L161: Inferring meaning How can readers make use of all the clues at their disposal in order to figure out the meaning of written signs and texts in a foreign language? Unit 4: The skills of reading and listening Inferring meaning On p. 121 of book 1, the unit introduces the idea of inferring meaning from texts even if you don’t understand all the words by using contextual clues, other linguistic knowledge (e.g. of cognates), etc. This activity builds on that idea. The two images in the next slides are a street poster and a street sign in Spanish. In plenary, ask any student who speaks Spanish to keep quiet, and get the others to guess as much as possible about what the signs say. They can use cognates, their knowledge of any other languages, the context, the visual imagery (in image 1) or their knowledge of the highway code (for image 2)… If any students speak Spanish, they can verify or explain (but make sure not to put them on the spot if they don’t understand!). If you or the rest of the class can’t understand everything, don’t worry! You might want to take this opportunity to reflect on the idea of Tolerating ambiguity, which is explained on p. 132. It is especially important when learning a foreign language, and in intercultural communication. Tolerating ambiguity: 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. In the activities in this module 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. So long as you give the activities a go you can be sure that some learning is taking place. Tolerating ambiguity is so important that it is often one of the assessment criteria in language aptitude tests.

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