Comment by keiferski
9 months ago
Weak article and weak paper. A more accurate title is: English majors from two Kansas universities had trouble understanding vocabulary words used in a 19th century British novel, such as Michaelmas term, mire, and blinkers.
Rubbish - they could look up any unfamiliar terms. Look at how they understood the dinosaur reference. I do find the level of reading quite shocking – it’s not a difficult passage, and I’m not at all well-read in this area of literature.
I am - hard to be a life long avid reader in the UK and not read Dickens at some point.
I found his books worth reading (and considered in their context as a reaction against the unfairness of society in his time they are indeed classics) but not something I'd say is always pleasurable reading - he feels like Pratchett without the humour, Pratchett had the rage (you can't read say Small Gods or Jingo and not sense the rage) but was warmer about the human experience.
That said we are specifically talking about English majors here - I wouldn't expect an average member of any English speaking country to do that well on Dickens because that is simply not the modern style of written/spoken English but they are English majors so you would expect the overall level to be higher than the general population as a whole.
In the UK reading is on the decline and what people read has fundamentally changed (I'm not competent to say why but to me at least it feels like we have a horrible streak of anti-intellectualism that runs across society).
Well I found it to be a bit confusingly written, so it didn’t surprise me that some students at average/below average universities had trouble.
Furthermore it certainly doesn’t validate the title of “English majors can’t read,” but of course without that this piece couldn’t latch on to the pseudo-outrage trend at how everyone is supposedly dumb.
They were allowed to use their phones to look up words they did not know.
I don’t think that would have been very useful, as Victorian English is typically written in a style that seems alien to modern ears.
Perhaps a better title still would be: English students had difficulty understanding a passage written in a different culture and time.
Which seems completely normal and expected to me. The issue is in defining “English” as too broad of a term.
Would you expect that 19% could not read contemporary English at the level expected of a 10th grader?
Look up "whiskers," is a kind of cat. In what world does "whiskers" mean "bearded man"?
Are you a native English speaker? "whiskers" is a common euphemism for a moustache. I would be very surprised if a native speaker didn't know that, or couldn't infer from context.
4 replies →
> Look up "whiskers"
ok: http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=whisker...
Whiskers are a mustache. It's not a kind of cat, it is the antenna hairs that cats have around their nose.
1 reply →
"They have a dictionary, reference material, and their phones on hand to assist in looking up any unfamiliar terms"
Vocabulary is not a problem. I read foreign texts to learn languages as well as very old texts, and it's easy to look up an unfamiliar word to learn it.
The trouble understanding isn't the issue - the lack of curiosity is. They're English majors, on an education level whose purpose is to teach you how to learn. They did not learn or wante to learn, they guessed.
Ignorance is fine, unwillingness to admit you don't know and lack the will to learn is not IMO.
Not individual words, but what the text conveys. Also how to approach (digest) unfamiliar content.