But they didn’t know the subject in advance and their teacher did not invest the time needed to introduce them to the topic they were about to study. Now suddenly they were handed textbooks about occupational psychology. These women usually read fiction, novels and magazines. It was a group of women about to start with further education and training at their current workplace out of necessity or because their employers requested it.
One group in particular stands out to me. I’ve worked with many adults about to start higher education. High expectations require prior understanding
What is needed in such a situation is a prior understanding of the texts contents. Academic literature about neurons might as well be written in Greek if you do not hold the adequate knowledge about the subject prior to reading about it. But just because the words are English it doesn’t necessarily mean that the content makes sense to us. We expect because we read in English and have a text written in English in front of us, that we automatically understand the text and are able to pull the essence out of it the moment we put our eyes on it. But sometimes our expectations can be a hindrance too, and if this is the case, we end up with a sense of frustration or find ourselves feeling that we didn’t catch the essence of the text – despite having read it thoroughly from end to end. Those “glasses” make it possible for us to find meaning in what we are reading. We always look at texts through glasses coloured by our experiences and our education. What expectations do we have as a reader when approaching an unknown text?Įvery time we sit ourselves down with an unknown text we automatically have some expectations concerning what we’re about to read.
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