish – you’ll see how you might be able to use it.
“It’s not just a question of picking berries or digging up tubers, it is a matter of processing foods…”
There’s a phrasal verb, digging up, which is noticeable here, but in real life you might miss the up. And you don’t need to know what tubers are in the context to understand the author’s point, but if you want to guess, start thinking of foods that are dug up and you’ll probably get it.4
And lastly:
“Cooking confers all kinds of benefits. It kills toxins, improves taste, makes tough substances chewable, greatly broadens the range of what we can eat, and above all vastly boosts the amount of calories humans can derive from what they eat. It is widely believed now that cooked food gave us the energy to grow big brains and the leisure to put them to use.”
From a teacher’s perspective, that’s a gorgeously language-rich sentence.5
We have a big word like confers, which is rarely used actively, but is clear here. Teachers also say that you should broaden your range of language, and fans of travel will often say that “travel broadens your horizons.” Above all is a nice phrase to add emphasis and vastly boosts is a lovely adverb-verb collocation. Have you come across the word boost before? Do teachers ever tell you that you need to boost your vocabulary? What do you do to give yourself a boost of confidence before a big presentation or exam? It is widely believed that is a formal passive structure used in a lot of essays and academic writing and is the kind of grammar that you might actively use a lot in writing, but not speaking. And pay close attention to put them to use, where you have a lovely collocation put something to use but also the pronoun them to refer to brains so you don’t repeat the word.
Jan Morris, Europe: An Intimate Journey, Chapter 5: ‘Spasms of Unity,’ part 10: ‘K.u.K.,’ p 331, Faber and Faber, 2006
General non-fiction like Bill Bryson is probably more accessible for most learners. The language is going to have fewer idioms, less figurative language, and overall be clearer to understand.
Some types of non-fiction, travel literature for example, can be more challenging. These are the kinds of books where even a native speaker will struggle to understand many of the words. A couple of my favourite writers, Paddy Leigh Fermor and Robert Macfarlane, have works with long passages full of obscure, lesser-known words that can overwhelm readers – even me, and my vocabulary is decent. I read these types of books for the overall sense, for the places and ideas they evoke, and for the lyrical beauty of the words.
If you’re reading a piece of travel literature, in this case Jan Morris, you will soon know what type of language to expect and whether it’s the right level and genre for you.
She writes about so many places that I’ve never been to that I can only guess what she’s talking about as I read. But I’m in Vienna right now, so I have plenty of prior knowledge when I come to a passage like this. If you’ve been to Vienna, or have an idea in your head as to what it looks like, then you might get the general idea here:
“The Ringstrasse itself, the wide ceremonial street which surrounds the old city of Vienna, was built in the nineteenth century as a deliberate declaration of imperial assurance. Like some megalomaniac’s dream, its buildings rise one after another preposterously into view, Gothic or Grecian or baroque, plastered in kitsch or writhing into classical allusion, here a titanic opera house, here a refulgent Attic assembly, a university more utterly academic than Heidelberg, Cambridge and Salamanca put together, museums as overwhelmingly museum as museums could possibly be, and all appearing to curve deferentially, even obsequiously, around the immense pillared and rambling sprawl of the Hofburg, the imperial palace – where for nearly seventy years Franz Josef, the last Habsburg emperor that anyone remembers, toiled at his simple desk, dressed always in his severe military uniform and addicted to boiled beef and potatoes.”
That second sentence is 111 words. And I understand perfectly clearly, but if you are around B2, then there are quite a few unknown words. I honestly couldn’t explain some of them (like refulgent). She uses museum three times in a span of six words, one of them as an adjective, which I had never seen before. This type of reading might be way too difficult or not even interesting for all readers. But I’ve chosen it to illustrate that some types of books, despite being overly complex and excessively wordy, can still be a pleasure to read, as long as you go about it the right way and just take it easy.
Trust me: just let the language flow at times and relax. You don’t always have to boost your vocabulary when reading, but if that’s your goal, pick your reading choices wisely.
I’ve done something intentional here which to some readers will look overly repetitive. In one sentence I’ve used ‘…without affecting the meaning…’ and in the next I’ve said ‘…won’t be affected.’ In a different type of book, an editor would cry out “unnecessary repetition!”, but I’ve done this to show you how important it is to use different word forms to vary your writing and speaking.
Two things: first, a larder is a place to store any type of food, not just fattening. And two, many people don’t like translating food words and there’s no need. Keep the original. We don’t translate paella, ravioli or borsch. But it’s a good idea when using them to paraphrase and explain what they are, and this is particularly important if you are using foreign words during a speaking exam. Questions about traditions, culture and food are common and so instead of hesitating and trying to think of a translation for something, just paraphrase it.
We could talk about error correction here, and whether and when teachers should correct their students. If it’s a higher-level class that mentioned a fantastic film, I might explain the word origins and why it might be correct. But for lower-level classes, I would correct them without a detailed explanation. This comes down to common contemporary usage and how often most people would say fantasy v fantastic films.
They’re spuds. Or potatoes. I love the word tuber. If you’re interested in potatoes, and who isn’t honestly?, then I highly recommend this short TED video, “History through the eyes of a potato”: History through the eyes of a potato TED
Students are often surprised about how versatile the word gorgeous is. It’s not just for people, but for so much else: sounds, scenery, clothes, jewellery, food, language. Also, ‘gorgeously language-rich’ isn’t a natural collocation, it’s my own. You can play around with adverb-adjective collocations and make up your own if you like. They may sound odd, but you only know by experimenting and trying them out.