I meant to post this near the end of summer 2022 as part of our series on Grammar, but alas, it got away from me. If you want to read the rest of the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. One of the more surprisingly enjoyable reads of my college career was Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. I loved (and still … Continue reading Words Don’t Mean Things (Explorations in the Art of Grammar Series #5)
In the previous post in this series, I considered how vocabulary and prior content knowledge could perhaps play a significant role in reading comprehension and understanding. In the final paragraph I wrote: Unfortunately, fewer and fewer students are taught the languages in which the Great Books are written, and not many more are taught the vocabulary they will encounter even in translations of these Great … Continue reading The Death of Words, the Old Testament, and the Great Books (Explorations in the Art of Grammar Series #2)
I was reading an article earlier this spring[1] that talked about literacy and the importance of content knowledge and vocabulary for understanding. The article revisited a 1988 published study by Recht and Leslie, oftentimes referred to as “the baseball experiment.” In short, the article, and the study by Recht and Leslie, addressed how after reading a passage about a half-inning of baseball, “good readers” who … Continue reading Words in Context (Explorations in the Art of Grammar Series #1)
The Classical Thistle 