Students' Engagement of Reading Beyond the Word
Teachers spend a great deal of time teaching students new vocabulary words. As the student matures, the student will learn how to read and write these words into sentences using similes, idioms, metaphors, and many other parts of speech. The authors will explore some basic areas of learning in the English language and the breakdown of five random, common, diverse words, and how teaching students to read may be more difficult for some learners. If you have ever performed an online search for the question, "What's in a word?" you were probably directed to a 1954 television show, a variety of games and quotes, or William Shakespeare. Much has been written regarding words, the grammar behind them, their definitions, the semantics of a word within a sentence, the morphemes, and phonemes, and many other parts of speech. Authors have written stories, using words intentionally to make a point, to complete a thought, to invent new ideas. Brilliant writers can create an escape from the ordinary with the reader's imagination. Words by themselves have such deep meanings and can be very personal or profound from individual to individual, taking on a life of their own. Even using the word "word" will evoke something in the hearts and minds of many people, whether that is something spiritual, communicative, contemplative, enlightening, or other feelings too numerous to state. In fact, many people around the world would have one thought when speaking about the meaning behind a word, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1, The Official King James Bible Online) Moreover, words are transitional, for example, the word "obtuse" in the English language may mean boorish or slow, on the other hand, in math it is an angle more than 90o, but less than 180o. Yehuda Berg, founder of the Kabbalah Centre, once stated: Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate and to humble. (BrainyQuote, 2001 2014b, para. 1) NATIONAL FORUM OF TEACHER EDUCATION JOURNAL 2___________________________________________________________________________________________ Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American novelist and short story writer, stated, "Words so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them" (BrainyQuote, 2001 2014a, para. 1) The focus on students' engagement of words, by themselves, within a sentence, in a paragraph or stanza, and beyond the word itself, or for that matter the moral or the point of the combination of words within the text will be explored. The following literature review is based on materials written by researchers in regards to the technical aspects of writing. Subsequently, the literature review is a brief exploration on the construction of words, and on five selected words as specific discoveries on the depth of those words and their impact on readers, students, writers, and those who would be merely lovers of words. Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures (2006) spoke of struggles an autistic individual may have in regards to the comprehension of words and how they may see a word in its abstract form. Even bright students with limited life knowledge may struggle with comprehension in the abstract form, such as with poetry. A Brief Review of Literature Lehrer (2012) stated words reference things, events, or properties to connect word relationships to a variety of linguistic idioms, such as a metaphor or a metonymy may act as a trajectory to reveal the differences or rivalry of words to each other and to provide comprehension to the context of the word's importance. Words may be vague, ambiguous, pragmatic, entailing, transcending, or transforming. Moreover, she stated a formal theory for grasping the correlation of "idiolects, dialects, and communal languages are proposed to account for the dynamic interaction of individuals and communities which occurs continuously" (p. 97) Ecalle, Bouchafa, Potocki, and Magnan's (2013) acknowledged reading is a complicated enterprise where a common course of interaction occurs, either by a (a) bottom up processing from word recognition to higher levels, such as the monitoring of comprehension and inference making; and (b) top down processing such as knowledge of the general subject matter of the text that could help readers identify lower information levels. (p. 128) They continued to state sentence level development is pivotal to reading comprehension. Ardoin, et al. (2013) maintained the variance in reading comprehension can be explained by a curriculum based measurement (CBM) demonstrating the disparities in oral reading rate of words between those readers who grasp at least some of what they read to non readers who are unable to understand anything they read as they attempt to decode each word. Moreover, inconsistencies among students who are able to comprehend is affected by the variability in the extent to which they are able to decode, and not to the realization of the passages read. However, there are differences in the reading accomplishments of students who are unable to understand what they read; but, these differences can possibly be explained by reading words out of context. Rommers, Dijkstra, and Bastiaansen (2013) declared activating and coalescing word meanings within sentences aid in language comprehension. However, they wondered whether obscure idiomatic expressions, such as "to spill the beans," intended for exact word meanings, may develop MARY WEBB AND MARY SCHAPER ____________________________________________________________________________3 into an unrelated broad allegation of the expression. Is the intent behind, "spilling the beans," revealing a secret or does it actually mean food has been dropped? In their study, they wanted to know what happens in comprehension when exposing the figurative or literal allegations behind expressions. They employed standard terminology in sentences and then replaced them with semantically related or unrelated words. They analyzed two brain operations to explain the processing of plausible linguistic input, since everyday dialogue includes many idioms. They concluded it was apparent word comprehension does vary across contexts. "When reading predictable and opaque idiomatic expressions, for which literal word meanings are irrelevant, the processing of literal word meanings can to some extent be 'switched off'" (Rommers et al. 2013, p. 775) Connell and Lynott (2014) declared understanding the lexical of a word is made possible by the strength of how the word is visually understood; whereas, the performance of being able to read aloud is made possible by the strength of both the visual and auditory experience. Furthermore, an individual's perceptual awareness is connected to how his or her reading relates to their point of view of a word's meaning based on how quickly and accurately the word is cultivated. In addition, using words in a variety of visual and/or auditory representations aids in the process that drive a "lexical decision or reading aloud response" (p. 527) Furthermore, a range of variables associated to word significance has been found to influence lexical choices more vigorously than just the act of reading aloud, such as imageability, the number of meanings, concreteness, body object interaction, the number of semantic attributes, and the extent of context clues around the word. For instance, individuals are able to recognize high imageability (concrete) words such as desk, over low imageability (abstract) words, for example love. Rodd et al. (2012, p. 1095) stated, "Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words." For example, the word "tweet" is not the sound a bird makes, but a term to the social media site, Twitter. Individuals need to learn new meanings for words they have already ascertained in their mental lexicon, especially in the field of technology, for instance mouse, friend, window, and virus. In their study, Rodd, et al. revealed learning a new word meaning, may be specifically difficult for children who have already learned a different linguistic meaning with an unrelated semantic connected with the new word. Cai and Lee (2012) researched inferencing strategies for new learners to process unfamilar words. They reported the data revealed learners use a variety of strategies or knowledge sources to infer a word's meaning. Furthermore, they stated most of the knowledge sources did not relate to the actual comprehension of the word itself. According to them, This suggests that no knowledge sources are universally effective or ineffective, and that what is crucial is the ability to use the various knowledge sources flexibly. The finding that learners in this study are able to use the inferencing strategy and different knowledge sources shows that listening comprehension is as active a process as reading comprehension. (p. 141) Moreover, Cai and Lee (2012) stated: Semantic knowledge of words in the local co text combined with background knowledge and semantic knowledge of the overall co text. The finding the use of most knowledge NATIONAL FORUM OF TEACHER EDUCATION JOURNAL 4___________________________________________________________________________________________ sources does not relate to the comprehension of the word suggests no particular knowledge source is universally effective or ineffective and it is more crucial to use the various knowledge sources flexibly. (p. 122) Ecalle, Bouchafa, Potocki, and Magnan (2013) asserted reading is a complex activity where information may be processed from a bottom up word recognition to h