Good Morning. 

I'd like to share with you a technique my Arabic teacher is doing with us:  She brings us a small article from one of the major Arabic newspapers-- with a picture, from last nights news.  The level is way over our heads, and our goal is to use our general knowledge and our fledgling language skills to break it down.  Most of us are still decoding the words letter by letter.  But if the article is about... oh, lessay Brad Pete winning best actor award, we can eventually find the words "Barad Feeeyt."  Then we see 2 big unkown words, on with a B and one with a C, and I make a guess that it is "baeerats  .....   carrbeyyan"  And so on.  Once we have identified cognates, garbled cognates and words we know, we try to fill in the rest.

I know that research of the last 25 years or so has stressed the importance of vocabulary aquisision.  How you need x thousand words to understand 95% of the text in order to pass the exam.  ( I don't have the statistics at my freezing fingertips, so please feel free to add them.  Thanks to Vocab expert Elisheva Barkon.)  and how it's more practical to spend classroom time on language chunks than on learning prediction strategies.

I don't dispute these findings, I'm just suggesting that a guessing RC with a high level passage -- done as a fun game, not a test, should still be done once in a while. 

And for teachers, busting our brains on such an exercise is a lesson in humility!

(also  kudos to blogger Nahla who posted something about vocabulary and prediction.)