Directions: In the following passage, there are six groups of underlined sentences. Read the passage carefully and translate these sentences into Chinese. Write the Chinese version on your Answer Sheet.
Jim Trelease has devoted the past 16 years to promoting what he considers the best-kept secret in education today. 1. “Most people don’t believe me when they first hear it,” he says. “They dismiss it for three reasons: One, it’s simple. Two. it’s free. Three, the child enjoys it. So how good can it be.”
His audience tonight, mostly young parents and teachers gathered in the St. Helena, Calif., elementary-school auditorium, giggles nervously. “I know what you’re thinking,” Trelease says. “There are only24 hours in a day. It’s true. But who ever told you that parenting was going to be a time-saving activity?” 2. Trelease continues to persuade them that no matter how busy they are, the foremost nurturing they can give a child, next to hugging him, is reading aloud to him.
After graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Trelease went to work as a newspaper reporter in nearby Springfield. Then in 1967 a fourth-grade teacher invited him to talk to her class about his career. He had so much fun that he was soon making 40 unpaid local school visits a year.
On his way out the door of one classroom, he spotted a novel he had just read to his daughter. “Who’s reading this?” he asked. Three girls sheepishly raised their hands. “Don’t you just love it?” he said. And for the next45 minutes he and the kids talked about books.
“From then on I always saved time to ask the class what they had read lately,” Trelease says. 3. “And with time I began to see that the kids were reading less and less, except where the teachers read aloud to them. I wondered whether there was a connection between how much you read to children and how much they want to read themselves,”
In professional reading journals Trelease found a wealth of research to support his hunch. 4. Talking to neighbours, relatives and colleagues, he realized that to most people reading aloud was something you did when your child wouldn’t go to sleep. Perhaps that was because these parents were rarely read to as children.
“It is the child’s listening vocabulary that feeds his reading vocabulary,” Trelease says. To illustrate, he reads the opening paragraph of Roald Dahl’s The Enormous Crocodile. “Two crocodiles lay with their heads just above the water. One was enormous. The other was not so big.” Now let’s suppose a child does not know the word “enormous”. Which is going to be more effective: hearing it in the context of a story, or seeing it isolated from meaning on a flashcard? 5. Remember, if a child has never heard the word, he’ll never say it. And if he’s never heard it or said it, it’s going to be difficult when the time comes to read it.
Trelease advocates reading aloud to children as soon as possible. “When did you start talking to your child? On the day she was born. If a child is old enough to talk to, the child is old enough to read to.” Case histories bear him out.
Upon the birth of their daughter, Marcia and Mark Thomas received a copy of Trelease’s best-seller, The Read-Aloud Handbook. 6. They had a special reason for wanting to promote Jennifer’s intellectual development: she was bon with Down syndrome, “We figured it couldn’t hurt,” says Marcia “so we put her on a diet of ten books a day.” When Jennifer required surgery as an infant, her parents left books on tape for the nurses to play. By age five Jennifer was reading on her own.
