Ways of approaching a text--a running commentary
This commentary is in DRAFT form and is to be used for instructional purposes only.
Key Points
One has to understand what one is looking at before making evaluative statements, or statements of agreement or disagreement. Makes sense, no?
Two requirements for being able to understand a text are to
- Hold it at arm's length (impersonally look at it), and
- Try to see it from one or more points of view.
One or more people can do these things together. A common description for this interpretive and interactive activity is academic discourse.
Academic discourse is grounded in dialectics (logic and reasoning), and questioning. Ask as many questions as you can about a text before and as the discourse proceeds, and you are well on your way to grasping what it--the text--is. Questions include even those about the medium in which the text appears (electronically, on the back of an envelope, via film, etc.).
The first interaction is between text and reader; and then it can expand to interactions among text and readers, including texts about the text.
Generating questions is hard for some people. Take several texts and see if you can ask more and more questions as you proceed from one text to the next. Even a short text can easily have twenty or more basic questions that are relevant to start with.
Next, list three questions for a given text, and use the text to help you respond to (not necessarily answer) these questions. In other words, ground your understanding in the text using specific questions that the text itself suggests. Limit your remarks to just the text and the selected questions.
As a proof of competence in understanding, you make observations and statements and insights about a text, plus perhaps its medium, and you can do this in different ways. But writing it all out is the best, so, of course, others can look at what you say, discuss that, and come to a better understanding. This can be seen as interactions among texts and readers.
Understanding
To say you understand is to make a knowledge claim. To make a knowledge claim, do these things.
- Follow a method (follow a procedure).
- Look at the results (analyze the data).
- Ask if experts agree (seek confirmation).
Here are some points of view, or perspectives, to use when looking at a text. (The words for these perspectives here are those used in class and may not be the same as you might encounter elsewhere. But they should suffice for the idea for methods used to make understanding/knowledge claims.)
belief system (e.g., Protestantism), Biblical reading, biographical interpretation, common knowledge (including cross-cultural), genre, historical analysis (when written), historical-linguistic context (hermeneutics), ideology (e.g., Marxism), intent (see also purpose), intuition ("what your gut tells you"), language and linguistics ("the bleeding obvious" for this class), literary criticism (e.g., point of view), paraphrase or summary, phenomenology (what is it like to experience), psychological perspective (e.g., Jungian), reader-response theory, reason and logic (e.g., inference), religion (see belief system), research (what science tells us), sound (the spoken text, all aspects), variation, etc.
Perhaps it goes without saying, but if you have a text which depends on knowing or understanding other things, then you and others need those to come to a fuller understanding, and to make any valid claim beyond what you can prove by evidence in the text itself.
Value
There are three guiding questions for considering the value (perhaps use) of a text.
1. What does the text mean? 2. How does it mean that? 3. Does the text call for some action? (In the case of teaching, how can you use, for example, the text in the language classroom?)
Question one has to do with what the text actually says and the interpretive-interactive process referenced above.
Question two has to do with the points of view or perspectives you use for your understanding (e.g., ideology, intuition, etc.).
Question three has to do with what to do, if anything. For example, in the case of a political text, is there a call to action? Another example. For students interpreting a text, what can they learn from it, and how can they best learn it? What activities would you have them do with a particular text, and for what purpose?
Answering (or responding to) these guiding questions comes through a process of addressing and re-addressing them until what you have suffices. You may not be able to respond to the questions in order.
Purpose
What is the inherent or intended purpose of a text? This surely has a bearing on meaning and value.
Purpose has to do with audience and apparent or supported-by-the-text evidence. For example, we talk about texts as having meaning. However, there may be other purposes for a text than to have people understand it.
The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.
For Henry Higgins, the speaker, this is a practice exercise in spoken English. However, Henry, remember, is a fictional (dramatic) character.
For Eliza Doolittle, his student and an actress with a script to follow, this is an opportunity to break out into song, on stage or screen.
For us, those who know this material, the sentence is reminiscent of the musical (My Fair Lady), or the play on which it is based. And its purpose may be to give us some kind of pleasure, or ah-ha recognition awareness.
For those who don't know where the line (text) comes from, they can deduce its possible meaning, or rather its purpose: phonology exercise? a part of a larger work to read or speak for the pleasure of hearing the sounds? (Recall the classroom exercise on this text, including reading and repeating it.)
So what a text is for is another way to approach a text. Who is it written for? Why has it been written? What purposes can a text have, in addition to conveying or transmitting sense/meaning? There may be many, or many levels of purpose!
Genre
With the identification of the type of writing (genre) comes conventions with which to analyze and understand. That is, once one says this or that text is a novel, poem, business policy statement, eulogy, or whatever, that genre then suggests how to read.
We thus seek and use touchstone types of writing for our appreciation and understanding. We have expectations and standards and terminology appropriate to just this or that type of text, and we exclude those expectations and so forth for what it is not. You don't usually read a eulogy as a comedy sketch.
Reading in a foreign language gives us a rudimentary model for reading with genre foremost in mind. First we try to say what the text is about (topic or theme). As we perform this step, we can look to the form of the text. What does it look like? Skimming and scanning are particular techniques familiar and helpful to foreign language learners.
To restate this in another way: What sounds like a poem about love is considered in ways different from an electro-chemical analysis in technical prose about when a man or woman displays behaviors associated with romantic love. Each genre then has its reading/understanding requirements.
Here is an incomplete list of genres a review of which should illustrate this point, and then which should also suggest that specific teaching-learning situations will guide choosing one genre over another: business letter, TV advertising copy, short silly poem, personal narrative, dialogue heard on the bus, classic piece of literature, lunch menu, fine print disclaimer, creative non-fiction, song lyric.
Genre is then more part of the descriptive as well as an analytical toolset for approaching a text than it is a key in a selection matrix of what to refer to or use in, say, instruction. This is true except, of course, when you are trying to teach genres, or something about a particular genre.
And here is a subtle point for advanced reading. Instruction, its own genre, will make demands on choice which an authentic text can but does not always fulfill.
Reflection
Our own development as human beings offers each of us different ages and stages, and along with these, we can or cannot do certain things, or perhaps some tasks are more or less difficult for each of us. Also, brain structure and learning style dictate in some ways what we are capable of, and even of who we like and don't!
So it is no wonder that when approaching a text, each may go about understanding or appreciating in different ways. One of those ways we--especially teachers--need to manage in approaching a text is seeing it as an object. A text is a thing to be reckoned with.
Once a text is seen as a thing out there, in some sense separate from our self (recall academic discourse), we are left with looking at it after our first reading, after our first experience of it.
This is to say, we can reflect on it. For some, this will involve both reflection on the text and the experience of it. We can call this a kind of guided introspection. Looking at the text and our experience of it allows us to come to our own understanding and appreciation quite separate from and better than a first reading. This qualitative difference, naturally enough, makes for better judgments about a text and what it says.
Not everyone, certainly not all students, can or like to do this. However, for teachers, who want to do better and better for students, reflective practice is required. If a lesson is a text, then remembering what was done and how it was done to improve are musts.
One frame for activating the process of reflective practice is do-look-learn. Teach your lesson, look back at it from a variety of perspectives, conclude how it could have been more successful.
When enacting this frame for an authentic text, it might look like read/experience, then analyze, then (tentatively) conclude.
And this is the skillset you want your critically thinking students to have and develop.
. . . to be continued, on your own interpretive and pedagogical journies.
