Module 1: Activity 2

a. What is corandic? A corandic is an emurient grof with many fribs.


b. What does corandic grank from? It granks from corite, an old which cargs like lange.


c. How do garkers excarp the tarances from the corite? Garkers excarp by glarcking the corite and starping it in tranker-clarped storbs.


d. What does the slorp finally frast? The slorp finally frasts a pragety, blickant crankle: coranda. 


e. What is coranda? Coranda is a cargurt, grinkling corandic and borigen. 


f. How is the corandic nacerated from the borigen? The corandic is nacerated from the borigen by means of loracity. 


g. What do the garkers finally thrap? The garkers finally thrap a glick, bracht, glupous grapant, corandic. 

How is it that you are able to answer such questions? What does this experience suggest about the kinds of “comprehension” questions found in workbooks and on standardized tests? 

I was able to answer the questions only by looking at the structure of the sentences. Simply by looking at the words like “is,” “by,” “from,” etc., I was able to figure out how to somewhat answer the questions. There is no way I could explain what the nonsense words mean, however just by the grammatical structure, I can easily answer the questions. The questions were also surface level questions (What? How?) If a question required me to think or infer, I would not be able to articulate an answer. I know that a corandic is a noun because of the way it is placed in the sentence. Suppose I said: “It corandic from the car.” You would conclude that “corandic” is a verb because of the way I used it in a sentence. You probably still could not determine its meaning, however you could probably figure out that it is a verb.

This experience shows that sometimes the comprehension questions that we ask our students, as teachers, do not tell us what we think they tell us.  Students may not always comprehend a text. Maybe they are just figuring how to answer the questions by looking at the grammatical structure of the sentence. Our comprehension questions should require more in-depth thinking and inferring. When a student infers something from a text, that situation is not clearly given. Inferring requires students to comprehend the events or meaning of the text. We need to be careful when using these types of questions, even though they may seem harmless.