Re: CHAT: learning to read

> Date:         Wed, 16 Jun 1999 08:03:10 CDT
> From: "J.Barefoot" <ataiyu@...>
> I think if [parents] would just read to the child regularly there
> wouldn't be so much of a problem.
Read to the kids until they start learning for themselves. Then let
them read to you. Takes a bit of patience, but it really helps.

When my daughter started reading, I soon began to insist that she
should go back and repeat each sentence with the proper intonation
once she understood it. That frustrated her no end, so she learned to
do it right on the fly. (That was when she was 7=BD --- we start school
late in Denmark. It would probably be beyond a 5yo to do that).

And that was just the school reader. Reading out something like a
fairy tale is real hard work, if you want to do a proper job of it:
First find out who says what, and use the proper voice (if you can
remember it from three pages back); then make sure you have the right
general parse of each sentence, so you can start it on the right
intonation and disambiguate all the little words between stressed and
unstressed; and preferably have the odd half second left over to skip
forward and see what happens next, so you're prepared for any sudden
mood changes. Better start training before the kids are born...

(I'm still amazed at how many people can't read fluently from a
manuscript --- even if they wrote it themselves. Perhaps rhetoric
should be taught in schools again).

ObConlang: Can a language be constructed to make it easier for humans
to parse left-to-right? Other tricks to make it easier to read out
loud? (No fair saying intonation is independent of parsing!) Putting
speaker tags before direct speech would be a great help, of course.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marke=
d)