Written by Ricardo Vargas.
Students who do not understand what they read are doomed to fail in school because reading is the backbone of academic life.
Books are made up of a set of ideas and a statement represents an idea. Understanding the statement requires understanding the meaning of the words that compose it. However, in some classrooms that possibility is minimal.
I once heard a fifth-grade boy ask his teacher what it meant to “pull a lawn mower”—an expression the boy had found in a magazine. The teacher, instead of explaining that the root of the word prune is related to the idea of cutting selectively, like the word amputate, replied that this meant: “to pull a machine to wirirear the grass” (To pull) ( weed-eater). Her explanation further confused the boy.
Analyzing the language of instruction that is developed in the classroom allows us to understand why it is so difficult for many children, whose mother tongue is not English, to understand explanations in a form of expression that is neither logical nor adequately organized to be processed by them. .
Comprehension is closely linked to the language of instruction. A good part of the problems of poor school performance of children is found in the defective, inaccurate instruction language, which does not help to understand the ideas contained in the texts.
To make work effective, teachers must understand that concepts are a fundamental part of understanding.
In his etymological dictionary, Guido Gómez de Silva indicates that the word concept is related to two ideas, to conceive and to set limits. Conceptus, or conceptualizing, is defined as separating one thing from another using intellectual capacities. From this comes the notion that conceptualizing is understood as something that is put into words inside the head, but for this to happen they must be words with a clear meaning, not empty words without meaning.
The way children understand is conditioned by the way they perceive concepts and the way they use them to organize their ideas.
Another fundamental aspect for reading comprehension is that children master the prefixes and suffixes that allow them to get closer to the meaning of words. For example: Saying something with your hand on your testicles at some point meant saying something powerful, with truth; testicle comes from testa which means head, the testicles have the shape of a head, from all this originates the expression “bear witness”.
Incorporating skills in teachers so that they are able to use an understandable instruction language has not been easy for educational systems, since each teacher has his own instruction language nuanced by his training and experiences.
At Lecto Nivelación Académica, for more than four decades we have dedicated ourselves to designing powerful methodologies for teaching reading and mathematics based on the language of instruction that guarantees that students will achieve a deep understanding.
