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Department of English and American Studies: Teaching English Language and Literature For Secondary Schools
Department of English and American Studies: Teaching English Language and Literature For Secondary Schools
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
and American Studies
Hana Tichá
2013
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
……………………………………………..
Author’s signature
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank my supervisor, James
Thomas, for his guidance and support during my
research.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
Invented texts 5
Top-down perspective 31
Meaning and schemata 32
Text structure and organization 41
Density of information 42
Text Cohesion 43
Bottom-up perspective 49
Sentence length 50
Syntactic complexity 50
Grammar 55
Vocabulary 68
CONCLUSION 93
REFERENCES 95
RESUMÉ 104
SUMMARY 105
Introduction
Cat in the Rain is a very short story by Ernest Hemingway (an American author,
journalist and the 1954 Nobel Prize winner in literature), which was first published in
1925 as a part of the short story collection In Our Time. Hemingway became famous
within his own life time (1899–1961), particularly being known for his simple style of
writing and careful structuring; thus like most of his novels, his short stories are very
easy to read. Cat in the Rain is an apparently simple story about an American couple
spending a holiday in Italy, however, as Taylor (1981) puts it, “behind the very realistic
surface there is a wealth of symbolism and possible meanings for the readers to supply
In the pages that follow it will be argued that this simplicity of style generating
multiple interpretations in the mind of the reader is what makes Cat in the Rain
particularly suitable for the EFL classroom. The thesis focuses attention on the
intermediate level of proficiency of English learners; it attempts to defend the view that
Cat in the Rain is a text with lexical and structural difficulty that will challenge
intermediate students without overwhelming them, and that it is an effective vehicle for
the achievement of certain language and content goals at this level of proficiency.
In order to support the hypothesis that Cat in the Rain is suitable for an
intermediate student of English, the text is discussed from different points of view. The
thesis touches upon linguistic, as well as methodological issues, and the overall
whole and then tries to understand the various features that enable the text to function.
Chapter One begins by laying out the theoretical background concerning texts and their
role in the classroom. Chapter Two deals with the complex issue of authenticity of
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classroom texts. Chapter Three describes the benefits and challenges of literary tests in
ELT. The aim of Chapter Four is to outline some of the processes that take place during
reading, as well as the ways of getting meaning from texts. Chapter Five analyses the
readability of Cat in the Rain – both from the bottom-up and top-down perspectives –
and looks at possible ways of exploiting the text in the intermediate English classroom.
Before any discussion can begin, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by the
(Sinclair, 1987) writes that “intermediate is used to refer to students and their level of
work in a subject when they are not beginners, but are not yet advanced” (p. 762). This
is a rather broad definition, but according to Brown (2007), the intermediate level of
proficiency of L2 learners is indeed richly diverse. He argues that at this stage some
automatic processing takes place; phrases, structures, and conversational rules have
long been practised and are increasing in number, enabling the mental processes to
“automatize” (p.124). Brown believes that students benefit from small doses of short,
tenses and clauses typify intermediate level teaching. Increasing complexity in terms of
length, grammar, and discourse characterize reading materials; students read paragraphs
To put this concept in the context of the Czech education system, secondary
Languages (CEFR) describes what knowledge and skills Czech learners have to develop
in order to communicate and interact effectively. The CEFR includes a set of Common
Reference Levels dividing learners into three broad divisions (A, B, C), which can be
further divided into six levels. B1 stands for an independent user of the language who
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can understand the main points of clear standard input on familiar matters
can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling in an area where the
language is spoken.
can produce simple connected texts on topics that are familiar or of personal
interest.
can describe experiences, events, dreams, hopes and ambitions, and briefly give
reasons and explanations for opinions and plans (Council of Europe, 2011, p.
24).
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Chapter One: Texts in the classroom
Thornbury (2005) argues that language learning should both begin and end in texts (p.
162). But what is meant by a text? In layman’s terms, it can be anything printed on
coherent language event which has a clear communicative purpose, which is appropriate
to the context of use, and is a recognizable text type (p. 19). Cat in the Rain (hereafter
It is a complete and independent unit with its beginning, middle and end.
The text was written to communicate the author’s message to the reader.
development purpose (material for development of reading and listening skills), and
a third purpose, which he calls ‘text-as-stimulus’ – the text is used to introduce into the
However, from my own experience in EFL teaching, full texts are generally
neglected in the classroom (even though one of the expected outcomes of Czech
secondary education is that students will be able to produce cohesive and coherent texts
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in English). The following pages will look at the most common type of texts used in the
classroom – invented texts – which will be later juxtaposed with authentic texts.
Invented texts
communicative potential of texts was rarely exploited in the activities of the traditional
language classroom. Students frequently read a text for the sole purpose of answering
questions about it – answers that the teacher already knew. Such activities
communicated the students’ mastering of the language of the text, not its content.
classroom texts have been subject to extensive criticism. It is felt that invented texts
provide poor models of real language use, and they are concerned with forms of the
language rather than with more communicative features of a text, e.g. vocabulary and
discourse features. Such texts are not used to inform the reader about the world; they are
Widdowson (1978) argues that when those texts appear in structurally graded
vocabulary that has already been introduced and to extend this knowledge by
incorporating into the passages examples of elements of usage that come next in the
course. In this case, the passage is intended to present selected parts of the language
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particular structures. The effectiveness of passages of this kind is achieved at the
features do not merge into the passage in a natural way but only serve to accentuate its
and syntax of classroom texts might actually result in a distortion of the message (p.
88). A criticism is often made of simplified texts that the simplification of vocabulary
results in more difficult grammar. Another criticism is that strict control of grammar
results in unnatural, awkward text (Nation, 2001, p. 171). The following example from
Project 3 Student’s Book illustrates the situation; in a text about London, the author
writes that a long time ago, in the Tower of London, “many people lost their heads”
(Hutchinson, 2000, p. 46). The expression lost their heads is apparently an attempt to
avoid the passive voice and the word executed. However, learners sometimes interpret
the expression lose someone’s head as lose control, especially if they have never heard
Nonetheless, all the explanations above tend to overlook the fact that there are
some good reasons for classroom texts to be like that. The target language is displayed
in comprehensible and learnable contexts. The fact that patterns in such texts are
prominently displayed increases the chances that they will be noticed. Repetition and
simplification are signs of an appropriate text designed for teaching purposes because
As Lewis and Hill (1992) write, some radical experiments have been done which
suggest that it is possible to teach a language while requiring very little of the
productive skills from the students during the early stages of teaching. Carefully
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selected listening and reading passages are chosen so that the majority of the content
will be comprehensible to the students and thus help acquisition (p. 31). Perhaps the
most influential hypothesis supporting the use of simplified texts is Krashen’s (1981,
1985) theory of comprehensible input. This theory states that learners develop language
along a natural order and by coming to understand input that is slightly beyond their
current language ability level (the so-called i +1 system). This issue will be mentioned
and productive learning suggest that if productive use is needed, there must be
productive learning (cited in Nation, 2001, p. 32). Similarly, Swain (1985, as cited in
Nation, 2001, p. 32) writes that it is still not clear if readiness for productive use can be
listening, or whether there must be ‘pushed’ output with learners being made to speak or
write.
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Chapter Two: Authenticity of classroom texts
In the pages that follow, it will be argued that CITR is suitable for the intermediate L2
that authenticity is the only prerequisite for its suitability. As authenticity is a somewhat
problematic concept, the complexities surrounding this issue will be considered first.
First of all, Henry Widdowson (1990) is probably the best known critic of the
some extent, an illusion; authenticity lies in the reader’s response to the text and not in
the text itself (p. 44). Similarly, Van Lier (1996) argues that “authenticity is the result of
acts of authentication, by students and their teacher, of the learning process and the
in ELT has been a much disputed subject within the field of applied linguistics. The
problem is that despite the importance accorded to authenticity, there has been a marked
absence of research.
study has empirically examined how these features differ between the
examined and compared cohesive devices in simplified and authentic texts. Using the
computational tool Coh-Metrix (McNamara, Louwerse, Cai, & Graesser, 2005), their
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study investigated the differences in linguistic structures between sampled simplified
and authentic reading texts. Their research was meant to enable L2 reading researchers,
material developers, and publishers to judge more accurately the comparative linguistic
value of both text types by concentrating on the differences and similarities between
them in cohesion and other language features at the lexical, intersentential, and
subsentential levels (p. 16). The findings of Crossley et al. include, for example, that
simplified texts provide ESL learners with more co-referential cohesion and more
common connectives, and rely more on frequent and familiar words than authentic
texts. Simplified texts, on the other hand, demonstrate less diversity in their parts of
speech tags, display less causality, depend less on complex logical operators, and
But cohesion, for example, does not occur in normal circumstances unless it
serves as a contributing factor to coherence. In other words, one does not employ
cohesive markers for its own sake but as part of the business of achieving coherent
discourse (Widdowson 1978, p. 78). So if an authentic text does not possess explicit
other ways (through lexical or grammatical cohesion, for instance). Later chapters will
investigate cohesion in CITR and show that although the text does not provide the
reader with an access of explicit devices that link the sentences, it is tightly cohesive
and thus coherent for an intermediate learner of English. It will be argued that observing
cohesion in authentic texts can help intermediate L2 learners improve their own writing.
Authentic texts are written with a particular group of readers in mind – readers
who are fluent users of the language and who approach the text with certain cultural
assumptions and some background knowledge. Thus one of the most convincing
arguments against authentic materials is that they can be a burden, both for the student
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and the teacher. The students may find them difficult to understand as they contain
language above their level of proficiency (Richards, 2006, p. 21), and the teacher may
find it difficult to decide which language features should be selected for teaching
purposes.
about it only to find that understanding the material has taken so long that
Furthermore, the matter is complicated by the fact that a written authentic text is
not an isolated language event. Broughton, Brumfit, Flavel, Hill and Pincas (1978)
contend that there are three kinds of relationship which concern written texts which
3. the relationship between the text and the culture (p. 96)
relationship between the reader and the text. Hoey (1991), for example, touches upon
the issues of reader creativity and discusses the relationship between the author’s
construct and the reader’s reconstruction of meaning from that construct (p. 152).
Anderson (1999) sees reading as an active, fluent process which involves the reader and
the reading material in building meaning. Meaning, he argues, does not reside on the
printed page, nor is it only in the head of the reader. A synergy occurs in reading which
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combines the words on the printed page with the reader’s background knowledge and
This has an important message for language teaching. Huang’s paper (2009), for
example, explains the constructivist approach to teaching reading and shows how a
in making meaning together with the text and its authors, rather than remaining as mute
Students need to understand that all readers construct meaning from texts
Huang writes that constructivists see reading, like learning, as social practice.
The author states that “the social constructivist approach to reading offers tools and
principles for EFL teachers which can help them to draw their students into energetic
participation in text events, entering into active dialogue with texts (and their authors),
So far the discussion has indicated that using authentic texts in L2 classroom
may be challenging, both for teachers and students. The following section will look at
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The benefits of studying authentic texts
Despite the complexities surrounding the concept of authenticity, there are powerful
Lightbown and Spada (2006) argue that the path through language acquisition is
rarely smooth and even. Learners have bursts of progress and then seem to reach
a plateau for a while before something stimulates further progress (p. 80). Larry
Selinker (1972, as cited in Lightbown and Spada, 2006, p. 80) gave the name
214). Interlanguage differs systematically from both the native language and the target
language. It has been argued at several points in this thesis that carefully selected
reading material is an important source of language input. Putting this more precisely, it
information about the target language, relate more closely to learners’ needs and support
a more creative approach to teaching (p. 20). The second argument is somewhat
needs, one would have to say what the needs are. Nonetheless, the argument implies
that the content of the text is at least as important as the fact that it is authentic.
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Advocates of content-based instruction argue that an optimal way to create
classroom processes that are believed to facilitate language learning is by using content
as the driving force of classroom activities (Richards 2006, p. 27). With authentic
materials, content is typically selected before other decisions are made. In traditional
approaches to language teaching, however, grammar, texts, skills and functions are the
starting point in planning the lesson or the syllabus, and after these decisions have been
Nunan (1988) describes various types of syllabuses. He argues that the most
common syllabus is one in which the input is selected and graded according to
language consists of a finite set of rules which are combined in various ways to make
meaning. The most rigid syllabuses introduce one item at a time and move on after the
item has been mastered (p. 28). To illustrate this situation, three randomly selected
coursebooks written for intermediate students have been compared: ProFile (Naunton,
2005), New Hotline (Hutchinson, 1999) and Headway (J. Soars & L. Soars, 1986). As
a similar order (e.g., present tenses are followed by past tenses, future tenses are
presented after present and past tenses, conditionals, reported speech and the passive
However, Lightbown and Spada (2006) argue that it is wrong to assume that
second language development is a sort of accumulation of rules and they conclude that
no matter how language is presented to learners, certain structures are acquired before
others (p. 80). Moreover, they maintain, isolated presentation and practice of one
structure at a time does not provide learners with an opportunity to discover how
different language features compare and contrast in normal language use (p. 189).
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Table 1: The order of presentation of grammatical structures compared across three
intermediate coursebooks
Past Simple and Present Present Perfect and Past Present Simple (2)
Reported speech
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As authentic texts are not constrained by and were not conceived with language
teaching features in mind, they are therefore to be used for different purposes than
inauthentic materials that are written with structures. An authentic text will often be
a mixture of what intermediate students have learned and what they do not know yet at
a certain point of their L2 development. As indicated above, the teacher’s role at the
intermediate stage is to “automatize” (Brown, 2007) the bits and pieces of the target
language available for automatic use. So if the structures met in the text are not
challenging enough, the learners will get an opportunity to reinforce what they already
know, and if the lexico-grammatical structures have not been mastered yet, but the input
is comprehensible, students can still comprehend the general meaning of the text (which
is fodder for acquisition, rather than learning from what is explicitly taught).
Lewis and Hill (1992) argue that as soon as it is accepted that a clear distinction
needs to be made between what students must produce and what they must understand,
material which is structurally beyond the students’ productive level may be introduced
to practise understanding (p. 27). Similarly, Lightbow and Spada (2006) maintain that
learners who successfully acquire a second language outside classrooms are exposed to
a great variety of forms and structures they have not mastered. Thus students need to
develop strategies for dealing with authentic materials if they are eventually going to be
Although this advocates the creative process of making decisions after content
suggested by Nunan (1988), the dilemma of sequencing input according to some sort of
structural progression might be addressed in two ways: we can either abandon any
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a coursebook) to our advantage; learners are exposed to genuine texts, but they are only
expected to focus on selected items from the list (p. 30). The latter approach is more
acceptable in Czech state schools because, after all, teachers must meet the requirements
of the curriculum.
Writers of authentic texts usually use language to create a point of view, which they
share with the reader and thus influence the reader’s view. According to Talbot (2005),
“Readers are drawn into a kind of complicity with the texts they read. When meanings
are simply obvious, that complicity and subjection are complete. Complicity is
topics (politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, -isms, and pork), teachers are relatively
free in this respect; they can adjust teaching materials to the ‘local’ needs of their
students, without having to overly concern themselves about the fact that the selected
From an ideological point of view, CITR does not seem to exhibit such dangers.
However, a careful reader can find a few hints between the lines, such as how particular
characters come “to embody certain values or attitudes” (Lazar, 2007, p.13). First of all,
the fact that the American husband is depicted as a slightly uncaring person, lacking
interest in his wife, whereas the Italian padrone is the opposite, can influence the
reader’s view of the world and can enhance stereotypical thinking. What is more, the
American wife is depicted as an unsatisfied, unhappy and bored young woman who
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desperately wants something she cannot have, while the Italian maid is her considerate
and jolly counterpart. The story consists of about 1,200 words, and the word American
appears five times. Judging from the high frequency of occurrence, the author
apparently overuses the word deliberately as he wants the reader to notice it. The fact
that the girl has no name, while her husband’s name appears in the text eight times, is
significant as well. This particular way of expressing (or rather omitting) social actors in
the texts is never accidental. Social Actor Analysis can be applied to any discourse in
which people are evaluated through the way they are named or categorized. “What is
absent in a text is as important as what is present” (Simpson & Mayr, 2010, p. 73).
drawback. On the contrary, it can widen students’ horizons and generate an interesting
When discussing the advantages of using authentic texts in ELT, one should not forget
to mention motivation. Thornbury (2005) argues that authentic texts offer the learner
reliable data about the language, and “they have a greater chance of capturing the
learner’s interest – and therefore attention – than fake or imitation texts” (p. 116). The
key problem with this argument is that there is no reason to believe that inauthentic
texts cannot be motivating as well. Nevertheless, for example, Lewis and Hill (1992)
argue that authentic materials show students that what they are learning is useful outside
the classroom. They also reassure students that what they are studying is real (p. 28).
approach principles relevant to the Czech education system. Czech students simply need
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to read literature with a capital L in order to pass their exams. At Czech secondary
schools students studying for their Literature Maturita exam are supposed to get
acquainted with literary works of selected authors, including American writers. Dealing
with something in English and using the knowledge in literature lessons, or vice versa,
Students learn and acquire the language, familiarize themselves with a style of writing,
learn about the author’s life, and discuss the meaning of a literary work. Working with
advocate of Content and Language Integrated Learning, argues that certain types of
language teaching methods may suit some students, but not others. Thus some children,
for example, prefer learning about the language, while others prefer ‘learning by using
the language’ (p. 5). As will be shown later, the teacher can exploit CITR in numerous
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Chapter Three: Literature in ELT
be said about using literary texts in ELT. Based on my learning experience, some
because the sophisticated use of language in literary texts will either be lost on learners,
(2005) argues, however, that there need not be any major differences between the
approach to using non-literary texts and the approach to using literary ones, even though
the teacher might have to work harder at the pre-text stage, providing background
knowledge including cultural and biographical information, and might have to intervene
more at the comprehending stage (p. 143). This will be discussed later in the section on
schemata.
(2007) argues that a literary text can be an important vehicle for generating discussion,
critical thinking and controversy in the classroom. However, students will often need
help and guidance to discover all the multiple levels of meaning in a literary text (p. 10).
Lazar (2007) argues that the teacher should not expect a student to reach a
definite interpretation of the text as the meaning of a literary text can never be fixed or
frozen, but manufactured by the reader, and different readers make sense of it in their
own way, depending on the society in which they live and their personal psychology (p.
10). Similarly, Nuttall (2005) maintains that with controversial texts, where there is
widespread disagreement about the meaning of the text, we must accept that various
19
interpretations are possible and even enriching, and we can use the opportunity to
from students without providing sufficient guidance in coping with the linguistic
intricacies of the text. Some texts can be so remote from students’ own experience that
they are unable to respond meaningfully to them (p. 25). Thornbury (2005), for
example, draws attention to the fact that the function of literary texts is primarily
expressive. Such texts often use language imaginatively and playfully, and the authors
might say one thing and mean another. Literature is full of symbolism and the meaning
is often not literal, but it has to be inferred (p. 135). This can cause difficulties,
the thesis, Hemingway became famous for his simple and direct style of writing. As the
following examples shows, from the stylistic point of view, the overall structure of the
passage – its parallelism, use of repetition, and the extreme simplicity of its vocabulary
– certainly helps accentuate the main ideas, which makes the text (and the message),
easier to understand.
He stood behind his desk in the far end of the dim room. The wife liked him. She
liked the deadly serious way he received any complaints. She liked his dignity.
She liked the way he wanted to serve her. She liked the way he felt about being a
hotel-keeper. She liked his old, heavy face and big hands. Liking him she opened
And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror
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What can also complicate the matter both for teachers and students is the fact
unemployment can have a metaphorical expression in every other sentence, here it takes
some time to encounter one. But it is more complex than this – the story is a metaphor
itself.
235)
hotel room may be a metaphor for their relationship. The description of the bad weather
and an empty square in the first paragraph sets the negative mood, and the isolation of
They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs.
This interpretation can be inferred from what is present in the text. However, the
fact that texts are not produced in a vacuum and connect to a larger discourse can
complicate the situation. Hoey (1991) argues that the appreciation of much literature is
dependent on the reader’s ability to recognize allusion to other works (p. 153).
Thornbury (2005) suggests that this intertextuality will prove allusive to many second
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language learners, who may lack knowledge of the shared background, both cultural
But it is also the author’s experience that influences his or her writing.
Broughton et al. (1978) point out that it may be necessary to know who wrote the text,
when they wrote it and for whom, in order to understand it fully. Such information may
not be present in the text itself but has to be acquired from the outside source (p. 97). To
understand CITR fully, it is helpful to read what Brennen (2006) writes about
Hemingway’s devotion to family pets, especially cats: he adopted stray cats in every
town he lived, owning fifty-seven cats in Cuba and two in Idaho when he died. Students
will learn that the story is also a tribute to Hemingway’s wife, “who was dealing with
her first year of marriage, the loneliness it entailed and her deep desire for motherhood”
(p. 16). According to Brennen, Hemingway based the story on an incident that
happened in 1923. His wife was pregnant when she found a kitten hiding under a table
disadvantages. On the contrary, the position taken by this thesis is that resourceful and
Although the preceding discussion may suggest that literature with a capital L had better
be avoided in ELT, there are enough arguments in favour of literary texts. Back in 1968,
Rivers argued that listening and speaking skills were in the centre of attention.
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utterances in a foreign language but have nothing worthwhile to say,
because they have never been given the opportunity to share the thinking
This thesis does not want to argue whether the quote has become reality but it
seems to support the hypothesis that CITR is a suitable text for L2 classroom because it
offers students an opportunity to widen the horizons of their knowledge and peer into
Duff and Maley (1992) argue that genuine samples of various text types are open
Moreover, literary texts are non-trivial; they deal with matters which concerned the
writers enough to want to write about them. This genuine feel is a powerful motivator –
learners can bring a personal response from their own experience (p. 6). In addition,
classroom are that a piece of literary prose, more than any other text, appeals to the
students’ emotions, grabs their interest, remains in their memory, and makes them
partake in the memory of another speech community. In her view, the main argument
for using literary texts in the language classroom is literature’s ability to represent the
particular voice of a writer among the many voices of his or her community and thus
these texts should encourage our students to explore these concerns and
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Another supportive argument in favour of literary texts is, as Lazar (2007) argues,
that from a linguistic point of view, literature may provide an appropriate way of
processing and interpreting language (p.17). Thornbury (2005) writes that any approach
that highlights the relation between a text and its context should serve the learners’
awareness about the way texts are produced and interpreted. Genre theory argues that
language is best learned through the analysis and mastery of specific genres, since such
an approach best reflects the way language is shaped by its social contexts of use
(p.102). This is meant in a broader sense as the term genre originally came from literary
studies but has been extended to mean any frequently occurring culturally embedded,
social process which involves language. Text-based instruction, also known as genre-
types of texts. Text here is used in a specific sense to refer to structured sequences of
language that are used in specific contexts in specific ways. The text exists as a unified
whole with a beginning, middle, and an end; it confirms to norms of organization and
competence thus involves being able to use different kinds of spoken and written texts
Finally, and this is the most relevant argument to this thesis, Broughton et al.
(1978) maintain that literature does not have to wait for the advanced level of the
language, even though much literature is not accessible to the beginning learner. But
even the most elementary learner can derive pleasure from traditional rhymes or
linguistically simple poems (p.114), and an intermediate learner of English can enjoy
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Chapter Four: Reading and deriving meaning from text
To develop some of the key issues raised above, texts (both authentic and inauthentic)
are usually used in English classes for two main purposes: as a way of learning new
language and as a way of developing reading comprehension. To set the scene for the
content of Chapter Five, Chapter Four will present some theoretical background
eyes and brain. The eyes receive messages and the brain then has to work out the
articulation of all these processes, beginning with the sounding out and
Similarly, Ehrich (2006) believes that “the written text must be analysed from
conjunction with the use of context and inference to establish meaning. He maintains
that the degree to which each of these two contrasting perspectives in the processing of
written text is emphasized is a matter of contention among reading researchers (p. 15).
This has some classroom implications. As Lewis and Hill (1992) write, natural
larger units such as a whole chapter of a book. The ability to use a language implies an
25
understanding of the structure of such small units as phrases, and such large units as
chapters. So if language teaching is to reflect what language really is, teachers need to
take into consideration a wider range of structural devices, and a wider range of skills
which students need in order to encode and decode the language successfully (p. 30).
Moreover, as Rivers (1968) contends, there are three levels of meaning the
student must learn to extract from the printed patterns: (a) lexical meaning, i.e. the
semantic content of the words and expressions, (b) structural and grammatical meaning,
i.e. deriving from interrelationships among words, and (c) social-cultural meaning, i.e.
the evaluation which people of the student’s own culture attach to the words and groups
of words in the text (p. 216). Similarly, Huang (2009) argues that “reading in a foreign
language is particularly hard, because the words and grammatical structures, the text
conventions and the cultural context are all less than familiar” (p. 74).
The preceding discussion has implied that deriving meaning from text may be
easier for a native speaker of the target language than for an intermediate L2 learner.
inner speech (Vygotsky, 1934) acts in two main ways to process text during silent
reading, as a mechanism which condenses chunks of text into compact meaning units,
and as a subvocal rehearsal mechanism which elicits meanings when reading cognition
becomes problematic (p. 12). Anderson (1999) argues that a fluent reader automatically
chunks the language, while second language learners often read word by word striving
to comprehend the text. He argues that chunking helps increasing reading speed and
comprehension of what is being read (p. 57), which is due to the fact, as Nations (2001)
maintains, that instead of having to give close attention to each part, the chunk is seen
26
chunk, it is treated as a basic existing unit (p. 320). Similarly, according to Favreau and
Segalowitz (1983, as cited by Lightbown and Spada, 2006, p. 39), the fact that
proficient language users can give their full attention to the overall meaning of a text or
conversation (whereas learners use more of their attention on processing the meaning of
individual words) helps to understand why second language readers need more time to
understood and stored, lexical items are available for immediate use.
[...] in addition to understanding the input the learner must notice the
optimal intake, understanding and noticing the chunks are both necessary
It is unlikely that teachers will discover what exactly happens in the mind of
their students during silent reading, but it is possible to draw some conclusions from the
way students read aloud. Based on my observations, students often chunk incorrectly
while reading aloud because they do not understand what they are reading, and
conversely, they do not understand because they chunk incorrectly. It is helpful when
the students are encouraged to read the text several times, or when they get an
opportunity to hear the text. Phrased meaningfully, the introductory paragraph of CITR
There were only two Americans\ stopping at the hotel. They did not know\ any of
the people\ they passed on the stairs\ on their way\ to and from their room. Their
27
room\ was on the second floor\ facing the sea. It also faced\ the public garden\
and the war monument. There were big palms\ and green benches\ in the public
garden. In the good weather\ there was always an artist\ with his easel. Artists
liked the way\ the palms grew\ and the bright colors\ of the hotels\ facing the
gardens\ and the sea. Italians came\ from a long way off\ to look up\ at the war
monument. It was made of bronze\ and glistened\ in the rain. It was raining. The
rain dropped\ from the palm trees. Water stood in pools\ on the gravel paths.
The sea broke\ in a long line\ in the rain\ and slipped back\ down the beach\ to
come up\ and break again\ in a long line\ in the rain. The motor cars\ were
gone\ from the square\ by the war monument. Across the square\ in the doorway
The American wife\ stood at the window\ looking out. Outside\ right under their
window\ a cat was crouched\ under one of the dripping green tables. The cat\
was trying\ to make herself so compact\ that she would not be dripped on.
It might be interesting to mention that more than forty years ago, the possibility
However, after two minor experiments and a thorough major experiment, Carver (1969)
concluded that for mature readers, the chunking of reading material did not produce
faster reading rates with no loss in comprehension per passage or did not produce higher
comprehension scores with no decrement in reading rate. These results suggested that
the spatial separation of reading material into meaningfully related groups of words
would probably not improve the reading efficiency of mature readers, reading at their
normal rate, regardless of the method used to separate the material (p. 11).
28
Even nowadays the methodology of chunking approach is open to some
criticism. Michael Swan (2006), for example, argues that it might seem disappointing,
but most non-native speakers must settle for the acquisition of a variety characterized by
argues, languages are difficult and cannot be learned perfectly (section on Realism and
Prioritising).
It has been shown that reading and getting meaning from texts is a complex
process. Nuttall (2005) argues that whenever we read, we use both top-down and
one predominates, sometimes the other, but they are both needed. In top-down
processing we draw on our own intelligence and experience – the predictions we can
make, based on the schemata we have acquired – to understand the text (p. 16). A top-
down approach makes use of all that the reader brings to the text; prior knowledge,
common sense, etc. In bottom-up processing the reader builds up a meaning from
recognizing the letters and words, working out sentence structure. We scrutinize the
vocabulary and syntax to make sure we have grasped the plain sense correctly (p. 17).
Huang (2009) explains the distinction between the top-down and bottom-up
29
Classroom reading practices which are based on bottom-up strategies
students are not encouraged to go beyond these strategies, they may learn
comprehend a written text. However, it should be stressed again that if it is a text with
lexical and structural difficulty that will overwhelm the students, or if the language used
is simply of little relevance in terms of their language means, they will never be able to
grasp the meaning properly. The following chapter will attempt to show that there is no
such danger related to CITR; the text is relevant to the intermediate L2 classroom, even
though the teacher may occasionally need to provide some additional support to help the
30
Chapter Five: Cat in the Rain – analysis and implications
Top-down perspective
In real life, we read with a certain purpose in mind – reading is always meaning based.
As seen in the previous chapter, getting meaning from texts can be a challenging task,
especially for an L2 learner, who may need a lot of help and support from the teacher.
The following pages intend to look at some of the numerous ways of helping learners to
support and, almost as a side effect, the discussion will also offer a variety of
possibilities of exploiting the text for promoting language learning. Thornbury (2005)
context familiarity
visual support
length
organization of text
The following sections will look at some of the factors in turn (although not
31
Meaning and schemata
satisfied with achieving a minimal level of comprehension via quick and basic
translation. If they are able to translate the words into their L2, then they assume they
have understood the text (p. 49). According to Barnett (1989), foreign language reading
can no longer be seen as simply the decoding of more or less unknown vocabulary and
that an individual reader will create for any particular text. Barnett argues that the text is
still essential, but comprehension truly depends on the reader's expectations as defined
by his or her linguistic proficiency, first language reading skill, reading strategies,
interest and purpose in reading the text, and formal schemata (p. 111).
generalized knowledge about objects and events (Lazar, 2007, p. 9). According to
Nuttall (2005), the kinds of assumptions we make about the world depend on what we
have experienced and how our minds have organized the knowledge which we have got
from our experiences. She describes a schema as a mental structure which derives from
includes the relationship between its component parts. Schema is a useful concept in
understanding how we are able to interpret texts (p. 7). Similarly, Anderson (1999)
describes a schema as the reader’s background knowledge which includes all experience
how texts can be organized rhetorically, knowledge of how the first language works,
knowledge how the second language works, and cultural background and knowledge,
32
So what is the students’ schema of a cat in the rain? In order to discover this,
students may be encouraged to visualize a cat in the rain, or asked to find different
pictures of cats to describe. Do they all share the same schemata? The author expects us
to share the attitude to a cat in the rain, but different readers fail to tune in to the same
feeling. Some readers are indifferent, or some even hate cats, so the story may have a
different impact on them. After reading, students can compare the new schema with the
author’s one. Is it different? What does Hemingway’s cat look like? The same can be
done with the main characters. Students can draw or find a picture that matches their
idea.
However, Anderson (1999) suggests that some readers may not have prior
knowledge to activate at all. In such a case, it will be necessary for the teacher to
establish background prior to asking the students to read so that they have sufficient
As will be shown later, the story does not exhibit any major difficulties in
The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come
students know, a student who has no schema of the sea, and the way water in it moves,
might face serious difficulties when deriving meaning from the sentence. It is the
teacher’s job to help the student activate the schema (or to create it). As translation is
rather problematic here, especially the part the sea broke in a long line, the teacher can
help the student visualize the scene. The Internet provides teachers with useful tools –
33
especially visual aids – and students’ holiday snapshots taken at the seaside can also be
argues, if students’ background knowledge interferes with reading, the teacher may
have to correct the background knowledge through a pre-reading activity before reading
This section has defined the term schema and explained why it is desirable to
activate students’ background knowledge. The following sections will outline some
One of the classroom techniques which can be used to facilitate the activation of
knowledge and the most likely schema that underlies the text. We predict all the time as
we read. We predict right from the beginning – from the title. In our story the title is
somewhat tricky because the cat and the rain are central, but also symbolic, which
readers to see what they know about the topic. Anderson (1999) argues that if readers
make predictions about what they think the text content will be, they can then read to
support or reject their hypothesis. This particular activation would need to be tied into
activities that are used during later phases of the reading lesson, particularly an activity
Broughton et al. (1978) argue that most English native speakers faced with the
beginning part of a sentence would be likely to predict how the sentence might continue
34
(p. 91). Similarly, Nuttall (2005) writes, “Prediction also helps us to make sense of
sentences; even the first word sets up the expectancies of what the next word will be,
and as the sentence develops, our ability to predict what comes next often increases” (p.
13). Nuttall illustrates the point with the following activity (which has been adjusted to
the introductory sentence of CITR). Students are asked to take a card to cover the
exercise. They try to guess the correct answer and move the card down the page until
There be|five|were
This exercise demonstrates how grammatical features and meaning both influence what
we expect to come next in a sentence. As the text grew, the student became able to use
meaning to choose between grammatically suitable options, because they had a growing
understanding of what the sentence was about. Similarly, in longer texts both structure
and meaning help us to predict. This kind of longer term prediction is one of the
attractions of stories; speculation about what will happen urges us to read to the end
Another prediction activity is looking at the key words before reading. From a
linguistic point of view, keywords are the words that are far more frequent in the text,
35
proportionally, than they are in a general reference corpus. Key words are usually
content words and they are nouns (Thornbury, 2005). Complet Lexical Tutor (Cobb,
2008) – a web-based tool for analysing texts from various perspectives – has generated
signora monument kitty palm doorway maid gravel umbrella rain path mirror
Compleat Lexical Tutor cannot, however, do all the work. On the one hand, key words
are always central to meaning. On the other hand, this thesis deals with a literary text
and therefore, more factors must be taken into consideration; mathematical calculations
are precise but they cannot reveal everything – the reader must read between the lines.
brainstorming. The readers may be given a key word or concepts that will be part of the
reading material. They are then asked to generate words and concepts they associate
with the key word. Semantic mapping allows students to link ideas and concepts they
already know to the new concept that will be learned, thus helping to build prior
Feinberg (2009) has created a helpful resource called Wordle – a web-based tool
generating ‘word clouds’ from a selected text. The clouds give greater prominence to
words that appear more frequently in the source text. This image can be used as a pre-
As Figure 1 shows, the most prominent words generated from CITR are the
words cat and want. When the pre-reading activity was piloted, students came up with
their ideas and predictions such as: Somebody (George or his wife) wants a cat because
36
he or she likes cats. George likes reading. The wife likes looking out of the window. It is
raining. George stood in the square. George is American. Students’ ideas were recorded
and later, after reading, the predictions were compared with what actually happened in
the story.
Asking questions to help learners activate background knowledge and understand the
text
reading comprehension. A pre-reading discussion on the type of text structure, and what
expectations a reader may have about the organization of the material, is very valuable
37
also assist learners in making early connections between previous
can also incite interest in a story or text, gathering the attention of the
But questions can also be asked at other stages of reading. According to Doff
(1991), there are two main aims in asking questions on a text; to check understanding
and to help students read the text (p. 175). Doff argues that it is best to ask short,
simple questions which help to break down the meaning of the text and make it easier
to understand. Students may only be required to give short answers as the aim is to
check comprehension, not to get students to reproduce the text. Students may be
allowed to keep their books open, so that they can refer to the text to answer the
good to ask the teacher’s own questions first. The appended questions can be answered
As written by Tsai and Wilkinson (n.d.) in their paper, the effect of text-based
variety of empirical studies, which have shown that features of whole-class discussion
were positively related to the student’s reading comprehension and literary response (n.
p.).
comprehension, for teachers to ask critical thinking questions from all levels of Bloom’s
Taxonomy. Questions at higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy can be modified so that the
language is simplified but the task remains the same (n. p.). Nelson (2011) adds to this
topic: “Set aside the fact that comprehension is the second classification level of
Bloom’s Taxonomy, assessing true reading compression skills must reach across the
38
levels of the cognitive domain” (n. p.). Here is a list of suggested questions and tasks
5. How does Hemingway address George in the first half of the story, and then in
the same time that the person asking the questions already knows the answers.
Although Widdowson maintains that this practice emphasizes the artificiality of the
learning process (p. 96), the above examples show that well-designed questions and
tasks may have no definite answers (at least those from the higher levels of Bloom’s
Taxonomy). In fact, the only definite answer could be the one to question number one.
While answering question two, the learners can be quite creative, although they have
to stick to the details given in the text. Some learners may consider the wife a negative
character, while others may feel sorry for her, which will be reflected in the way they
describe her. Nevertheless, the most interesting open questions will inevitably emerge
at the end of the story: What kind of cat did the maid actually bring? Why did she do
it? Did this make the girl happy? At this point, students may also talk about their own
experience related to the topic, and they can discuss their wishes, hopes, expectations,
39
Another way to eliminate the artificiality of the learning process is encouraging
students to ask their own questions (while reading or after reading). Based on my
experience, this is what small children do while being read to; they jump in and ask
questions when they do not understand, or when something captures their attention. The
parent usually provides a gloss or answers the question, or sometimes the child’s
reaction does not require any response at all. As Nuttall (2005) suggests, one of the
most important things students have to learn is to interrogate texts; to continually stop
and ask themselves questions. Students’ attention should be focused on the text,
especially on pieces of the text that are important and problematic; things that can give
rise to misunderstanding texts. In the early days, the teacher may like to talk through
some texts in this way with the class, thinking aloud about the questions the text raises
(p.37). However, the teacher will first need to create the kind of atmosphere that
motivates students to ask questions. As there are not many opportunities to ask genuine
questions in the classroom, this will be a valuable exercise, particularly for intermediate
students, who still make basic errors (due to their interlanguage and L1 transfer). The
teacher can ask students to read the first sentence and answer the following question:
There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. > Were there only two
people at the hotel? > We don’t know. Maybe. At this point, the sentence looks
ambiguous but while reading on, the same question can be asked again.
They did not know any of the people they passed on the stairs on their way to
and from their room. > Were there only two people at the hotel? > No. Was the
hotel in America? > We don’t know. Maybe. We cannot say at this point.
Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. > Was the
40
Then the students can go on asking their own questions. From my reading
experience, this is what happens when reading. The meaning is constantly reconstructed
As discussed earlier in the thesis, CITR is organized in a particular way to convey the
author’s message. Barnett (1989) argues that, as research on formal schemata shows,
readers' familiarity with standard text structures (description of the place, characters,
chronological sequence, etc.) and their ability to recognize and follow structure help
them comprehend. Teachers may need at first to identify text structure for beginning or
weaker readers; later, students should learn to recognize it on their own. The teacher
will not always be there to lead them; moreover, too much direction can destroy reader
interest (p. 118). Once students perceive that a text belongs to a certain familiar genre,
many unfamiliar words and even sentence structures may become less difficult. Since
first language readers generally know (from source, title, or illustrations) the genre of
a text they are about to read, it is fair to enlighten foreign language students before they
begin reading and to ask what they know about that genre (p. 119).
genre pattern or familiar story line; some have a particularly appropriate title or helpful
illustrations; some require more introduction and background explanation than others;
some have an absurd or ironic twist. Previewing a text with students should arouse their
interest and help them approach reading more meaningfully and purposefully as the
discussion compels them to think about the situation or points raised in a text (p. 123).
41
Every text is organized in a specific way, and it is not incidental. What principle
the text, the students can spot at first sight that there is an introductory paragraph, and
the rest of the text consists of stretches of direct and indirect speech. These direct
speech interruptions may promise that the reading is not too challenging as the
sentences are usually shorter, sometimes consisting of only two words. And why did
Hemingway give a description of the place at first? There were only two Americans
stopping at the hotel? Why did he start like this? A possible answer was offered in the
Density of information
As was implied in the section on authentic texts and ideology, when a careful reader
tries to decipher the meaning and the writer’s point of view, he or she does so by
looking closely at what is in the text, but more importantly, especially with literary
texts, at what is not in the text. Good writing gets the most from the least, and it often
leaves a lot unsaid. As Thornbury (2005) writes, one of the features of good literature is
its economy. It is the unsaid that is as important as what is said. He argues, “Only at
hinting at something can there be resonance” (p. 137). So in a literary text, the problem
may not be that there is too much information, but that there is too little. Lazar (2007)
maintains that if the readers possess the schemata assumed by the writer, they easily
understand what is said in the text and also make the necessary inferences about what is
This can be well exploited in the classroom; when discussing CITR, the
following questions can be asked: Who are the people from the story? How did they
42
arrive at the hotel? Do they have children? How long have they been married? What
kind of life do they lead in their own country? What class are they? None of this is
explicitly said, and the students will have to use various hints and their imagination to
Hemingway's title to his story carries more meaning than the literal cat in the
rain. The story talks about a cat stuck in the rain. There are many interpretations
Ernest-Hemingway-s-Cat-975070.html or http://voices.yahoo.com/the-true-meaning-
ask students to read those interpretations and compare them with their own ideas. At
this point, students will get beyond the text and will be exposed to additional language
Text Cohesion
If speakers of English hear or read a passage of the language which is more than one
sentence in length, they can normally decide without difficulty whether it forms
a unified whole or is just a collection of unrelated sentences (Halliday & Hasan, 1976,
p. 1). Cohesion is one of the features which distinguish a text from a random collection
makes texts hang together (and thus makes them coherent). If a text is not cohesive, it is
not coherent – it does not make sense to the reader. Writers intentionally use cohesive
devices with the aim to make their texts easier to follow (p. 36). In other words,
43
In CITR there are not many explicit linking words which connect the sentences.
In the first paragraph, only one can be found in the fourth sentence, and it refers back to
the previous sentence. (It also faced the public garden and war monument). However,
the text is tightly cohesive as the author uses a great deal of grammatical reference. In
the story there are precisely thirty-five instances of the additive conjunct and, seven
instances of the causal so, three examples of the temporal then, and only one example of
the adversative but. Furthermore, pronouns and the definite article refer back or forward
to someone (or something), making the text cohesive. They can also refer outside the
text to their referents. Table 2 shows the number of occurrences of pronouns and the
Table 2
Reference Occurrence
the 118
she 34
her 17
he 13
his 12
their 6
they 3
him 2
The teacher can ask the students to identify these referents. Their room was on
the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and war monument.
44
What does it refer to? Identifying the referent correctly can help the students
Table 3
Lexical cohesion – repetition of lexical items in the introductory paragraph of CITR and
rain/raining 5
war monument 3
square 3
palms/palm trees 3
face/faced/facing 3
sea 3
(public) garden(s) 3
dripping/dripped 2
window 2
room 2
hotel(s) 2
cat 2
artist(s) 2
American(s) 2
in a long line 2
broke/break 2
45
But what is even more striking than the amount of grammatical cohesion in the
repetition and lexical chains (see Table 3). The passage, consisting of 212 words, almost
feels like an excerpt from a children’s book. At the top of Table 3 there is rain and
raining with 5 occurrences. However, the words dripping and dripped with 2
occurrences are also related to rain, which would make 7 occurrences altogether.
The analysis of lexical cohesion is closely related to the concept of key words –
the repetition is apparently an attempt to enhance the message of the story, and a careful
reader may notice that the words related to water (rain, raining, dripping, dripped) are
crucial to meaning. This can also be ascertained via cross-reference to the author’s own
life experience.
across text on the basis of multiple repetitions. In the above mentioned set of sentences
(Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public garden and
war monument.), the verb face appears twice, although in different forms, which is not
only useful for comprehension, but also for vocabulary acquisition. The more often a
word is met, the better the chances are it will be remembered. In his volume on patterns
of lexis in text, Hoey (1991) argues that words should be learned in the morphological
forms in which they are encountered because they may be the most frequent forms in
use (p. 240). Drawing on the evidence from British National Corpus (accessed via
that the verb face will be encountered most frequently in the form face, but the forms
46
Table 4
faced)
VVD – the past tense form of lexical verbs (e.g. faced) 1,579
But learners can also benefit from observing cohesion in authentic texts at the
productive level – when producing their own texts. Hoey (1991) argues, for example,
that the traditional advice to avoid repetition in writing needs to be couched with special
care. Learners should not be encouraged to say the same thing over and over again, but
they should be advised to make connection not only between what they are saying and
what they said before, but also with what they later intend to say (p. 243). In order to
make language a lot more expressive and interesting, students should be encouraged to
vary the words they use as often as possible. Synonyms (and also hypernyms) are useful
for making one’s writing cohesive and more attractive. Apart from printed dictionaries,
Furthermore, students’ attention should be drawn to the fact that the linking
47
characteristically use repetition devices to connect over a considerable distance in a text,
whereas L2 learners tend to repeat at shorter distances, typically within the paragraph
boundaries (p. 242). In the following passage, the whole clause is an attempt to make
the story cohesive. It refers back to the sentence, which appears earlier in the text.
As she stood in the doorway an umbrella opened behind her. It was the maid
“You must not get wet,” she smiled, speaking Italian. Of course, the hotel-
With the maid holding the umbrella over her, she walked along the gravel path
Here, the repetition occurs within one paragraph for obvious reasons – the
sequencing of the events. However, there are instances where the author connects what
he is saying to something he has said earlier (through lexical repetition again). In the
same passage above, the gravel path refers to the same gravel path mentioned in the
introductory paragraph. The first mention of gravel path appears on the 130th and 131st
position in the text, and the second mention is 333 words later. Here is another example
It is the very first sentence of the story. The use of the definite article indicates
that some additional information will follow, since the reader does not and cannot know
what hotel the author has in mind. At this point, Hemingway is already making
connection to what he is going to say later; he already has the knowledge of the hotel,
which he is going to share with the reader. This way of sequencing is typical for the
narrative literary text type (starting a story with a piece of information of which the
48
The most obvious conclusion to emerge from this section is that if students
observe how cohesion is achieved in authentic texts, their own writing improves
should become one of the priorities at the intermediate level of proficiency in Czech
state schools.
Bottom-up perspective
limited experience with reading in L2, let alone with authentic literary texts. Thus for
individual readings, teachers should find a balance between texts that are too long or
difficult and texts that do not challenge students adequately. A variety of bottom-up
factors should be considered before students are exposed to a specific text. However, it
would be wrong to assume that top-down and bottom-up factors affecting text difficulty
can be strictly divided into two separate categories; in fact, some factors fall into both
categories, depending on the researcher’s point of view. Here is, for example,
grammatical familiarity
As will be shown later, these factors do not work separately; they interact and
interweave. So if one of the factors appears problematic, it is not a reason for rejecting
49
the text, but for providing further instructional support. When looking at CITR from the
bottom-up perspective, this thesis focuses on the sentence length, syntactic complexity,
Sentence length
CITR is not a lengthy text; it is a very short story, with about 1,200 words and 117
sentences. In this thesis the term sentence will be used to refer to a grammatical unit
consisting of one or more words that bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that
precede or follow it, a string of words that are not arbitrary in their sequence (Plag,
Braun, Lappe & Schramm, 2007), or orthographic units that are contained between full
instances of sentences which include all the usual sentence constituents – subject, verb,
object and adverbial (“I wanted it so much,” she said.). However, not all the sentences
are full sentences, which is not surprising in literary fiction, which usually contains
fabricated utterances simulating genuine conversation (“A cat in the rain?”). Based on
my experience as an L2 reader, reading feels much easier when the text includes short
exchanges which interrupt long stretches of language. This point will be discussed in
the following section, where the text and sentence length will come into play again.
Syntactic complexity
As the text consists of 117 sentences and about 1,200 words, the average sentence
length is ten words. This indicates that from a syntactic point of view, the text is
relatively easy to read. The longest sentence consists of 31 words (And I want it to be
50
spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want
some new clothes.), whereas the shortest one has only two words. Forty-five sentences
are in direct speech (or parts of direct speech). The majority of the non-direct-speech
sentences (42 out 72) are sentences containing only one clause (She opened the door of
the room.). Six sentences are clause complexes, in Hallidayan terms (1985), containing
one independent clause and at least one dependent clause (She liked the way he wanted
to serve her). Finally, there are 24 clause complexes composed of at least two
independent clauses joined by a coordinator (She went over and sat in front of the
mirror of the dressing table.). Even one of the most complex sentences is not too
daunting, but definitely challenging enough for intermediate students (With the maid
holding the umbrella over her, she walked along the gravel path until she was under
their window.). However, there are some problematic passages, such as the following
sentence containing 29 words: The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back
down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. As mentioned
earlier, this sentence may be confusing not just because it is so long and complex – it
also needs to be chunked correctly, and the reader must have an appropriate schema of
the sea.
quantifiable linguistic and textual factors. The following version of the Flesch-Kincaid
features of word and sentence length. The original Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level formula
(OFKF) and the simplified Flesch-Kincaid (SFKF) read as follows (Hedgcock & Ferris,
2009):
51
ASL refers to the average sentence length (the number of words divided by the
number of sentences), and ASW refers to the average number of syllables per word (the
formula is particularly useful for teachers, parents, and librarians to use because the
value converts to a U.S. grade school level (the Flesch-Kincaid Level). The readability
score of the first paragraph of CITR has been calculated for illustration. As the passage
contains 15 sentences, 194 words, and 246 syllables, the formula reads as follows:
The result 4.3 is the equivalent of grade 4 text in U.S. grade school system. However, it
should be stressed that the overall score is lower, since the sentences in the introductory
Internet provides teachers with various tools for quick text analysis. Readability can be
for texts are available. The Text Consensus Readability Tool will analyse the selected
text and calculate the number of sentences, words, syllables, and characters in the
sample. The program takes the output of these numbers and plugs them into seven
readability formulas. These readability formulas will output the reading level and grade
level of the text and help to judge if the audience can read the selected material. The
results can be read in several ways. Firstly, according to seven reading formulas
provided by the website (Flesch-Kincaid being one of them), the Readability Consensus
score of CITR is 5, and the text is marked as very easy to read (see Figure 2).
52
Figure 2. CITR Readability Consensus retrieved from ReadabilityFormulas.com: Part 1
However, as Figure 3 shows, another sample of the text, including mainly direct
speech utterances, displays a lower score (when measuring the score, the text had to be
divided into two parts as the pasted sample must be between 150–600 words).
Figure 4. U.S. Grade Level Conversion Table graph statistics retrieved from
ReadabilityFormulas.com.
53
Furthermore, the graph statistic (see Figure 4) shows that CITR could be easily
speakers of the target language with L2 learners is rather subjective. However, the Word
Statistics (see Figure 5) can provide the teacher with a valuable source of information. It
shows, for instance, all the unique words – as opposed to repeated words. This can be
useful for teachers and students when identifying key words, or when analysing text
cohesion.
It should be stressed, though, that one of the problems with lexical statistics is
that they do not take account of ‘other’ uses of words which typically manifest in
breaks into pieces or stops working. But the sea breaks is quite different. It is clear that
the meanings of words are related to word grammar. Grammar will be the subject of
very easy to read. However, the fact that CITR is easy to read does not necessarily mean
54
Grammar
Halliday (1985) sees a text as a semantic unit, not a grammatical one, but without
Language, he argues, is a system for making meanings; a semantic system, with other
systems for encoding the meanings it produces. He sees grammar as naturally related to
meaning (p. xvii). Similarly, Hoey (2005) argues that lexis is systematically structured
(they identify the lexical meaning of words, which exist out of context, but they also
create a broader meaning for these words within the context of phrase, sentence, and
within a sentence). Fluent readers rely more on semantic than syntactic information,
except when meaning is not clear (p. 70). Similarly, Broughton et al. (1978) maintain
that an efficient reader must have a clear understanding of the grammatical relationships
which hold between the lexical items. Good readers need to grasp the semantics of a
particular grammatical item in a particular context. They also need to be familiar with
subordinating one clause to another, choosing one tense over another, or the way of
relating sentences are the proper subject of the good reader’s attention (p. 95). “The
skilled reader makes use of the information, the signals, passed to him by the lexical and
grammatical patterns to discover the architecture of the passage, the framework upon
This point can be illustrated by the following example from CITR: The sea
slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain. Why
did Hemingway use infinitive here? The meaning would not change significantly if a
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different structure was used (The sea slipped back down the beach and came up and
broke again in a long line in the rain), but authors choose their words and grammar
carefully. In the classroom, the teacher can juxtapose the two sentences and ask the
students if they can feel any difference in meaning. To make the task easier, the students
can, for example, discuss the difference between I came home to have a rest and I came
Thornbury (2005) argues that the grammar that is embedded in texts is bound to
feature of other complex systems: its smallest self-standing components (its texts) are
Thornbury (2001, 2005) argues that the teacher should develop students’ ability to
for learning. It is not enough to “throw the chunks of language at learners”; their
attention must be drawn to them (Thornbury, 2012). The Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt,
1990), proposing that input does not become intake for language learning unless it is
consciously registered, has been known for some time. On the other hand, as Rothman
cannot be a prerequisite for learning, since native speakers have vast intuitive
advanced L2 learners also have vast intuitive knowledge that is closer to native speaker
intuitions than to the simplified rules that are taught in language classes. Through
exposure, they have acquired more than they have been taught.
display language features, it can be used as an effective vehicle for emphasizing textual
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Corpora show that some words and phrases are predominantly used in literary fiction
(2001) maintains that the particular nature of the text will determine, for example, how
frequent certain grammatical words are and their frequencies relative to other function
words (p. 206). Thus the conjunction whereas or adverbial particle hence will be fairly
frequent in an academic thesis, while they may not be encountered so often in a short
story, where words such as well, oh, yes will be more common. Otherwise, it is difficult
to distinguish a literary text from a non-literary one, because any seemingly non-literary
The following pages of this chapter shall argue that CITR is suitable for
intermediate L2 learners because it mainly contains language appropriate for this level
Patterns in texts
The traditional approach to teaching grammar assumes that there is something the
learners do not know and the teacher’s role is to provide them with that knowledge.
Thornbury (2001) looks at grammar from a different point of view; he believes that
there is something that the learners can already do, and that the teacher’s role is to help
them to do it more effectively (p.78). Thornbury’s ‘emergent’ view of grammar has the
following implications:
Work from texts and topics rather than from a structural syllabus.
Talk to the learners and scaffold their emergent language (p. 78).
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The question which needs to be addressed now is what constitutes a pattern.
Thornbury (2001) sees a pattern as any regularity that has productive potential, i.e.
which can act as a template for the creation of novel utterances. In Thornbury’s words,
patterns in language cut across the traditional boundaries between vocabulary and
grammar, and they are everywhere – they “ripple through whole texts” (p.67).
recurs with more than chance frequency, a quick Google search will show many more
patterns in a text than the standard grammar syllabus accounts for. This gives the
teacher an idea of how the text is intensely and intricately patterned (blog comment C is
– will provide a list of patterns in which the query word is conventionally used. One of
the patterns recurring in the story is [pronoun/noun] liked the way [pronoun/noun]
[verb].
StringNet then provides the teacher with other patterns in which the word way
frequently occurs.
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For an intermediate Czech learner of English the word way is quite interesting, as the
Czech equivalent for examples 1, 2, and 3 is different from the one in example 4.
…and the bright colors of the hotels facing the gardens and the sea.
And here are more patterns in which the verb frequently appears:
1. let’s face it
2. be faced with
3. problem faced by [adj] [noun]
Again, the verb in the chunk taken from CITR has a different meaning and a different
is/are/was/were, which is another problematic area for Czech learners. This structure is
There were big palms and green benches in the public garden.
In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel.
1. There is no doubt
2. There is no need
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3. There is no reason
4. There is no way
5. There is no evidence
This way of dealing with grammar takes the teachers (and the students) beyond
the text. And the teachers can go as far as they wish. Thus one text consisting of only
‘Small’ words
Not being a highly inflected language, English makes use almost entirely of
grammatical words (or function words), such as auxiliary verbs, determiners, and
Francis & Kučera (1982, as cited in Nation, 2001, p. 206), the approximately 270
function word types (176 word families) account for 43–44% of the running words in
most texts. These ‘small’ words (Thornbury, 2009–2013) serve to make connections
across stretches of text (e.g. and, so, but), to connect utterances to their context (here,
now, this), and to manage speaker turns (well, oh, yes). They have the highest degree of
connectivity with other words; the most frequent patterns that are formed by these
Thus learning about the behaviour of these words, including their constructional
properties, is the key to learning the structure of English. Learners often do not notice
small words and the teacher’s job is to make them salient (Thornbury, 2009–2013, blog
The Compleat Lexical Tutor (Cobb, 2008) has extracted the following list of
function words from CITR (see the Figure 6). A simple cloze test (for example an on-
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line one created at http://www.lextutor.ca/cloze/vp/cloze_make.pl) can draw students’
Figure 6. The list of function words in CITR extracted by Compleat Lexical Tutor.
The reason why small words remain unnoticed may be related to the fact that
shorter words have a lower semantic load. While Zipf (1936) showed that the length of
a word correlated with how often it was used, and that short words were used more
frequently than long ones, according to Piantadosi, Tily, and Gibson (as cited in Ball,
2011), to convey a given amount of information, it is more efficient to shorten the least
informative – and therefore the most predictable – words, rather than the most frequent
ones. After analysing word use in 11 different European languages (Czech and English
being two of them), Piantadosi and colleagues found that word length more closely
correlated with their information content than with how often they were used.
Piantadosi et al. make the assumption that the more predictable a word is, the less
informative it is, and they suggest that the relationship of word length to information
content might not only make it more efficient to convey information linguistically, but
also make language cognition a smoother ride for the reader or listener (cited in Ball,
This would have some important pedagogical implications. Firstly, what can be
a highly predictable word for a native speaker of English may be an unpredictable one
for an L2 learner, who has not had so much exposure to the target language. And if
English makes use almost entirely of small words, and one of the priorities of ELT is to
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help an intermediate student of English become a fluent user of the target language, the
importance of small (and short) words is evident. Obviously, a distinction must be made
between a small word (i.e. a function word) and a short word. In this respect, the words
pub (a content word, semantically loaded) and the (a function word, carrying little
meaning) cannot be considered of one kind, even though they both consist of three
letters.
Articles
This passage will focus on two ‘small’ words that are among the five most frequent
words in English – the articles. In CITR, there are 118 instances of the definite article,
29 instances of the indefinite article a, and three instances of an. Articles occupy more
The advantage of using an authentic text and its content as the starting point of a
lesson is that the teacher does not have to be restricted by the grammar sections of the
textbook. Moreover, as the examples below show, textbooks and grammar books do not
maintains that “the definite and indefinite article must win the prize for having the most
nonsense written about them in coursebooks and student grammars” (blog comment A is
for Articles). He gives the following example: “We use the indefinite article when we
are talking about a single countable noun in a general non-specific way or when we
introduce it for the first time: There was a car outside the bank.”
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Looking at an example from CTIR, nouns such as sea, public garden, war
monument, and square are mentioned for the first time, even though the definite article
was used: Their room was on the second floor facing the sea. It also faced the public
garden and the war monument. The motor cars were gone from the square by the war
monument.
It is essential to raise this problem in the class, mainly because articles are not
found in Czech. Thornbury (2009–2013) argues that the definite article can only be
taught, explained and practised in contexts that are normally larger than a sentence. It is
less a grammatical item than a feature of discourse (and also of pragmatics). Similarly,
Lightbow and Spada (2006) write that as the article system in English is both complex
and abstract and notoriously difficult to teach, it may be better to learn about articles via
simple ‘rule of thumb’ is provided. Thus the definite article can be contrasted, for
example, with determiners this and that, which do have their equivalents in Czech. The
indefinite article can be explained as meaning one. However, articles remain a persistent
problem for learners and require plenty of patience, exposure to the target language and
corrective feedback.
Phrasal verbs
From my teaching and learning experience, phrasal verbs belong to the most
problematic areas of English lexico-grammar. They are notoriously difficult for Czech
learners to learn, and they are often avoided at the intermediate level of proficiency,
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Grammars typically claim that phrasal verbs consist of a verb and a particle
(a preposition or adverb) or a verb and two particles (an adverb and a preposition). This
particle adds a special meaning to the verb. They often – but not always – have a one-
word equivalent. Some phrasal verbs take an object (transitive); others do not take an
object (intransitive). They are important because they are frequent. Phrasal verbs are
items, to be learned in phrases and chunks (McCarthy & O’Dell, 2007, p. 6). When
dealing with CITR, teachers clearly do not need to overwhelm students with too much
metalanguage concerning phrasal verbs. Instead, students’ attention could be, for
Italians came from a long way off to look up at the war monument. (up = adverb)
The American wife stood at the window looking out (out = adverb) vs. look out
The examples below are listed among the ‘regular’ phrasal verbs at UsingEnglish.com
(http://www.usingenglish.com/):
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shut up…
Whether they are all ‘regular’ phrasal verbs is disputable and my teaching experience
shows that finding the correct answer is not relevant to the needs of the intermediate
classroom; it is more useful to encourage learners to notice them and use them in
example:
Sometimes the separable phrasal verbs only allow one choice of word order if the object
is a pronoun (She laid it down). It is so because the pronoun – which usually has back-
reference – seldom ever encodes new information, hence it looks unnatural at the end of
a sentence. The following rule can be found in traditional grammar books and
textbooks:
Ann’s asleep. Don’t wake her up. (not ‘wake up her’) (Murphy, 1985, p. 262).
However, there are some examples when the rule is not so strict but this is not taught in
traditional courses:
Because of the principle of putting the newest piece of information at the end of the
sentence, the first example sounds just as natural as the second one. (Thornbury, 2009–
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Gerund
as Tom Hutchinson, use the term gerund in their textbooks but others, for example
Murphy and Hewings prefer the term ‘-ing form’. Thornbury (2009–2013) writes that
there seems to be a whole range of -ing form uses that cover a spectrum from total
‘verby-ness’ to total ‘nouny-ness’ (not to mention total ‘adjectivey-ness’), and with lots
usually use the -ing form correctly when they are encouraged to use it. When they are
not pressured to use it, they will tend to avoid it and use what they assume to be more
of view, the -ing form is one of the most prominent features in the story. It is advisable
to draw the students’ attention to this grammatical area, especially because the English -
ing form is expressed in a different way in Czech. Various mime games, role plays and
visuals (magazine pictures, photos, or Google images) can be used to present and
Across the square in the doorway of the cafe a waiter stood looking out at the
empty square.
Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping
green tables.
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The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot
of the bed.
“Did you get the cat?” he asked, putting the book down.
“Wonder where it went to,” he said, resting his eyes from reading.
She went over and sat in front of the mirror of the dressing table looking at
There is one item which deserves special attention: She liked his old, heavy face
and big hands. Liking him she opened the door and looked out.
First, it should be stressed that in this sense, liking him is a rather unusual
construction; it primarily serves cohesion, i.e. it links the previous passage to the next
one, and it might have been used due to Hemingway’s economy of language. It is
almost impossible to translate this chunk literally into Czech, but students may attempt
suitable Czech equivalent, which can be carried out as a competition. Nation (2001)
argues that translation has the advantage of being quick, simple, and easily understood
(p. 86). However, a word of warning is necessary here; Nation maintains that the major
drawback of translation is that its use may encourage other use of the first language that
reduces the time available for use of the second language. Moreover, translating literary
texts is an art that requires a sophisticated knowledge of the native language as well as
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requires a sensitivity to nuances and subtleties of meaning, speech registers, and levels
of style in English and a perceptive awareness of the flexibility and potentialities of the
when students are constantly being told by their teachers and grammar books that the
verb like is an example of a stative verb, never used in the progressive form. According
to BNC, however, the form liking is not so unusual (618 hits/5.5 per million). So the
grammar book can only be a generalized representation of the language system, just an
consequence, many rules that one can find in grammar books are inadequate, or even
wrong, since they do not represent the reality of language; and this is especially true for
rules in grammar books for less advanced students (Plag et al., 2007, p. 107).
Vocabulary
constructed meaning. According to Broughton et al. (1978), the most salient of all
elements of language are words and part of what is involved in understanding a text is
Laufer (1992, as cited in Nation, 2001, p. 146) was interested in determining the
minimal language proficiency level where a teacher can usefully switch from
skills. Her studies have shown that the 3,000 word family level is a minimum for the
reading of unsimplified text. In this thesis the term word family is used to describe the
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base form of a word plus its inflected forms and derived forms made from affixes (Hirsh
Hu and Nation’s study (as cited in Nation, 2001, p. 147) found that for largely
unassisted reading for pleasure, learners would need to know around 98% of the
running words in a fiction text. With this coverage almost all learners have a chance of
guidelines for teachers to use in determining if the correct books were being selected for
classroom. In order to read independently, the reader must have 90% comprehension. If
they do not have that 90%, they cannot actually understand all that they are reading or
they cannot do it independently. If the comprehension level drops to about 75%, they
have reached the ‘instructional’ level or ‘teaching’ level. This is the level which
children use in schools if they are being taught reading. If the reader drops below that,
particularly if they come down to 50% or less, they become frustrated. It is impossible
for anyone to read if they understand only 50% or less, or maybe even 60%. If a person
can understand when being read or spoken to, they have reached the so-called ‘capacity
level’, which is also called the ‘listening level’. Based on Betts’s framework, Anderson
(1999) suggests a strategy for selecting appropriate reading material. When reading,
students are asked to raise a finger for each new vocabulary they encounter. Depending
on the length of the page, if they have raised 10 fingers, perhaps the level of difficulty is
above their current level of reading and they should select something else to read (p.
117).
For the sake of illustration, a small group of intermediate students aged 14–15
were asked to read CITR once and highlight words they assume they do not know. The
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results in Table 5 show that although the students are in the same class, their vocabulary
knowledge is richly diverse. Not many objective conclusions can be drawn, though, as
the results are based on students’ subjective feelings. Nonetheless, there are some
interesting observations to be made, subjectivity being one of them. For the sake of
simplicity, the participants will from now on be labelled S1, S2, S3, S4 and S5.
Table 5
bowed X X X X
brutto X X
cape X X
clipped X X X
compact X
crouched X X
darn X X X X
dignity X X X X
dim X X X
dripped X X
dripping X
easel X X X X
eaves X X X X X
glistened X X X X
hand glass X
knot X X X
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Student 1 Student 2 Student 3 Student 4 Student 5
laid X
lap X
maid X X
padrone X X X X X
piove X X
propped up X X
purr X X X X
rubber X
serve X
shifted X X
smooth X
stood (up) X
stroke X X X
supreme X X X
swung X X
tempo X
tightened X X X
tortoise-shell X X X
waiter X
total number of 19 15 25 20 5
unknown words
difficulty is above his current level of reading, as he ‘raised his finger’ 12.5 times. This
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calculation is, however, highly relative and speculative, as the original text in the
collection is printed on three pages, while the copy with which students were working
only had two pages. The original printed version consists of 114 lines, though of
completing the task than S5 (with 5 unknown words). First of all, it should be stressed
that having marked five words as unknown does not necessarily mean that these are the
only words S5 does not know. This particular student is a very ambitious teenager who,
even though told that she should be absolutely honest, wanted to achieve the best score.
She cannot be blamed for the fact that she strived to guess the words from context to
avoid having to mark them. On the other hand, S4, one of the best students in the class,
highlighted words such as serve and waiter, which he knows and normally uses.
Furthermore, although some of the words appear in the story more than once, it
is interesting that two participants could not guess their meaning and marked them as
unknown. The word maid, for example, appears in the story seven times in various
The students might have failed to notice the cues because they had explicitly
been asked to search for unknown words. Or it may be that although they eventually
could guess the meaning, they did not take their initial choice back.
The case of dripping versus dripped is also worth attention. Three students
marked dripped as unknown and dripping as known, or vice versa, even though the
words are two forms of the same verb. But Nation (2001) points out that arriving at a
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correct guess from word part analysis can be tricky, and it is less sure, for example, than
The experiment can be taken two steps further. First, in order to minimize the
in Student 5’s case, the students could be asked to translate all the unknown words
collected from the five participants, and the words translated correctly would then be
added to the total number of unknown words. Second, in order to present absolutely
precise results, it would be necessary to ask the students to translate all the text, because
there is no guarantee that the words in Table 5 are all the words the students do not
know. However, this would not guarantee precise results either, as this thesis deals with
a literary text, and the fact that the students cannot translate an utterance does not
It is also important to mention that the story includes several Italian utterances
which the students treated inconsistently. It should be stressed that none of them claims
2) "Si, il gatto"
3) "Avanti!"
4) II piove
6) padrone
Table 5 shows that all students highlighted the word padrone, presumably under
the impression that it is an English word which they do not know. S3 marked brutto
tempo as one expression, while S4 only marked brutto. The same student also
underlined "Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signora?"and il gatto, while the other students
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perhaps finally arrived at the conclusion that there is no point in underlining words
other than English, or they could guess the meaning. Hemingway’s occasional code-
switching (in this case between the native language and the foreign language) can also
be well exploited in the EFL classroom. The following sets of exchanges between the
Italian speaking characters and the Americans demonstrate that Hemingway gives many
clues, helping the readers guess the meaning, even though they do not speak the
language.
1. ….the hotel owner stood up and bowed to her. – “Il piove,” the wife said.
2. “Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signora?”– “There was a cat,” said the
American girl.
The first exchange proves to be rather problematic, as four out of five students
marked bowed as unknown. That is why bowed could not be a clue for guessing the
meaning of Il piove. The question mark in the second exchange indicates that the
speaker is asking about something, and she gets the answer – a cat. The same thing
happens in exchange number 3, where the American wife speaking Italian confirms
what the Italian maid speaking English is asking about – it is the cat, again. When
someone knocks at the door, the person inside the room usually invites him or her in. So
avanti could also be guessed easily from the context and co-text. As Czech students are
familiar with both tempo – from Italian tempo (Online Etymology Dictionary) – they
can also deduce what brutto means, provided they take into consideration the co-text
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Vocabulary frequencies
There is a more objective way of finding out how difficult a text will be for students.
This involves two steps: (1) finding out how many of the most frequent words in
English the students know and (2) analysing the frequency ranges of vocabulary used in
Before the students were exposed to reading CITR, they were asked to complete
Nation’s Vocabulary Level Test (Nation, 1990). The test includes isolated words tested
with multiple choice meanings and words in non-defining contexts. The tests can be
used to see if learners know enough vocabulary to read (but it is important not to
As Table 6 shows, all the students did very well in the 1,000 word level test, S2
and S5 scoring the best (39 out of 39). S2 achieved the maximum score in the 2,000
word level test, and S1 had a fairly good result in the 3,000 word level test. In
comparison with S3, S2’s results declined gradually throughout the test levels (with one
exception in the 2,000 word level test, where he scored 100%). S3 did quite well in the
University Level test, but achieved a low score in the 5,000 word level test. This might
be due to the fact that the University Word Level Test includes vocabulary with which
Czech students are familiar – their cognates appear in school subjects such as biology or
science.
2008), 87% of the words in CITR are within the 3,000 frequency range. The rest of the
words are outside the 3,000 range (see Figure 7). Nation (2001) writes that to gain
adequate comprehension of the text, most readers would need to know 98% of the
running words in the text (p. 165). The results of Nation’s Vocabulary Level Test imply
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Table 6
1,000 38 39 37 34 39 39
2,000 15 18 12 13 8 18
3,000 16 15 13 12 11 18
5,000 9 10 3 4 10 18
University 9 9 8 7 4 18
10,000 8 5 3 7 1 18
dictionary use is rather time-consuming, unknown words can be glossed in texts for
second language learners. Guessing from context and glossing will be discussed later in
detail.
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As far as vocabulary frequencies are concerned, there are some further
pedagogical implications. Nation (2001) argues that when deciding which words should
be taught and learned, and which should be ignored, it is important to make a distinction
teachers need to deal with these two kinds of words in different ways (p. 21). Firstly,
English, like any language, has the habit of recycling a relatively small number of
words over and over again, and if the learners know these high-frequency words, their
investment (Cobb, 2008). Secondly, teachers may need to give most attention to less
frequent words in a particular text that are high-frequency words across a range of texts
The question that needs to be addressed now is how teachers find out what the
3,000 most frequent words in both spoken and written English, based on statistical
analysis of the 390 million words contained in the Longman Corpus Network – a group
3000 represents the core of the English language and shows students of English which
words are the most important for them to learn and study in order to communicate
effectively in both speech and writing. Analysis of the Longman Corpus Network shows
that these 3,000 most frequent words in spoken and written English account for 86% of
the language. This means that by knowing this list of words, a learner of English is in a
position to understand 86% or more of what he or she reads (which is, however, still
insufficient for adequate comprehension). There is a distinction between words that are
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in the top 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 most frequent words in written English, and the top
1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 most frequent words in spoken English. The words are
accompanied by special symbols S1, S2, S3 for spoken English and W1, W2, W3 for
written English.
Table 7
Note: S stands for spoken English and W for written English. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 refer
to the frequency ranges. The number following the slash refers to COCA frequencies.
Table 7 shows some of the words which the students marked as unknown and
their occurrences in Longman Communication 3000 and, for the sake of comparison, the
frequency ranks in COCA. The lower the rank, the more frequent the word is. The
words that are not listed here are outside the 3,000 frequency range in Longman
Communication 3000.
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The results show, for example, that the word rubber is not a very useful word for
students to learn, although it is one of the first words young learners of English
When reading a text, students will always need to make intelligent guesses as to the
meaning of unknown words. While Harmer (1989) argues that it is often difficult to
convince students that texts in English can be understood even though there are
vocabulary items and structures the learner has never seen before (p. 153), my teaching
experience shows that this is highly dependent on the students’ age; the younger the
students are, the less concerned they are about unfamiliar words they encounter in texts.
Thornbury (2002) argues that guessing from context is probably one of the most
useful skills learners can acquire and apply both inside and outside the classroom (p.
148). Nation (2001) sees guessing from context as a sub-skill of reading which seems to
draw heavily on other reading skills (p. 250). Clarke and Nation (1980, as cited in
Nation, 2001, p. 257) recommend a five-step inductive procedure for guessing from
context:
if necessary.
Step 3: Look at the wider context of the word (including the adjoining clauses
and sentences).
Step 4: Guess.
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Step 5: Check the guess. Is the guess the same part of speech as the unknown
word? Does it fit into the context? Break the unknown words into parts. Does
the meaning of the parts support the guess? Look up the word in the dictionary.
For illustration, here is a sentence from the story, including a word the students
found problematic.
In the good weather there was always an artist with his easel.
Following the proposed steps, the student can see that the word easel is a noun
because its immediate preceding collocate is the pronoun his and there is nothing after
easel. The surrounding context can reveal that easel has something to do with the artist.
Also, the expression in the good weather may be helpful. Artists usually paint outdoors
when the weather is good. But there are still more alternatives as artists have brushes,
palettes, canvases, etc. As the word is not repeated in the text, the student will probably
Here the -ed ending indicates that it is a verb. Its immediate collocate is face, so the
students could guess that the verb is related to facial expressions. The word tightened is
made up of tight + en +ed. Students might be familiar with tight, although they might
find the meaning of tightened somewhat elusive. Also the preceding clause When she
talked English can help because she refers to the Italian maid who might find speaking
This procedure is strongly based on language clues and does not draw on
background content knowledge. Nuttall (2005) suggests, however, that we stop and go
top-down approach, we can make imaginative leaps from one bit to another (p. 22).
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To conclude, learners need not to follow a rigid procedure when guessing, but
they should be aware of the range of possible clues and should have the skill to draw on
Glossaries
As indicated above, teachers must take care that texts do not present difficulties for the
learners which would inhibit comprehending to the extent necessary to read the text
effectively as discourse. If the text consists of syntactic structures and lexical items
which the learner just has not got enough competence to comprehend, the teachers and
unknown words is guessing from context. However, this can be particularly challenging
for an intermediate learner of English. As Lightbow and Spada (2006) write, the
research gives evidence that in order to guess successfully the meanings of new words
in a text, a reader usually needs to know 90 per cent or more of the words in that text (p.
One of the things the teacher can do to help learners with comprehension, and
thus make the text more suitable, is to provide glossaries. However, findings related to
the relationship between glossing and reading comprehension have been inconsistent.
Nation (2001) argues that the effects of glossing on comprehension and on vocabulary
acquisition are mixed, but overall, research on glossing shows that it has certain
attractions. Firstly, it allows texts to be used that may be too difficult for learners to read
without glosses. Secondly, glossing provides accurate meanings for words that might
not be guessed correctly. Thirdly, glossing provides minimal interruption of the reading
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process, especially if the words appear near the words being glossed (p. 175). Nation
concludes that glosses are best in the margins of the text and can be in the L1 or L2, as
long as they are easily understood (p. 177). As Azari, Abdullah and Hoon (2012)
suggest in their study aimed to explore the effects of different glosses on reading
glosses, second language instructors should provide L2 learners with glossed texts. In
this way, the readers’ attention is drawn to glosses, and it will result in reading
meanings for unknown words in a particular context (p. 49). Similarly, Thornbury
(2005) writes that providing a glossary of difficult words in the text can help reduce the
The research evidence shows that, particularly in the first meeting with a word,
which precede the reading passage and their purpose is to prepare the learner
beforehand for his encounter with possible problems in the text), and prompting
glossaries (explanations which are linked to particular problems as the reader actually
encounters them in context; they usually appear after the text and it is assumed that the
readers will refer to them whenever they encounter a difficulty (p. 82).
CITR is a part of the More Modern Short Stories collection selected and edited
by Taylor (1981), which offers a prompting glossary appended to each short story. The
Crouched – lying close to the ground, protecting itself from the rain
82
Il piove – Italian for ‘It’s raining.’
‘Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signora?’ – Italian for Have you lost something,
Madam?
padrone – hotel-keeper
to get tired of – to become bored with the same thing all the time
According to Widdowson (1978), glosses can divide into two categories: some
of them give the ‘signification’ of the lexical item, its definition as a linguistic element
in the language code, other explanations provide the ‘value’ which the lexical items take
on in this particular context (p. 84). With the signification glosses, the learner has to
perform a further operation on the explanation so that it fits into the context. The learner
must adjust it in some way. This adjustment may be principally syntactic. What the
learner has to do is to extract the basic meaning from the explanation and apply it
appropriately when the word which is glossed appears in the text. This may involve
decide on the signification type of gloss, they leave the learner with the problem of
working out meanings from context or adjusting the explanation so that it makes
appropriate sense. Also, by giving the learner a meaning in advance the teacher can give
the learner the impression that reading is simply a matter of recognizing of given and
fixed meanings. So glosses of this kind may encourage a mistaken attitude to the
83
Widdowson (1978) goes on to argue the other side of the coin, pointing out that
a value gloss leaves the learner with too little to do and deprives him of the opportunity
of discovering the values of different expressions in the process of interpreting the text
(p. 86).
As the example below shows, most of the glosses provided are value glosses
which can be transferred directly to the context with very little adjustment.
Outside right under their window a cat was [crouched] = [lying close to the
ground, protecting itself from the rain] under one of the dripping green tables.
The cat was trying to make herself so [compact] = [fitting into a small space]
that she would not be dripped on. Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I let
I [get tired of] it = [become so bored with (the same hair) all the time].
So far paper glosses have been discussed. Lyman-Hager (1999) maintains that
traditionally, text glosses (i.e. margin notes or footnotes that explain obscure words or
Multimedia annotations avoid these restrictions and allow for students to easily access
and identify words or phrases. This type of teaching tool expands the amount of
gloss until the student feels the need to access it, and permits instructors and students to
have more class time to devote to the content of literary texts (p.3). Davis (as cited in
Lomnicka, 1998) emphasizes that hypertext is invisible and unobtrusive, allowing the
users to consult as much or as little information as they desire (p. 42). Lomnicka (1998)
maintains that to achieve a more global understanding of the text, other multimedia
84
annotations such as images, sounds, cultural, historical and geographical references, and
guiding questions could enhance comprehension (p. 42). She adds that although
students are often accustomed to single word or phrase decoding, experience with
multimedia annotations can help to convey the necessity of moving beyond a simple
Below there are two examples of multimedia glossing. Figure 8 shows CITR
the user to a visual (a picture, or video) or verbal gloss, which the user has inserted.
http://www.wikispaces.com
(http://www.helpforenglish.cz/article/2010021605-beyond-the-great-white-wall). After
clicking any word in the text, the user is taken to a dictionary entry including a Czech
The advantage of the first type of glossing is that the teacher can choose what to
gloss and how to gloss (based on the needs of the students); this type of glossing keeps
different learning styles in mind. Visuals are often seen as the most valid way of
85
communicating the meaning of a word – learners see an instance of the meaning, and
this is likely to be remembered as the meaning is stored both linguistically and visually
(Nation, 2001, p. 85). Moreover, although the underlined words are rather distracting,
glossing words increases the chances of them being noticed, and thus learned (Nation,
2001, p. 72)
http://www.helpforenglish.cz/article/2010021605-beyond-the-great-white-wall
In the other text (see Figure 9), the words are not underlined, and learners can
choose which glosses they want to see. The glosses are only verbal (translation, a
simple definition, and a phonetic transcription), and the user is dependent on what the
website offers (at this moment, unfortunately, it does not offer CITR; it only provides
the users with authentic texts at the upper-intermediate and advanced level).
Translation is often being criticized as being indirect, taking time away from the
second language, and encouraging the idea that there is an exact equivalence between
words in L1 and L2. But Nation (1978, as cited in Nation, 2001, p. 85) points out that
this criticism applies to most other ways of communicating meaning which involve the
changing of an idea into some observable form; they are indirect, they are likely to be
86
misinterpreted, and they may not convey the exact underlying concept of the word.
Nation maintains that there is no exact equivalence between, for example, a second
From an L2 learner point of view, reading glosses do save time and, if designed
and used effectively, they do not diminish the pleasure of reading. From a teacher’s
perspective, glosses (especially in the form of clear, simple, and brief definitions) are a
Collocation
So far the section on vocabulary has dealt with isolated lexical items (i.e. individual
words). Broughton et al. (1978) argue, however, that understanding the meanings of
individual words is not the end itself. The efficient reader needs to be able to understand
Lewis (2000) argues that intermediate students may know quite a lot of
knowledge, but they lack the ability to use those words in a range of collocations which
pack more meaning into what they say or write. Lewis maintains that most intermediate
students would improve dramatically if they spent less time trying to perfect their
grammar and learn new, rare words, and instead simply learning to use the words they
already know in the huge number of collocations of which these words are parts (p. 14).
The term collocation is used to refer to a group of words that belong together
either because they commonly occur together, or because the meaning of the group is
not obvious from the meaning of the parts (Nation, 2001, p. 317). According to Hoey
87
(1991), collocation is a psychological association between words up to four words apart
terms of random distribution (p. 5). Ellis (as cited in Nation, 2001, p.319) sees the
Nation (2001) argues, however, that just because collocation exists does not
mean that it deserves attention. In order to decide if classroom time and effort should be
spent on an item, two factors should be taken into consideration: whether the frequency
of the collocation is high, and whether it occurs in many different uses of the language.
Partington (1998) argues that what is frequent and normal in one kind of text
on genre, register and style (p. 17). Lewis (2000) examines written texts from different
genres and argues that different kinds of texts exhibit different collocational
characteristics, making some texts more suitable than others for the EFL classroom (p.
56). Lewis believes that there is the temptation to think that good writers do not use
word combinations – in other words, to break our expectations. And it is in the breaking
of the conventional that the greatness of great literature partly resides.” (p. 57).
previous chapters, Hemingway use of the language is truly unique. In addition, CITR
was first published in 1925, almost a century ago, which may substantially change the
view of the author’s choices of collocations and decrease the suitability of the text for
the classroom.
88
demonstrates that one wording of a sentence sounds more natural, or more idiomatic,
than another. James Thomas (Masaryk University) calls this activity the Hoey
Procedure. By comparing several chunks from the text with corpus data, Table 8 shows
that Hemingway made most collocational decisions with respect to what nowadays
Table 8
Hoey Procedure
BNC COCA
89
BNC COCA
big palms 0 0
On the other hand, it also shows that Hemingway used some words in unique
collocations. For example, as BNC shows, the collocation stay at the hotel is more
typical than stop at the hotel, while the verb stop is used more frequently with
collocates such as overnight in this context. In addition, the expressions the war
monument and big palms are not found in BNC at all. Furthermore, the phrase in the
good weather is not found in BNC, while in good weather shows five hits. Although
Hemingway was an American writer, even in COCA, the collocation in good weather is
90
Hunston (2002) maintains that corpora cannot be used to determine what is
impossible in a language, as they do not offer negative evidence, and they cannot even
be used to determine what is possible, as a corpus may well contain utterances which
the native speaker of a language would reject as incorrect. However, corpora can
provide teachers and students with what is typical, such as the most frequent collocates
(p. 42).
Just as a lexical item may tend to co-occur with another lexical item, so it may
the grammatical company a word or word sequence keeps (or avoids keeping)
the grammatical functions preferred or avoided by the group in which the word
the place in a sequence that a word or word sequence prefers (or avoids).
difference between bowed slightly and slightly bowed. Both orders are possible but XY
bowed slightly (past tense form – 18 hits in BNC and 61 hits in COCA) is more frequent
than XY slightly bowed (past participle – 5 hits in BNC and 35 hits in COCA). The
same applies to tightened mouth (0 hits in BNC and 0 hits in COCA) and mouth
The words bow and tightened were marked as unknown by some of the
participants of the above mentioned experiment. Their collocates slightly and mouth do
not appear in CITR; they have been chosen because they frequently co-occurs with bow
and tightened in other texts. As shown earlier, bow and tightened are not frequent words
91
(they are outside the 3,000 frequency range in COCA and Longman Communication
3000), but if the teacher still needs to teach a low-frequency word, it may be better done
with its collocates. And as teachers wish to ease the vocabulary learning burden, it is
To conclude this section and return to the argument posed at the beginning of the
proficiency, when some automatic processing takes place. Students need more than just
separate words to produce simple connected texts on topics that are of personal interest,
to describe experiences, events, dreams, hopes and ambitions, and to briefly give
92
Conclusion
The main purpose of this thesis was to assess the readability and exploitability of Cat in
the Rain (CITR), an authentic literary text, and to support the hypothesis that it deserves
be concluded that authentic texts have enough advantages to justify their use in the
intermediate L2 classroom. This thesis has also argued that the main disadvantage of
authentic texts is their potential difficulty. The most obvious conclusion to emerge from
this thesis is that teachers cannot simply choose any authentic text without considering
the challenges of such a text; various top-down and bottom-up factors affecting
difficulty must be taken into account, including the students’ background knowledge,
Various readability calculations support the idea that CITR is not a very difficult
text to read. However, CITR is a literary text and, therefore, these calculations are only
one aspect of assessing the text difficulty. Literary texts often use language
imaginatively and playfully, and the authors may say one thing and mean another. Thus
students will often need help and guidance to discover the multiple levels of meaning in
a literary text. Research shows, for example, that students can better comprehend a text
Although CITR was not written for EFL learners, there is no reason to assume
that the text cannot be used for highlighting certain language features. On the contrary,
93
collection of sentences – the teacher can develop students’ ability to focus on certain
possible to state that CITR is a suitable text for an intermediate L2 classroom because it
is comprehensible and exploitable. The thesis has gone some way towards enhancing
our understanding of what an important role full texts, especially authentic ones, play in
the classroom. The thesis has only examined a literary genre, but the findings are
94
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Resumé
povídky Cat in the Rain od Ernesta Hemingwaye – pro výuku angličtiny na středně
pokročilé úrovni znalosti jazyka. Vhodností má autorka na mysli to, že textu je možno
jejich náročnost, proto nelze pracovat s jakýmkoli textem; při výběru je potřeba zvážit
pro středně pokročilého studenta angličtiny není vybraný text ze syntaktického hlediska
příliš náročný. Poněvadž jde ale o literární text, jsou tyto výpočty pouze jedním
Závěrem lze říci, že ačkoliv povídka Cat in the Rain nebyla původně napsána
pro studenty cizího jazyka, není důvod předpokládat, že ji nelze využít pro jazykové
účely. Právě naopak, jelikož se jedná o ukázku souvislého jazykového celku, lze tento
text využít pro rozvíjení schopnosti studentů všímat si určitých jazykových aspektů,
struktur.
104
Summary
The main purpose of this thesis is to assess the readability and exploitability of Cat in
the Rain (CITR) – a short story written by Ernest Hemingway – and to support the
concluded that authentic texts have enough advantages to justify their use in the
their potential difficulty. That is why the most obvious conclusion to emerge from this
thesis is that teachers cannot simply choose any authentic text without considering the
challenges of such a text; various top-down and bottom-up factors affecting difficulty
Various readability calculations support the idea that CITR is not a very difficult
text to read. However, CITR is a literary text and therefore, these calculations are only
one aspect of assessing the text difficulty; students will often need help and guidance to
In conclusion, although CITR was not written for EFL learners, there is no
reason to assume that the text cannot be used for highlighting certain language features.
On the contrary, since CITR is an example of a cohesive piece of text, the teacher can
105