> most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them
The inability to understand sarcasm on the internet is far worse today than it was 10 years ago, and i don't think this can be explained by the influx of larger audience, because this keeps happening in very niche communities. It's something happening globally, even in non-english countries. my guess is it has to do with the dumbing-down of popular media (the internet) to the point where words are removed and only emoji are left (which severely limits the bandwidth of conversation)
> You can’t blame demographic shifts or foreign students on these results
I don't think that it matters. I'm not a native speaker and I did on that sample better then the most. I'm just one point of data, but I believe what does matter is not a proficiency with English itself, but with reading in general. English of Dickens is hard ("the waters had but newly retired" took me a minute to parse), but I can see what I can't understand, so I can spend time on it and get it.
Probably I could miss with "Michaelmas". In hindsight after reading the article I see it ends with "-mas", like "Christmas", but I'm not sure I'd look up it in Google if I took the test seriously.
OTOH, I noticed this "The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily", and it made me think, that the student was nervous. But why? And why the researchers didn't tried to reduce stress levels? Stress makes intellectual tasks harder. I know it from my own experience, the worst kind of stress for me is when I believe that I have very limited time for a task. In these situations I could do unbelievable dumb things.
> In fact, none of the [problematic readers] ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results.
> these students had full use of dictionaries and even their phones when reading the passages. They were free to look up and search any terms they didn’t recognize. But these resources did not help them understand the text.
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> I found that a majority of [English majors] had a lot of trouble understanding metaphor and allusion in the assigned reading, couldn’t grasp even obvious themes and character motivations, and could not reliably construct grammatically correct sentences in their own writing.
> Almost all of them went on to be awarded BAs in English.
I feel there's multiple factors in all of this, but the central spiral could be summarized as corrupting economic pressure on learning that forces schools to reduce rigor for the sake of increasing the passing rate.
There could be an inclusion bias however. Long ago, only a select few students would go to college. If we looked at the test results of 2024 students that also would likely have gone to college had they been in the class of 1960, would we see such a difference?
There's an interesting disconnect between readers who read for the "painting with words" aspect of novels and readers who read solely for the plot.
My first impression on quickly reading that passage is it was very muddy, very very muddy, and nothing plot important had happened yet, but we need dinosaur metaphors to say just how muddy it was.
For someone reading for the plot the text did not contain a lot of information.
From reading the examples, it just looks like the subjects weren't properly motivated. If you read a hard text and just say the first thing that comes to your mind and immediately continue to the next sentence, of course you're going to do bad. But if your performance doesn't matter, why would you spend double the time and do it properly?
Perhaps what this is actually showing is that college is in, in fact, not for everyone.
But modern incentives force everyone to college.
Thus is gets devalued and it means nothing to have a college degree.
I wonder if they would get the same result with that passage with British-English speakers.
I've never read a Dickens novel, but a lot of the context there seems obvious to me.
There they go with Dickens again. Why always Dickens? Haven't we suffered enough?
I suggest a similar experiment and let some English professors explain the meeting of some contemporary rap songs. I guess they would struggle as well (depending on which song one chooses). Now the professors likely would argue that the rap songs are not relevant, which tells me they (as English professors) are simply not interested how their language evolves.
All that to say it's difficult to read and understand texts that are from a culture you're not familiar with. And I would argue that one can be perfectly fine as an English major in the US not being familiar with Dickens.
Is it possible that the whole thing is explained by incentives?
Getting a four year college degree is a mandatory rite of passage into the middle class these days.
It almost doesn't matter what you do as long as you get the piece of paper and you can move on with your life. Everybody's incentives are aligned: the school will graduate you and make their money, the students will get their degree, and eventually a job, the employers.. well, not sure, but I guess they'll filter for the signal that their candidate is able to complete something long and tedious.
it's interesting to try to guess *how* the mistakes got made as they are
e.g. in "as if ... , and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus" that subject saw the comma as the end of hypothetical - and meeting a dinosaur isn't that strange in our contemporary storytelling. "This is too strange" failsafe has disappeared?
"addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief" - I have no idea if subject didn't know what advocate is, but advocate being an animal wouldn't be strange nowadays (in fantasy).
"Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall" - I managed to misread this sentence twice: first with "Michaelmas' term" (as in someone's term in power) and then "inner hall". Had I been the one explaining, I'd say "I have no idea who these 2 are, but I'll wait later in the text to find out that mystery"... Point against me, I guess?
Also, it's a bit sad that "-saurus" doesn't get recognized as dinosaur anymore :(
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but my personal, internal, experience - is that I would skip (at least in my mind) the text that was displayed in here. I'd want to find who is the hero, and what's the plot about - letting the "it was muddy, but in 1000 words" pass me by
Go follow @nyttypos and you will find that the 'best' journalists in the world at the NY Times make 50+ published grammar, style guide, factual, and comprehension errors per day. Example: 73 errors yesterday...
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.
Or maybe college English majors aren’t familiar with archaic meanings of common words like “retired” and “wonderful” that are used differently than they were 175 years ago?
I can’t read Les Miserable in its original French (despite 5 years of high school French class), but I love it in translation. Does that make me functionally illiterate?
It might be an interesting development of the study to test the comprehension of engineering and then science students on the same passages.
This is the ranting (disguised as "analysis") of a self righteous English major annoyed that students don't get readings that are written in archaic English. The only person who can't read is the people who can't read the room and understand that this stuff is of zero relevance or usefulness to the vast majority of students. This is like getting mad when people show up for a Italian class and they don't understand the Latin readings you give them.
This is the most ridiculous thing. The leap from deciphering ornate language from an old novel to “literacy” let alone being about to read is silly.
You can always set people up to fail. It’s like you gave some junior frontend engineers some highly optimized fortran from 45 years ago and asked them to explain it to you. Without much of a motivator you would probably conclude “software engineers can’t read code”.
>This paper analyzes the results from a think-aloud reading study designed to test the reading comprehension skills of 85 English majors from two regional Kansas universities.
I think a major factor in this study is that there aren’t exactly any prestigious universities in Kansas. If they were to repeat the same thing at an elite institution the vast majority of students in any major could understand this.
(Also it’s probably easier to read the whole thing and then go back and explain the meaning in my personal opinion)
Can someone explain why smoke would be lowering down? Is it not supposed to go up?
The study in question is... questionable, at best, IMO.
Discussed elsewhere, and a comment there summarized (and led to further discussion) why the study is not as representative as we might assume.
Link below [0], as it's simultaneously far too long to re-post here (especially from mobile), yet well worth the read. That said, for ease of reading, the opening paragraph starts:
There's a lot of awful stuff that has been discussed already, but I feel like some of this is "catastrophized" because the researchers set up the subjects to fail by setting the standards in a way that you wouldn't expect the students to succeed.
I agreed with the rebuttal to the study, and think the study is hardly all it's cracked up to be
[0] https://tildes.net/~humanities/1nz8/they_dont_read_very_well...
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TL;DR?
I'm a big fan of Bleak House. The opening chapter is one if my favorite bits of Dickens. But it is a silly selection to expect a random undergrad from a state school in middle America to be able to fully parse on command unless they have some familiarity with London / Dickens or are in the midst of studying it. It's a book that you have to want to read or it is going to be a slog (saying this as a state-educated American).
The intro chapter is written more like a Shakespearean speech to be read aloud than a narrative chapter. The rest of the book isn't nearly so flowery.
Terms like chancery, Michaelmas, Lincoln's Inn Court, Lord Chancellor, etc, are a foreign language to an American but pretty obvious to an educated Brit in London, especially if they have familiarity with the court system.
You'd get the same result if you asked a random student to fully translate a passage from Hamlet, sentence by sentence, with no prior context. Or asked a random CS student to explain a random snippet of source code from the Linux kernel line by line. Most people don't deeply understand most things unless they get the bug and decide to dig in for fun.
The point is that you can't force comprehension on someone who isn't interested or motivated on their own. Most students are just muddling through because they "have to get a degree".