4.1 Looking for clues

Question 1

What drives us, how we overcome it and when is it more obvious?

Answer 1

Throughout our lives, we are driven by the need to make sense of our
experiences. Every external stimulus constitutes a piece of information and we constantly bring together all the information at our disposal to help us understand the world around us. This is especially obvious in early life, as babies explore their surroundings, and engage with objects and people through touch, sound, sight, smell and taste: each interaction brings new information that helps them build their knowledge and understanding of the
world

Question 2

What do adults do when they find themselves in a new environment, can you give an example and what are we trying to attempt by behaving like that?

Answer 2

When they find themselves immersed in a new environment, adults, too, use the available information as clues to understand what goes on around them.
For example, many of us find that as soon as we arrive in a foreign country, our eyes are almost irresistibly drawn to the signs all around us as we try to figure out what they mean. In doing this we are attempting to gather linguistic information, and are looking for similarities and differences between the cultures we know so that we can build a mental picture of the new culture in which we find ourselves immersed.

Question 4

Name one thing that helps making sense of signs and situations (like the triangles in the French cafe)

Answer 4

Local knowledge

Question 5

New words and expressions (not glossary): which other way can you call a person that speaks only English?

Answer 5

Monolingual English speaker, page 125 book one

Question 6

***How do we try to make sense of signs around us? give two examples

Answer 6

*we deploy an array of strategies that enable us to infer meanings
from all the clues at our disposal
1- These may be drawn from our previous experience, for example, knowing what a typical café or a block of offices or flats look like can help us identify Image 1 as a café and Image 3 as a block of offices or flats.
2-Wherever possible we can also draw on our existing linguistic knowledge, so the English word ‘tobacco’ can help us infer the
meaning of tabac (‘tobacco’/‘tobaccanist’) in French.
3-Cultural assumptions

Question 7

How can the knowledge of types of texts be an useful tool?

Answer 7

because it can enable us to guess what information to expect in different contexts, such as large numerical signs displayed on blocks of flats or offices

Question 8

What do the three examples in this unit show when it comes to understanding the meaning of signs?

Answer 8

The examples in Activity 4.1 also show that the role of cultural knowledge is essential in
helping us comprehend the full meaning of the signs we encounter, such as the fact that cigarettes are sold in certain cafés in France, or that ‘8’ is seen as a lucky number in China, which might explain its prevalence on signs.

Question 9

What is Burns night and when?

Answer 9

Burns Night is celebrated every 25 January to commemorate the
birth of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns.

Question 10

***How can readers try to interpret messages in less familiar languages?

Answer 10

Firstly, that readers, wherever possible, use the languages that they know in order to interpret messages in less familiar languages. Secondly, that some meanings can only be understood if readers have the relevant cultural knowledge behind the meaning. Thirdly, that inferences (guesses) based on previous knowledge, be this linguistic or cultural, enable readers to make further inferences:
1 trifle+ tipsy → must contain alcohol
2 alcohol + Scottish → whisky.

Question 11

What’s the problem with inferences?

Answer 11

Such inferences are essential to comprehension, but they can also lead to errors.
Inferences based on stereotypes can sometimes be misleading.

Question 12

Food and culture

Answer 12

food and culture are often intertwined. Food is often one of the first things that people mention when they describe a particular culture, and it is not too surprising that it often features in cultural
stereotypes (e.g. French people pictured as garlic eaters in Britain). Food can be a very emotive issue because our eating preferences are usually rooted in habits created in childhood and may have connections to religion (eating
certain foods for particular festivals, avoiding others, etc.). When friends
from other regions invite us for a meal at their homes they may often treat us to typical regional dishes, and, of course, food is also one of the first aspects of culture that we encounter when we visit another country. If you like to Book 1 Language and culture 128
travel, you will sooner or later be faced with the challenge of ordering food from a menu written in a language that you do not understand.

Question 13

***What clues can you use in order to work out information (decode) out of a menu or a text? (decode a menu)

Answer 13

-Cultural knowledge, words that are very similar in English and German. Gulash sounds like ‘goulash’ in English + I know goulash contains meat
-Guess based on my knowledge of English: kalb sounds very much like
‘calf’ so this may refer to veal.
-Basic knowledge of language: mit and und mean ‘with’ and ‘and’ respectively (from my basic knowledge of German). Frittaten sounds like French frites which means fried (guess based on French), but you do not normally have chips with soup (cultural
knowledge), so it must be something
else.
-Knowledge of similar texts in my own language: The structure A with B, C, and D in a menu usually means that A is the main ingredient and B, C and D are the accompaniments
-inferring from cultural knowledge (guessing based on cultural knowledge, as mentioned above)

Question 14

***What’s on common definition for “Ambiguity Tolerance (AT)”

Answer 14

“the degree to which you are
cognitively willing to tolerate ideas and propositions that run counter to your own belief system or
structure of knowledge” (Brown, 2000: 119)

Question 15

*** Why is tolerating ambiguity so important?

Answer 15

When you learn a foreign language, you often find yourself in situations
where you simply have no way of knowing whether what you think you
understood is correct or not. This is a reality of real-life language
learning, and the ability to accept it and use whatever you can without
worrying too much about possible errors is an important quality to
develop

Sometimes you will find that ‘correct’ answers (such as the complete translation of a foreign menu) are not always provided. You must not let this worry you.

Tolerating ambiguity is so important that it is often one of the assessment criteria in language aptitude tests.

Question 16

What two different processes we use when trying to comprehend a spoken or written message?

Answer 16

-Decoding: a process that uses ‘low-level’ units in order to understand
the meaning of ‘higher level’ ones (in other words, building up the general meaning word by word) (for example, working out the
meaning of a text by looking up all the words in a dictionary). This is also known as ‘bottom-up processing’.
-Inferencing: a process that uses ‘high-level’ units in order to understand the meaning of ‘low-level’ ones (for example, guessing the meaning of a word from the context in which it is used). This is also known as ‘top-down processing’.

Question 17

Why Decoding is not enough on it’s own to achieve comprehension and how can we counteract this?

Answer 17

1-first because texts carry meanings that are not limited to the meanings of the words that make them
2-secondly, because in a foreign language, readers are unlikely to
recognise every single word.
———————————————
To counteract these problems, readers make constant guesses in order to fill in the gaps. This is known as ‘inferencing’ or ‘top-down processing’ and it is the second most important process in language comprehension. It works the other way round, as readers start from
their existing knowledge to infer the meanings of individual words or
symbols (e.g. a sign displayed onabuilding and featuring a number followed by ‘m2’ must refer to the surface area of properties for rental or sale).

Inferencing and decoding go hand in hand. As you saw from the comment

Inferencing can be difficult when not enough clues are available
from decoding; thus, no amount of guesswork will help a monolingual
English speaker to figure out the dishes in Menu 3 because the words
themselves are not recognisable. Conversely, you may remember situations
where you did recognise all the individual words but could not understand
what a text was about because you did not know its background.

Question 18

***Cultural, linguistic, and communicative ‘risks’ and potential benefits

Answer 18

Dealing with unfamiliar situations, such as ordering food from a menu you
do not fully understand, involves a variety of cultural, linguistic and
communicative ‘risks’, and your psychological disposition at the time
determines the choices you are prepared to make. In a restaurant situation,
these may depend on where you are, how you are feeling, who you are with,
how friendly the waiting staff seem to be, how hungry you are, and so on.
Like when you order in a foreign restaurant. You could be more or less risky and each could have different outcomes, like talking more or less to the waiter or learning about local culture, that you like or not the dish, etc.

Question 19

***What can provide sampling a country’s cuisine?

Answer 19

can provide plenty of opportunities to engage with the culture, to initiate intercultural contact with the inhabitants, and for developing your language skills. Intercultural challenges as valuable learning opportunities that are there to be seized.

Question 20

What is the skill of reading based on?

Answer 20

the interaction between bottom-up processing, which is determined by the words we are able to recognise, and top-down processing, which is determined by our knowledge of the world (culture, types of text, etc.).