Yaa mar7aba! Right now, I want to take a little
bit a break from grammar, to talk about
something else. I want to talk about
reading strategies, especially those that
apply to intermediate and advanced level
learners of Arabic like you. If you're
watching this video, you probably fall
into one of those two categories. Of
course, we're always approaching
different texts in different ways, depending on
a lot of factors like how much
time we have,
whether we're seeking specific
information or general comprehension
from a text, whether or not we have
dictionaries or other translation aids
at our disposal, and things like that. The
way you read your train schedule when
you have four minutes to get from the
platform is different from the way that
you're going to approach fiction that
you read for pleasure, and the way that
you read an advertisement in a magazine
is going to be different from the way
that you approach a text that you're
using for research, for writing a paper.
What I'd like to do, though, is provide
some suggestions for working on the texts
that your instructors may assign you
in Arabic class, either as homework or as
in class reading, in order to help you
get the maximum benefit from them. So as
a first step, when your eyes hit that
page for the very first time, you just
want to skim. You want to stop and think
about what kind of text it is, without
concerning yourself too much with the
specific language that's involved with
the text. Is it a newspaper article? Is it
an autobiographical blog post that's
written in the first person? Or is it a
fairy tale? It can be tempting to dive
right into the words, because that can feel
faster, you want to get to the end,
because you have other homework to do,
and you only have so many hours in the
day, but be sure to just stop and take a
look for any other information that is
being presented to you on the periphery
of the language, right? If there are dates,
or pictures, or URLs typed in English, for
example, those can be really valuable in
terms of knowing what kind of a text you're
dealing with, and if you can determine
just from the visual context that you're
looking at a recent newspaper article,
then you can use that understanding, plus
your knowledge of current events, to
contextualize what you're about to read.
I can reasonably expect the 'who, what
when, where, why' if I'm looking at a
newspaper article, I expect a certain
kind of information to be presented, If I
see colorful illustrations of kings and
queens and horses and dragons, I might
expect a completely different kind of
text, right? Maybe I'm looking at a story
from 'Alf Layla wa Layla,' and I can expect
magic, and a narrative that's happening
mostly in the past tense, and maybe words
for specific creatures that I see on the
page in the picture, whose names I don't
know yet, but using that context can wind
up saving me a lot of time. So it's easy
to forget this step, but be sure to take
a look at the forest before you deal
with the trees. Once you're done with
that then you can start to scanning, moving your
eyes in a slightly slower and more
directed way. At this point the scanning
stage you're going to want to look for the
familiar, you're not reading word by word,
you're not worrying about grammar or
vocabulary that seems unfamiliar, words
you don't know, you're letting your eyes
drift on the hunt for any information
that can pop out and make itself
immediately apparent to you. If you have a
set of questions that you're supposed to
answer as part of the assignment, you can
mark or take a note about anything that
leaps out it seems as though it might be
useful for answering those questions
later on, once you've done a couple more
readings. Now is also a great time to
focus on things like titles, headlines, or
subheadings, and maybe pay a little extra
attention to the first sentence, the lead
sentence in every paragraph, right?
That is going to be a place where we're
gonna see a lot of new ideas presented,
and it might even be a good idea to read
just the first sentence of each
paragraph, to give you a quick-and-dirty
summary of the kind of information that
might be presented. If it's fiction, right,
if it's a if it's a story narrative, then
there might be more or less value to
that, but you'll still get an idea of
what is happening and the way, the direction
in which the narrative is proceeding.
When you're done with that it's a good
idea to come up with some initial
comprehension questions of your own to
guide further reading. You might say, okay,
I've seen this name or this proper noun
in several different places, in several
different paragraphs, what is the
significance of that person or place? I
still haven't been able to really
situate it and figure out what its role is
in terms of the information that's being
presented to me. It's better to aim a
little big with those questions, too. At
this point, try to make your questions
about the level of ideas, and less about
'Hmm, what does this word mean?' That's a
question, and it might be a good question,
but now isn't the time to concern
yourself with that
minute level of detail. Always remember
that your goal when you're reading a
text is to seek information. So finally,
after I've skimmed and I've scanned, I'm
ready to do my initial readings. Skimming,
scanning, reading: all slightly different
activities with different goals, right?
When I'm doing my initial reading, or
hopefully my initial readings, plural, I'm
going to do them without stopping. When
you're doing this initial reading, try to
read in chunks and phrases, not just one
word at a time,
and to keep track of the main topic of
each sentence. If I'm not getting every
single word or every bit of information,
that's okay, but I'm slowing down and
seeking more specifics. At this point I'm
definitely not using a dictionary yet.
You might make some marks for words that intrigue
you, or that you might want to
investigate later, but you're not
stopping to grab a dictionary or
computer and look anything up, because at
this point we're still on for all of the
context that the text can provide. Once
you get all the way to the end, you're
gonna want to head back to the beginning
and do that second reading again. That
might seem very basic, very obvious, maybe
even a little bit silly, or annoying as a
suggestion, but the thing is that doing
this first reading twice will enable you
to reexamine the beginning of the text
with all of the context that you got
from the end, and you'll probably be
surprised at how much additional
comprehension you gain. Now is
also a great time to keep a sharp
lookout for familiar جذور, those
Arabic roots. They might enable you to
successfully guess at the meaning of an
unfamiliar word even if you don't know
the word you might recognize the جذر
from another word you do know ,and even if
you're not quite sure what the meaning
of the word is it can help you come up
with an intelligent hypothesis about
what the ideas are that are being
discussed. And then finally, at the end of
that process of initial readings, I'm
gonna write some notes on what I think I
understood, and not worry about whether
my hypotheses are 100% accurate yet, but
I'm also we can check in with my initial
questions, and see if I can answer any of
those questions, and see if I can
re-articulate any additional questions
that I can use to guide me on my final
close readings. You can't really do a
close reading unless you are hunting
for something specific, so once you move
on to that re-reading step when you're
doing your close readings, make it your
goal to be looking again for specific
information, right? This would be the
first point at which I would consider using a dictionary,
and I can target my efforts by focusing
on the pieces of the text that I believe,
based on my earlier steps in this
process, are going to yield me more
information, and a deeper understanding.
Remember that information is what we're
after! If we learn some words or some
grammar while we're doing a reading, then
great, that's wonderful, but our main goal
is to gain understanding. So I want to be
very choosy with my dictionary use. You
could, if you wanted, spend 12 hours
looking up every word in the text, but
during that time you're not necessarily
gaining information from the text. You
would wind up with a word list, and then
be very frustrated at the end, because
your comprehension hasn't really
increased that much. You've got a vocab
list, but that's not the same as gaining
understanding of a piece of information.
So I want to be very targeted. It can be
useful, especially if you have other
homework to do in a given day, to maybe
give yourself a quota. If you have an
hour and a half or two hours to look at
a couple of pages of text, maybe decide
'okay, I'm going to allow myself just 12
words with a dictionary,' or with an
online translator of some sort, and I'm
going to really want to select those
words on the basis of the understanding
that they give me. Maybe you recognize
the جذر, but you can't figure out
what context is it makes sense in, or
maybe it's the only word in the sentence
whose جذر you don't recognize, or
maybe it's the word that you see eight
times in the text that's completely
unfamiliar, but clearly really important.
But always make sure you have a reason
when you're looking up a word, and that
that reason is better than 'it's the
first word i don't know,' right? That will
save you a lot of time and frustration,
trust me. And then, at the end of that
process, once we have taken a look at the
clock and determined how much time we
can spend on any dictionary use, and
really focused on which questions
we want to answer, which information is
still not readily available to us, that
would be the time to answer those
questions, and maybe revise them. If you
have any additional questions, articulate
those to yourself before you dive in, and
you can continue that process for as
long as as time allows, right? But at a
certain point it's a good idea to head
on to the summary process, where it's
gonna be your goal to articulate in as
much detail as possible what you
understood. If you have comprehension
questions then it's a good idea to make
your answers long, because in repeating
my information to yourself, and in
writing it down, or speaking aloud, if
you're working in class with a classmate,
the more detail you can provide, the more
likely you are to remember it, and the
more likely you are to be able to
present that information, and turn your
passive understanding into active
production, right, you're working on
multiple skills at the same time. If
you're writing at home before class, then
it's a good idea to think of your
written answers to these questions as
preparation to speak in class, and
similarly, if you're looking at a class
cold, excuse me, if you're looking at a text
'cold,' in a class, with a classmate, then
your conversation with that classmate is
a great way to prepare yourself to do
some writing, since you know your
instructor is probably going to make you
write on the topic that you're reading
about it a certain point in time, right?
So be conscious about the relationship
of those two productive tasks to each
other. Speaking is prep for writing, and
writing is prep for speaking. Now ,when
you're answering questions, when you're
articulating everything that you
understood about a text, that's also a
great time to prep any additional
questions that you may have, and I say
this because the more specific you can
make your questions, for a classmate once
you get to class, or for an instructor
who's going to be helping you in class,
the more likely they are to be able to
help you. If you point at a sentence and
say 'I didn't understand a word of that,'
that's a statement but it's not really a
question that they can help you answer.
But if you are looking at a specific
sentence, and you can identify what's
still making understanding challenging
for you, then if you can articulate
that, that is a great way of having them
help you. So you can say okay, there's a
list of different things in this
sentence, and I understand the nouns, but
I don't understand what the purpose of
this verb at the beginning of the
sentence is, or what its relationship is,
what the subject is, can you help me
figure that out? Or, 'can you help
me understand the relationship between
these two people that the text mentions
in the same paragraph? They clearly have
some kind of relationship to each other
but I don't understand exactly what they
did together or what the nature of their
adversarial relationship is... can you help
me understand that? What did you
understand from that text?' And those are
questions that others in class, your
instructor and your classmates, can help
you answer. So time is precious, right, and
it is perhaps not always possible to
implement every single one of these
steps in full for every text you're ever
going to read in Arabic or another
language for that matter, that you might
be learning. However, especially with these
initial steps, it's always a good idea to
give yourself a little bit of time to
consciously perform those actions, to
make sure that you're allowing yourself
the benefit of all the context that's
provided, and especially coming up with
questions, and answering your questions,
and thinking about that consciously, is
such a helpful way for helping yourself
squeeze some meaning out of a text. If
anything from this video sticks with you,
I hope it's that articulating questions
consciously, and thinking about those
questions, and trying to answer your own
questions, is perhaps the best way to
arrive at a real understanding of
the text you happen to be
dealing with.