Ask the Author: David Hastings
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David Hastings
The idea for my latest book came from my experience of teaching English as a second language. I used to encourage the students to read for pleasure as a very good way, perhaps the best way, of expanding their vocabulary. But in one advanced class many of them said that they could not get any pleasure out of reading in English because, even at their level, they had to look up so many words and colloquial expressions that it spoiled the enjoyment. However, one student argued that when learning a language, you should always try to work out the meaning of unknown and unfamiliar words and phrases from the context rather than reaching for the dictionary as first resort. He spoke with some authority because he was not only the best English speaker in the class, but English was his fifth language, so he clearly knew what he was talking about.
What he said got me thinking because although working out the meaning from context is standard advice for any language learners it is not often followed up with sufficiently detailed explanations of how you do it. Hence my new book The Vocabulary Detective: How to get meaning from context. It is quite different from the other books I have written which are all non-fiction and either historical or biographical or a combination of both. The Vocabulary Detective, by contrast, is a guide to the questions to ask and the clues to look for. These methods are described and then demonstrated through six non-fiction short stories.
When I was working on the ideas for the book, I was simultaneously learning Spanish and road-tested my ideas on authentic Spanish texts (novels, histories and news reports). I estimate my Spanish level was about intermediate or upper intermediate at the time and I had about a fifty per cent success rate in getting the meaning about right.
An example from my experiences with Spanish explains how it works. I was reading Julia Alvarez’s novel En el tiempo de las Mariposas when I came across the word ‘atareada’ which I had never seen before. The immediate context was ‘ … durante la atareada estación de la cosecha’. I knew this was ‘the (something) season of the harvest’ but could see no clue that would help me work out the meaning of the adjective. I was about to reach for the dictionary when I recalled the words of my star student whose advice was always to keep reading because you might see the same word in a different context, and this will help you guess or infer the meaning.
Sure enough, five pages later the word appeared again: ‘Estábamos atareadas con las clases, y hacienda nuevas amigas’ which means ‘we were (something) with classes and making new friends’. But this time there were plenty of clues. Alvarez was describing the first days at a new school of one of the main characters in the book and there were lots of details about people coming and going and lots of things to do. The meaning of the mystery word came to me instantly and I was so sure of it that I didn’t need to look it up in a dictionary. Indeed, I didn’t even want to match it with an English equivalent because the details in Alvarez’s description were enough to reveal the meaning. But, in the end, the English equivalent occurred to me anyway: ‘busy’. The girls were busy at school and their parents had been busy with the season of the harvest.
This idea of paying attention to the details surrounding unknown words and phrases is one of the key points outlined in my book for working out meaning from context but there are many others.
From my experience, there are numerous advantages to developing this skill. One of the most important of these is that you are less likely to forget a word or expression if you have worked out the meaning in this way. Another is that you learn to appreciate that words mean different things in different contexts. But perhaps most important of all is that it brings back the enjoyment of reading even though you might be struggling a bit with your new language. Indeed, it adds an extra dimension, a bit like solving a series of crossword puzzles or mysteries as you follow the story.
So that is where the idea for the book came from, and I hope readers find it useful and pleasurable. Although I wrote mainly for people learning English, you can adapt the ideas and become a vocabulary detective in any language. And, of course, I would be very interested to hear any feedback.
P.S. Alvarez’s novel is based on the tragic and heroic story of a group of sisters who resisted the brutal Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in the middle of last century. When I read it in Spanish, I didn’t it was a translation and that it had originally been written in English: In the time of the Butterflies. Because I spoke so highly of the book, my wife bought a copy in the original English, and she admired it greatly too. This also enabled me to check the original wording against my translation. The first quotation is ‘ … during the busy harvest season’ and the second ‘We were busy with classes and making new friends.
What he said got me thinking because although working out the meaning from context is standard advice for any language learners it is not often followed up with sufficiently detailed explanations of how you do it. Hence my new book The Vocabulary Detective: How to get meaning from context. It is quite different from the other books I have written which are all non-fiction and either historical or biographical or a combination of both. The Vocabulary Detective, by contrast, is a guide to the questions to ask and the clues to look for. These methods are described and then demonstrated through six non-fiction short stories.
When I was working on the ideas for the book, I was simultaneously learning Spanish and road-tested my ideas on authentic Spanish texts (novels, histories and news reports). I estimate my Spanish level was about intermediate or upper intermediate at the time and I had about a fifty per cent success rate in getting the meaning about right.
An example from my experiences with Spanish explains how it works. I was reading Julia Alvarez’s novel En el tiempo de las Mariposas when I came across the word ‘atareada’ which I had never seen before. The immediate context was ‘ … durante la atareada estación de la cosecha’. I knew this was ‘the (something) season of the harvest’ but could see no clue that would help me work out the meaning of the adjective. I was about to reach for the dictionary when I recalled the words of my star student whose advice was always to keep reading because you might see the same word in a different context, and this will help you guess or infer the meaning.
Sure enough, five pages later the word appeared again: ‘Estábamos atareadas con las clases, y hacienda nuevas amigas’ which means ‘we were (something) with classes and making new friends’. But this time there were plenty of clues. Alvarez was describing the first days at a new school of one of the main characters in the book and there were lots of details about people coming and going and lots of things to do. The meaning of the mystery word came to me instantly and I was so sure of it that I didn’t need to look it up in a dictionary. Indeed, I didn’t even want to match it with an English equivalent because the details in Alvarez’s description were enough to reveal the meaning. But, in the end, the English equivalent occurred to me anyway: ‘busy’. The girls were busy at school and their parents had been busy with the season of the harvest.
This idea of paying attention to the details surrounding unknown words and phrases is one of the key points outlined in my book for working out meaning from context but there are many others.
From my experience, there are numerous advantages to developing this skill. One of the most important of these is that you are less likely to forget a word or expression if you have worked out the meaning in this way. Another is that you learn to appreciate that words mean different things in different contexts. But perhaps most important of all is that it brings back the enjoyment of reading even though you might be struggling a bit with your new language. Indeed, it adds an extra dimension, a bit like solving a series of crossword puzzles or mysteries as you follow the story.
So that is where the idea for the book came from, and I hope readers find it useful and pleasurable. Although I wrote mainly for people learning English, you can adapt the ideas and become a vocabulary detective in any language. And, of course, I would be very interested to hear any feedback.
P.S. Alvarez’s novel is based on the tragic and heroic story of a group of sisters who resisted the brutal Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in the middle of last century. When I read it in Spanish, I didn’t it was a translation and that it had originally been written in English: In the time of the Butterflies. Because I spoke so highly of the book, my wife bought a copy in the original English, and she admired it greatly too. This also enabled me to check the original wording against my translation. The first quotation is ‘ … during the busy harvest season’ and the second ‘We were busy with classes and making new friends.
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