A Khmer student wrote to me on YouTube and asked me to make videos about reading English-language newspapers
"I would like to ask you to make videos on how to read the newspaper and I can translate English to Khmer. "Khmer and I have a problem understanding English."
Language learners often write to me some learning area or the area of their lives where difficulties arise and ask me a trick or a guide that will help them learn.
As I have said in many other language studies, there are no tricks and no references. The more you invest, the better it will be. And if the goal is reading at native level, then you have to read the things a native speaker has read. If you have a 22-year university degree, you must read it at the given level in a foreign language. And you will not read the language textbooks. You will read it when you read books, articles and textbooks, not the language.
If we analyze this latest e-mail, the student says he can not read and specifically set up a newspaper
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Obviously reading reads. On some levels reading a newspaper is no different from reading a novel or reading a short story.
If you read novels and short stories, you should be able to read newspapers. But if I ask this student, she probably will not read a monthly novel in English. If he were, then the newspaper would have read it.
Therefore, the problem in itself is not reading or newspapers. The problem is lack of practice
I never bought the "Newsreader" title in English. I just started reading the newspapers. And for the first time I had to learn to handle the language, structure and organization of journalism, but nobody taught me or you. He just came to us. The same applies to German or Spanish newspapers, which can be read almost in English. No one taught me or taught Gunther or Pablo, but it was only through practice
A point you've often done in articles is that if you study a foreign language, you're not an idiot. An empty brain does not start. One of the reasons why infants spend three years learning their mother tongue, because they also learn what language is and how language works. You know all this and much more. Babies do not know it's like grammar. Each vocabulary needs to be learned. The seven-year-old does not know the words "population, economy, government, referendum, currency" in his mother tongue. So reading a foreign newspaper would be difficult for him because reading a mother tongue newspaper is difficult for him.
If you are an adult or an advanced country, at least with high school or university education, you must be able to read the mother tongue newspapers. At this point reading a foreign language newspaper is simply a vocabulary.
True, there are different forms and styles of language. And the style of the newspapers is different from the other spells. But read and read them.
However, the problem with most students is that they do not read novels or novels. Most students only have to admit that they need to practice. They have to read, read and stoop, and have to fall down and read it again until they get it. 19459002
I was not willing to read the newspaper in English until I was late in the twenties. But then I read a lot of books in English and spent 16 years teaching. I just read the newspapers because I had to read foreign papers at the university. Then I learned to read the newspapers first in English to help you understand the foreign newspaper. One issue, especially with Khmer students, is that there is so little written material available in Khmer. American students are newspapers, journals, novels, books, poetry, games, encyclopedias, diaries, biographies, textbooks, comics, magazines, books … Most Khmers have not been exposed to this exposure
has not read their native language how did they read in a foreign language? And not just Khmers. It is true that these spells are not available in Khmer, but even in Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese, where these many literatures exist, students may not have been exposed to them. For example, Taiwanese college students said they had never written a single research article under the 12-year primary school.
But then they were asked to speak English in their ESL class
I currently have a Thai friend, Em, who studies in the US. He has been there for three years, he is studying full time in English and still does not get enough high marks on the TOEFL exam to enter an American College college. He has a college degree in Thailand, but Thai education is far behind Western education. And in the developed world, the US colleges are the only simplest higher education institution.
If Em finally reaches the TOEFL and enters the community college, "George Orwell's 1984 article explains and explains that this is an allegory for communism and how it can be applied in the US Homeland Security Law ".
When foreign students stumble as such, they always blame their English level. But I'm sure the average graduate from most Asian countries did not have this job in their native language. Their curricula do not include these kinds of analytical book reports.
When I was teaching in Korea, a famous story circulated around the common ESL community. A Korean girl won a national English race from a rich family. Almost since his birth, an expensive home teacher taught him, and the English level was exceptional. The prize was a fellowship in the United States for a prestigious boarding school, which was almost guaranteed to be admitted to the Ivy League school. 19459002
It seems one of the first tasks of a new school in America was to read a poem and write an original analysis then lecture in the classroom. When the show's time came, the student stood up and dutifully spoke the verse, literally, and was just as regurgitated as the lecturer said about poetry in the classroom. And I did not succeed. In Korea, his incredible memory and the ability to repeat exactly what the teacher said kept him at the top of his class. But in America they were asked to do much more; think and analyze, create, present and defend. A majority of students believe that difficulties with foreign education, books, newspapers, or conversations lie in the absence of vocabulary or lack of language skills. But if they have a relatively large vocabulary, the real problem is a combination of culture and practice.
Returning to Khmer Students and Their Problems When Reading English Newspapers: To understand English newspapers, we need to know everything about newspaper news and concepts. The best way to handle foreign newspapers is at the beginning of the first reading of a news item in your own language. Then read the same news in the foreign language newspaper. You can also watch news in your own language, then in any language you study and compare.
Translation is not just about knowledge of words. You need to know the concepts. The first translation rule is that the written text must give the same meaning in the target language as in the source language. Even if the wording, in the end, is not as far away as the original. No matter how good your foreign language skills are, you can not give a report that you do not know in your mother tongue. Recently, newspapers in Asia have been stories of the Y2K crisis in Taiwan.
To understand newspaper articles, we must first understand the original global Y2K crisis. The global Y2K question was such that Cambodia was not very involved because in 1999 there were so few computers in Cambodia. Cambodia probably had less than one hundred internet connections at that time. You must then know and understand that Taiwan has its own calendar based on the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911. Taiwan's government offices and banks record the events according to the Chinese People's Calendar, which means that 99 will be the year.
If you know and understand these facts, you will know that Taiwan will soon reach the first century in 2011 and face a mini-Y2K crisis because the computer has only two digits for the season.
Most of my readers are not living in Asia and did not know anything about history in Taiwan or the Taiwan date. But any person with normal reading levels should have understood the explanation. You do not necessarily need to know exactly the exact situation you are reading about, but you can also know other things like other calendars and other Y2K issues.
If you look at the above explanation, the vocabulary is quite simple. Probably only a tiny, perhaps five or six word word that an intermediate language learner would not know. So these words can be searched in a dictionary. And for a European student with a broad educational and experiential base, this would need all the help. But for students from Asian education systems, especially Cambodia, which is now involved in global events, such as the Olympic Games, it is difficult for the first time or even impossible to understand this or similar newspaper articles.
The key lies in general education, not in English. Students have to read and simply have to build their primary school, primarily in their native language, then in English, or they will never understand English newspapers or TV shows.
Antonio Graceffo
Source by Antonio Graceffo