Assignment:   Affective Comprehension

-                           APPLIED comprehension

For the department of English and media studies.

By Prof DR Sohail Ansari

Dead line: 5 April

(The assignments are in compliance to instruction from higher authorities so that learning remains uninterrupted despite the closure of university)

(This assignment is 3^nd  of the series of assignments calculated to initiate students into the art of reading)

·         Affective Comprehension.

·         Affective meaning

·          Affective relating to moods, feelings, and attitudes.

AFFECTIVE

Definition of Affective Questions: 

Questions which elicit expressions of attitude, values, or feelings of others.

 

EXAMPLE :

1     Why did Henry roll his eyes when his dad started to play the guitar?

2      How do you feel about that?" "Is that important to you?"

 

Assessment tools:

 

Assessment tools in the affective domain are used to assess attitudes, interests, motivations, and self-efficacy.

 

Skills in the affective domain

Skills in the affective domain describe the way people react emotionally and their ability to feel another living thing's pain or joy. Affective objectives typically target the awareness and growth in attitudes, emotion, and feelings.

Importance of understanding the social and emotional aspects of a text:

 

If a child does not grasp why certain characters in a story may respond in a certain manner, they get lost in the words and the plot.

 

 How did Cinderella feel when she went to live at the castle?

 

While most children will answer "happy" or "excited" to this question, some children will say "sad", revealing a deeper appreciation for interpersonal and family dynamics than you may have expected.

Question:

 What problems a writer or a reader may have if he does not have the appreciation for interpersonal and family dynamics and why he will get lost in words and the plot?

Read below excerpt from a research articles:

Tracking Affective Language Comprehension: Simulating and Evaluating Character Affect in Morally Loaded Narratives

Björn ‘t Hart, Marijn E. Struiksma, Anton van Boxtel, and Jos J. A. van Berkum

 ‘One of the most enjoyable things about reading is that it allows us to walk a mile in the shoes of characters from the most amazing stories. For example, millions of readers have vicariously lived the life of the Machiavellian Queen Cersei from the Game of Thrones book series. This vicarious experience of “walking a mile in another’s shoes" is more than just a figure of speech. To illustrate, although the reader will likely be sitting down as they read about Queen Cersei walking through the palace gardens of the Red Keep, parts of their cortical (pre)motor areas usually involved in walking will nonetheless be slightly activated
Theories of grounded cognition hold that this is because in order to understand what we read, we simulate the meaning of words. Simulation in these cases is taken to involve the neural reactivation of experiential, multimodal traces stored from previous experience with the referents described in the language (e.g., Barsalou, 2008).

This simulation could, theoretically, either be part of the retrieval of the meaning of individual words (e.g., “walking”) or be part of the construction of a situation model of a longer text (so as to, e.g., represent the situation referred to by “Cercei is walking”). Whether simulation, either at the lexical or the situation model level, is automatic and strictly necessary for comprehension continues to be debated (e.g., Mahon and Caramazza, 2008; Willems and Casasanto, 2011; Barsalou, 2016; Leshinskaya and Caramazza, 2016), but converging evidence supports the notion that sensorimotor simulation is, at least under some circumstances, involved in language comprehension (Kiefer and Pulvermüller, 2012).’

 The Affective Language Comprehension (ALC) model

Van Berkum (2018, 2019) recently outlined the possible interfaces between language comprehension and emotion in a comprehensive model, the Affective Language Comprehension (ALC) model. This model helps us to discuss the different ways in which affect can come into play during the processing of a sentence like “Cersei is furious when her favorite dress rips.” language comprehension is assumed to involve a process of decoding, where comprehenders retrieve and grammatically combine word meanings (as well as recognize other signs, in writing these could include bold font, capitalization, exclamation marks, etc.) and a process of interpretation where comprehenders infer the speaker’s intentions in the context at hand. In line with Tomasello (2008) the latter would include working out the situation to which the speaker is referring and what they are hoping to achieve by doing so.

Exercise:

Read below the Opinion from The New York Times

Opinion

A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky Is Falling

Alarmist is not a word anyone has ever used to describe me before. But this is different.

By Cornelia Griggs

Dr. Griggs is a pediatric surgery fellow.

March 19, 2020

I’ve had hard conversations this week. “Look me in the eye,” I said to my neighbor Karen, who was spiraling to a dark place in her mind. “I make this personal promise to you — I will not let your children die from this disease.” I swallowed back a lump in my throat. Just the image of one of our kids attached to a tube was jarring. Two weeks ago our kids were having a pizza party and watching cartoons together, running back and forth between our apartments. This was before #socialdistancing was trending. Statistically, I still feel good about my promise to Karen because children do not seem to be dying from Covid-19. There are others to whom I cannot make similar promises.

A few days later, I got a text from another friend. She has asthma. “I’m just saying this because I need to say it to someone,” she wrote. She asked that if she gets sick and has a poor prognosis, to play recordings of the voice of Josie, her daughter. “I think it would bring me back,” she said. Josie is my 4-year-old’s best friend.

Today, at the hospital where I work, one of the largest in New York City, Covid-19 cases continue to climb, and there’s movement to redeploy as many health care workers as possible to the E.R.s, new “fever clinics” and I.C.U.s. It’s becoming an all-healthy-hands-on-deck scenario.

The sky is falling. I’m not afraid to say it. A few weeks from now you may call me an alarmist; and I can live with that. Actually, I will keel over with happiness if I’m proven wrong.

Alarmist is not a word anyone has ever used to describe me before. I’m a board-certified surgeon and critical care specialist who spent much of my training attending to traumas in the emergency room and doing the rounds at Harvard hospitals’ intensive care units. I’m now in my last four months of training as a pediatric surgeon in New York City. Part of my job entails waking in the middle of the night to rush to the children’s hospital to put babies on a form of life support called ECMO, a service required when a child’s lungs are failing even with maximum ventilator support. Scenarios that mimic end-stage Covid-19 are part of my job. Panic is not in my vocabulary; the emotion has been drilled out of me in nine years of training. This is different.

We are living in a global public health crisis moving at a speed and scale never witnessed by living generations. The cracks in our medical and financial systems are being splayed open like a gashing wound. No matter how this plays out, life will forever look a little different for all of us.

Making my rounds at the children’s hospital earlier this week, I saw that the boxes of gloves and other personal protective equipment were dwindling. This is a crisis for our vulnerable patients and health care workers alike. Protective equipment is only one of the places where supplies are falling short. At our large, 4,000-bed New York City hospital, we have 500 ventilators and 250 on backup reserve. If we are on track to match the scale of Covid-19 infections in Italy, then we are likely to run out of ventilators in New York. The anti-viral “treatments” we have for Covid-19 are experimental and many of them are hard to even get approved. Let me repeat. The sky is falling.

(The phrase "The sky is falling!" features prominently in the story, and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent).

Question:

1       Try to walk a mile in the shoes of Cornelia Griggs. Describe in your words that walking.

2       Can you vicariously live the life of the Cornelia Griggs while sitting down as you read about Cornelia Griggs witnessing a global public health crisis moving at a speed and scale never witnessed by living generations?

3       You are involved in witnessing but in order to understand what you read, you simulate the meaning of words. Which words you simulate?

4       ‘Simulation could, theoretically, either be part of the retrieval of the meaning of individual words’ write some individual words and write some words those are the ‘part of the construction of a situation model of a longer text’ (so as to represent the situation referred to by Cornelia Griggs.

5      Simulation in these cases is taken to involve the neural reactivation of experiential, multimodal traces stored from previous experience with the referents described in the language. What is stored from previous experience and what referents you find in ‘opinion?

6       Apply Affective Language Comprehension (ALC) model to discuss the different ways in which affect can come into play during the processing of various sentences expressing the emotional responses of Cornelia Griggs to situation and people like”

7       Infer Cornelia Griggs’s intentions in the context.

Applied comprehension:

Understandings at the literal and interpretive levels are combined, reorganized and restructured at the applied level to express opinions, draw new insights and develop fresh ideas.

Guiding students through the applied level shows them how to synthesize information, to read between the lines and to develop a deeper understanding of the concepts, principles and implications presented in the text..

 

APPLIED comprehension:

Question: How would the author’s message apply to other situations given what you memorized and understood at the other two levels?

Example:

 If Henry’s friend Tom was the one playing the guitar! Do you think  Henry would have rolled his eyes? Why or why not?

 

INTERPRETIVE

EXAMPLE :

Why did Henry roll his eyes when his dad started to play

the guitar?

AFFECTIVE

EXAMPLE :

Why did Henry roll his eyes when his dad started to play

the guitar?

Applied – reading beyond the lines

Here the reader makes links between the text and his or her own experience and knowledge to develop an answer. The reader asks open-ended questions to promote deeper understanding and do the following:

• Make generalizations.
• Make comparisons.
• Make judgments.
• Make recommendations and suggestions.
• Make decisions.
• Create alternative endings.

Examples of applied question starters: How would you…? Do you agree . . . ?  What would have happened if . . . ? How might . . . ?  What effect does  . . . ?  If you were . . .  What would you . . . ?

APPLIED - taking what was said (literal) and what was meant by what was said (interpretive) and then extend (apply) the concepts or ideas beyond the situation.

·         Analyzing

·         Synthesizing

·         Applying

Applied Questions: (“Beyond the text”)

Applied questions are mainly opinion questions that work “beyond the text”. They are more difficult to assess because one could really ask them without having read the text.

Applied questions connect to the “real-world” and help students to make connections between the text, their own opinions, and scenarios.

They are harder to use to assess student’s understanding of the text.

Applied Questions

Applied Questions (“real world” questions that involve application to an invented scenario, interpretation of the text, inclusion of the reader’s judgment, opinion, and personal response

Did you like the book? Why or why not? • Would this book appeal to boys, as well? Why or why not?)

Who is your favorite character and why?

Are you reminded of another book, movie, or real-life scenario from this book?

Why do you think the author wrote this book?

Who is your least favorite character and why?

Do you think it would make a difference to a child after reading this book in their behavior, either about bullying or standing up to bullies?

Exercise:

Choose any passage of any article and write below applied questions.