ARC: Context is important

What are you doing, Superman?!

Yes, that’s what I first thought too. I’m sure we’re not alone. You, however, didn’t stop there I bet. You tried to figure out another explanation for what Superman could be doing.

Given what we know about Superman and his adventures, we know he’s not trying to defeat the villain with his bodily fluids. We know that superheroes don’t resort to this. We know that it wouldn’t befit Superman even if they did. We know this because we understand there is context to this image: its decades of cultural background embedded into our understanding of superheroes.

Imagine, however, that you didn’t know anything about Superman or superhero cartoons or hoses, for that matter.  If this were the case, we wouldn’t connect this apparent behaviour in this image with its hidden context. Our non-existent background knowledge wouldn’t fill in the gaps like it did above. We’d reside in the superficial layer of meaning.

This same issue with context and background knowledge occurs in learners exposure to texts they encounter in L2. So often authors utilise references to key figures, events and places to demonstrate and strengthen their points. When our learners read these texts in L2, these contextual references are often missed or flippantly skipped over, leaving comprehension inadequate.

The Contextualiser is one of five Academic Reading Circles roles that work collaboratively to engage learners and improve their textual comprehension in L2. The Contextualiser focuses on guiding learners to incorporate information about contextual references into their understanding of author meaning.

To learn more about this, check out Academic Reading Circles (ARC): a teacher resource book that describes this intensive reading approach  with language learning students and exemplifies each component in detail.

This post, the first of a short series on the background and intention of Academic Reading Circles roles, also appears on Linkedin here.

* Initial image taken from Superman: The Animated Series (1996).