My typical strategy when reading German texts matches some of the Coles & Dodd method in the sense that I tend to "pre-read" to figure out the concept and/or topic of the text. Is it a political text? If so, is it an editorial or opinoin piece, a factual report, a one-sided argument? If it's a cultural piece, what's my guess about the point of view of the author? Asking these questions before I start reading orients my reading -- do I need to have a dictionary handy, do I need to focus on the logical connectors in order to figure out nuances in the author's argument?
Once I start reading the article, I tend to read it through once without pausing on words I do not know, trying to figure out the general gist. I go back through paragraphs that are confusing, trying to understand (1) the grammatical sentence structure (where is the verb and what is the subject...??) and (2) the purpose of the information and its place in the overall argument of the text.
I try to build a vocabulary and build on it by searching out texts in similar fields. For example, I read a lot of pieces about energy policy and the environment and created a vocabulary sheet with commonly used words. When I hit an unknown word, I tried to puzzle it through based on thinking about other words. Only if I was at a total loss did I resort to a dictionary, but I found that the more I built the vocabulary and the overall context, the better I was able to read new articles in the same field.
Seems you developed a quite a successful technique especially with certain topics (energry policy and environment) because you can predict the text. Does it work with unfamiliar articles as well? Did you read about other techniques you tried?
ReplyDeleteDo you just keep a single list of vocabulary words, or do you keep separate lists for words relating to different subjects?
ReplyDeleteI keep separate topic lists: environment, politics, economics, health care. I got the idea from a great book I used when studying French that grouped advanced vocab by subject matter.
DeleteI'm really interested in your technique for "puzzling through" when you encounter a word you don't know. This is the kind of "educated guessing" technique I really need to work on and would be very interested in how you guess at unknown words. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI try to find a part of the word I recognize, and if I can't find one, I try to see if I can understand the rest of the sentence. If all else fails, I use the dictionary!!
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