Download Speaking about developing a vocabulary of criticism, we are aware

DEVELOPING A VOCABULARY OF CRITICISM
Profesor TAMISI MIRELA MARIA
LICEUL CU PROGRAM SPORTIV, TG.-JIU
“Teaching word meanings should be a way for students to define their world, to move from light
to dark, to a more fine-grained description of the colors that surround us.”
—Steven Stahl
Everything we do affects us in some way. The same thing happens with the reading. What you
read may cause you pleasure or displeasure, even when it is meant to inform or entertain you.
People react at what they read and part of the reaction is the criticism, meaning analyzing and
judging of the work.
The noun criticism is most often used to describe negative commentary about something or
someone, but it is just as correct to use criticism to mean "an examination or judgment." Critics
who review books and movies consider their reviews to be criticism, whether they are positive or
negative. So the criticism you give or receive doesn't have to be all about faults, it can actually
be a pleasant experience.
What people feel about a work may be quite difficult to express. They may be able to express
their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a novel or say it is good or bad. However, it is advisable
to support and elaborate an opinion with specific reasoning and, in this case, many people feel at
a loss of words.
Vocabulary development is a process by which people acquire words. In order to build their
vocabularies, people must learn about the meanings that words carry. From an early age, infants
use language to communicate. Family members use language to teach children how to act in
society. In their interactions with peers, children have the opportunity to learn about unique
conversational roles. Through pragmatic directions, adults often offer children cues for
understanding the meaning of words. Throughout their school years, children continue to build
their vocabulary. Therefore, children naturally learn to communicate through listening and
speaking. In order to make the transition to communicating through reading and writing, they
need a large meaning vocabulary and effective decoding skills.
Here are some means for vocabulary development. One of them is exposure to conversations and
engaging in conversation with others which help school-age children develop. Reading is
considered to be a key element of vocabulary development in school-age children. Before
children are able to read on their own, children can learn from others reading to them. Learning
vocabulary from these experiences includes using context, as well as explicit explanations of
words and/or events in the story. This may be done using illustrations in the book to guide
explanation and provide a visual reference or comparisons, usually to prior knowledge and past
experiences. It is said that, by the age of ten, children's vocabulary development through reading
moves away from learning concrete words to learning abstract words.
Generally, both conversation and reading involve at least one of the four principles of context
that are used in word learning and vocabulary development: physical context, prior knowledge,
social context and semantic support. Even it mostly refers to children, people may learn it all
their lives.
Speaking about developing a vocabulary of criticism, we are aware of two important facts about
words: most words, in common use, have more than one meaning and it is hard to get all of the
meaning of a word in any situation, for example, the word criticism. As I said before, many of us
have long been familiar with its meaning of ‘finding fault’, but the word means “to analyze and
make judgments”.
The act of making judgments is very common. We have to analyze every situation in which we
find ourselves if for no other reason to decide whether it is dangerous to us. In the classroom, the
teacher asks a question and the students must size up the question and determine whether they
can give a reasonable answer. This is one kind of analysis – the analysis of a situation. Every day
we make a lot of analyses and judgments. We judge the speech, actions and character of the
others; we also may judge clothes, food, books or information. For each of these judgments,
there are specific words that help us state our findings. Besides, these judgment words help us
think about the things, people and events in the world. They help sharpen our perceptions and
reactions to the environment. Our reactions can be subjective, which is to express our personal
feelings about the thing we are criticizing. Actually, these words say nothing about that thing;
they only express our feelings about it. We can also try to name the qualities of the thing, being
objective. In this situation, we use words that carry specific information to others about the thing
we are dealing with.
Attempting to be objective in our judgments will have more benefits: an objective criticism will
carry more information and be more precise; making an objective criticism requires us to look at
what we are criticizing with an open mind; searching for words to relay an objective criticism
with precision and clarity will help us think more precisely; an objective criticism will learn the
respect of our audience not only for the judgment we express but also for the critical effort that
underlies it.
To conclude, the importance of vocabulary is huge, not only for reading achievement but also for
general social and economic success. The early years of a child’s life have a profound influence
on that child’s language and vocabulary development, which in turn greatly influences
school/life success. Teachers should also directly teach important specific words, and they
should develop and sustain students’ interest in and curiosity about words, making them
objective speakers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY/WEBOGRAPHY:
McDouggal, Littell, Building English Skills, pages 2-19
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/literary%20criticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary_development
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542121/
https://www.eduplace.com/marketing/nc/pdf/author_pages.pdf