A Type of Exercise for Developing Prediction Skills in Reading
K. W. MOODY · RELC Journal · 1976
A good deal of interest is currently being shown in the problems which learners of a foreign language have in understanding written texts, particularly those concerned with some special field of knowledge such as the sciences. These problems are those which they have in under-standing the texts as entities, as distinguished from those of under-standing the elements of which they are constructed. The main schools of linguistics over the last forty years or so (with the exception of the Prague School in the 40’s) have tended to con-centrate attention on what happens in language at and below the level of the sentence and this concentration has been reflected almost univer-sally in teaching materials. Seliger refers to a paper by Harris which appeared in 1952 and says &dquo;Harris.... mentions that the linguistics of his day.... had set up the sentence as the outer boundary of its con-cem...&dquo;. Seliger then adds &dquo;Linguistics today (1971) is still not con-cerned with language beyond the sentence and still views the sentence