Re: redaing levels

In article <p3chl.126997$_03.92060@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
"tpi"<spamhere@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I wasn't very familiar with the concept of "reading level", so I
googled a  bit.
It seems it is assessed by reading aloud word from a list, and when
you  can't read the read the word (aloud) anymore, that's you reading
level. What  the hell has the ability to pronounce the word to do
with the ability to  read (and understand it)? And vice versa? There
are a _lot_ of English words  I can read and understand, even if I
can't pronounce them.
Well, in Finnish, when you are fairly fluent reader, after third
grade or  so, you can pronounce _every_ word. You might not
_understand_ it, but if it  is a grammatically correct Finnish word,
and you have even basic reading  ability you _can_ pronounce it aloud.

English does not come from one source: the two biggest sources for
English are Latin and Greek. These two languages work differently,
use different rules for how to spell, sometimes have different words
for the same idea. Many of these rules and words arrived in English
and sometimes you have two different spelling rules, or two different
words for the same idea. It is not possible to guess which one to use
unless you are experienced.

Worse still, English is an acquisitive language: even after it was
made out of two different language when it needed a new word it took
that word from a language which already has it, which might be a
language which has not supplied any words yet. So we have the words
'algebra', 'honey', 'chef', 'first', 'top', 'island', and 'chant' all
supplied by different languages. And each one has the same letter
pronounced in a different way. So the 'o' in 'honey' is not
pronounced the same as the 'o' in 'top'. And how should a child know
which is which ? And these are simple words: everyoneknows them all
before they leave school.

So 'basic reading ability' involves a lot of knowledge that you just
have to know, you can't use logic to decide how a word is pronounced.
For instance, look up how to pronounce the word 'metaphore'. Now, how
do you pronounce the word 'apostrophe' ? Look up the word 'literal'.
Now how do you pronounce 'litotes' ? There's no logic to it, you
either have to knowwhich language supplied the word, or just know the
word.

The above is simplified, but it does explain why reading English well
is difficult. Fortunately reading English poorly is easy because it
has a lot of words in common with so many other languages that the
chances are that you know one of them. So English is a very easy
language to start learning, and very difficult to finish learning.


--

I'm using an evaluation license of nemo since 34 days.
You should really try it!
http://www.malcom-mac.com/nemo

.

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