Break Off From Reading Only Momentarily to Find Meaning
The bilingual marginal gloss was extensively used by Nott and Trickey (1971, 1976, rev. ed.) in a course book ‘designed to meet the requirements of both the traditional “A” level language syllabuses and the new approaches now being adopted by some examining boards’ (1976, p. v). Each gloss was given at the end of the appropriate line on the page, with the French in italic and the English in Roman. It was thus necessary for the reader to break off from reading only momentarily in order to find meaning. Further vocabulary was given in a ‘box’ at the end of the text. Later textbooks at this level (Bourdais, Jones, Maynard, & Terree, 2001; Deane, Powell, & Armstrong, 1994; Hares & Mort, 1995; McLachlan, 2000) provided only the ‘box’, thus causing the reader to break off to search for unknown lexis and then re-find the point at which reading had been broken off. Such breaks, of course, cause a slowdown in reading, and can mean that the reader does not achieve the 200-300 words-per-minute rate that is required for fluent reading.
It should be noted that the possible existence of a marginal gloss is dependent upon type size. Given that language students today demand large print size, clear layout and much white space (Maun, 2006), the possibility of the marginal gloss is much reduced in today’s textbooks. Marginal glosses, of course, are a ‘while-reading’ support for the reader. Hill (1997, p. 64), however, states, ‘In my judgment, learners need pre-reading support to help them overcome the difficulty of “getting into” a book’. Prediction as a way into the text is advocated in some books (e.g. Hedge [1988] on writing; Maun and Rodrigues [2009] on reading and writing), in which students are asked to predict vocabulary which might appear, given the nature of the topic or the text-type. ‘Pre-reading’ vocabulary, however, was a feature of books of the Grammar-Translation period, e.g. Ritchie and Moore (1928), in which a short list of words and expressions about to be encountered was given below the title of the piece, itself an indicator of topic. In other words, the text was scaffolded, in the Vygotskyan sense.
Both bilingual marginal glosses and pre-reading vocabulary lists, however, have a major philosophical drawback. While they allow the reader-learner to construct the meaning of a text while reading, they do so through the medium of the LI, not the L2. Code-switching is an inherent part of their use. The same, of course, is true for bilingual dictionaries, in both hard copy and online versions. The learner using these resources cannot stay within the L2. The use of monolingual glosses or dictionaries may be of help, but may lead readers into a vicious circle of non-comprehension, in which they require a gloss on the gloss, or a to-and-fro process through the dictionary in search of the component words of a definition.
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