Informational Educational Descriptive Texts. Written Speech

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 415.

In recent years it has become fashionable in education to extol the importance of the spoken language with a depreciation of the values of reading, consequently skill in reading now is either low or inadequate. This situation needs considerations. As was stated in Chapter I, there is a gap between spoken and written varieties of the language and the task of the teacher is to differentiate these forms of the language appropriate to speech and writing and to assign to each their "proper" sphere. It is perhaps just to say that many teachers and lecturers recognize the gap but are unable to improve this state of affairs because of the lack of materials and methods.

These two varieties of the language differ psychologically and intellectually.

Talking is easier than the laborious solitary acts of reading. The reluctant reader will have to be given more cogent reasons for the efforts required of him. Reading aloud is even harder. It is neither spontaneous speech nor writing. In class it has purely ed­ucational purposes to stimulate pupils or students for prose and poetry appreciation and comprehension. Needless to say a writ­ten passage does not always coincide with a phonopassage. In reading aloud a written passage may be broken into several phonopassages or, on the contrary, short passages may be com­bined into one long lasting phonopassage.

We would like to recapitulate here that as has been men­tioned in Chapter I, reading and speaking differ totally in the speech production activity as explained by certain basic psycho­logical reasons. So in teaching to read we are simply helping to transfer from one medium to another. Reading and speaking each requires differently directed intensive efforts. Consequently,

the phonetic features of these varieties of texts would be basical­ly different.

We would like to start the phonostylistic analysis of the reading, in which some customs and traditions of Cambridge University life are described.