READING ACADEMIC

TEXTS
Fictional story
Refers to a narrative that is derived from the imagination in
other words not based strictly on history or fact. It can also
refer to narratives written only in prose, and is often used as
a synonyms for the novel

Publication
Is something which is written and made to communicate
with the public
It is usually printed on paper (like magazines and books)

Noun publication comes from the Latin Word

“PUBLICARE” meaning make public
Identify if the text came from a publication
or a fictional story.

• There are 10 persons died in the accident last

June 10, 2017 at Brgy Malayantok, Science City of
Muñoz Nueva Ecija.
• The warrior saved to a princess and they live
happily ever after.
• Cinderella left her shoes in the party and the
princes kept looking for her
 From Hand to Mouth
By Michael C. Corballis

(1)Imagine trying to teach a child to talk without using

your hands or any other means of pointing of gesturing.
The task would surely be impossible. There can be little
doubt that bodily gestures are involved in the
development of language, both in the individual and in
the species.
Yet, once the system is up and running, it can function
entirely on vocalizations, as when two friends chat over
the phone and create in each other’s minds a world of
events far removed from the actual sounds that emerge
from their lips.
My contention is that the vocal element emerged relatively late in
hominid evolution. If the modern chimpanzee is to be our guide, the
common ancestor of 5 or 6 million years ago would have been
utterly incapable of a telephone conversation but would have been
able to make voluntary movements of hands and face that could the
least serve as a platform upon which to build a language.
(2) Evidence suggests that the vocal machinery
necessary for autonomous speech developed quite
recently in hominid evolution. Grammatical language
may well have begun to emerge around 2 million years
ago but would at first have been primary gestural,
though no doubt punctuated with grunts and other
vocal cries that were at first largely involuntary and
emotional.
The complex adjustments necessary to produce
speech as we know it today would have taken
some time to evolve, and may not have been
complete until some 170,000 years ago, or even
later, when Homo sapiens emerged to grace,
but more often disgrace, the planet. These
adjustments may have been incomplete even in
our close relatives the Neanderthals; arguably, it
was this failure that contributed to their demise.
(3) The question now is what were the selective
pressures that led to the eventual dominance of
speech? On the face of it, an acoustic medium
seems a poor way to convey information about
the world; not for nothing is it said that a picture
is worth a thousand words.
Moreover, signed language has all the lexical and grammatical
complexity of spoken language. Primate evolution is itself a
testimony to the primacy of the visual world. We share with
monkeys a highly sophisticated visual system, giving us three-
dimension information in colour about us, and an intricate system
for exploring that world through movement and manipulation.
Further, in a hunter- gatherer environment, where
predators and prey are major concern, there are
surely.
Advantages in silent communication since sound
acts as a general alert. And yet we came to
communicate about the world in a medium that in
all primates except ourselves is primitive and
stereotyped- and noisy.
(4) Before we consider the pressures that may have
favoured vocalization over gestures, it bears repeating
that the switch from hand to mouth was almost certainly
not an abrupt one. In fact, manual gestures still feature
prominently in language; even as fluent speakers gesture
almost as much as they vocalize, and of course deaf
communities spontaneously develop signed language
It has also been proposed that speech itself is in many respects
better conceived as composed of gestures rather than
sequences of these elusive phantoms called phonemes. In this
view, language evolved as a system of gestures based on
movements of the hands, arms and face, including
movements of the mouth, lips, and tongue.
It would not have been a big steps to add voicing to the
gestural repertoire, at first as mere grunts, but later articulated
so that invisible gestures of the oral cavity could rendered
accessible, but to the ear rather than the eye. There may
therefore have been continuity from the language that was
almost exclusively manual and facial, though perhaps
punctuated by involuntary grunts, to one in which the vocal
component has a much more extensive repertoire and is under
voluntary control.
The essential feature of modern expressive language
is not that it is purely vocal, but rather that the
component can function autonomously and
provide the grammar as well as meaning of
linguistics communication.
What, then, are the advantages of a language that
can operate autonomously through voice and ear,
rather than hand and eye? Why speech?
Advantages of Arbitrary Symbols
One possible advantage of vocal language is
its arbitrariness. Except in rare cases of
onomatopoeia, spoken words cannot be
iconic, and they therefore offer scope for
creating symbols that distinguish between
object or actions that look alike or might
otherwise be confusable. The names of similar
animals, such as cats, lions, tigers, cheetahs,
lynxes, and leopards, are rather different.
We may be confused as to which animals is which, bur at least it
is clear which one we are talking about. The shortening of words
overtime also makes communication more efficient, and some
of us have been around long enough to see this happen:
television has become TV or telly, microphone has been
reduced to mike (or mic), and so on.
The fact that more frequent words tends to be shorter than less
frequent ones was noted by the American philologist George
Kingsley Zipf, who related it to a principle of “least effort.” So
long as signs are based on iconic resemblance, the signer has
little scope for these kinds of calibration.
(7) It may well have been very important for hunter-gatherers to
identify and name a great many similar fruits, plants, trees,
animals, birds, and so on, and attempts at iconic
representation would eventually only confuse. Jared Diamond
observes that the people living largely traditional lifestyle in
Papua New Guinea can name hundreds of birds, animals, and
plants, along with details about each of them. These people
are illiterate, relying on word of mouth to pass on information,
not only about potential foods, but also about how to survive
dangers, such as crop failures, droughts, cyclones, and raids
from other tribes.
Diamond suggests that the main repository of accumulated
information is elderly. He points out that humans are unique
among primates in that they can expect to live to a ripe old
age, well beyond the age of child bearing (although
perhaps it was not always so). A slowing down of senescence
may well have been selected in evolution because the
knowledge retained by the elderly enhanced the survival of
their younger relatives. An elderly, knowledgeable granny
may help us all live a little longer, and she can also look after
the kids.
(8) In the naming and transmission of such detailed
information, iconic representation would almost certainly be
inefficient: edible plants or berries could be confused with
poisonous ones, and animals that attack confused with
those that are benign. This is not to say that gestural signs
could not to do the trick. Manual signs readily become
conventionalized and convey abstract information.
Nevertheless, there may be some advantage to using
spoken words, since they have virtually no iconic content to
begin with, and so provide a ready-made system for
abstraction.
(9) I would be on dangerous ground, however, if I were to
insist too strongly that speech is linguistically superior to signed
language. After all, students at Gallaudet University seem
pretty unrestricted in what they can learn; signed language
apparently functions well right through to university level- and
still requires students to learn lots of vocabulary from their
suitably elderly professor. It is nevertheless true that many
signs remain iconic, or at least partially so and are therefore
somewhat tethered with respect to modifications that might
enhance clarity or efficiency of expression.
But there may well be a trade- off here. Signed language
may easier to learn than spoken ones. Especially in initial
stages of acquisition, in which the child comes to understand
the linking of objects and the action with their linguistic
representations. But spoken languages, ones acquired, may
relay messages more accurately, since spoken words are
better calibrated to minimize confusion. Even so, the iconic
component is often important, and as I look the quadrangles
outside my office I see how freely the students there are
embellishing their conversations with manual gestures.
Three Parts of Academic Texts

Introduction
Often contains :
Background of the topic
Aim and issue
A description of the outline of the text

Body

Conclusion
Assignment

Find one academic text (students may copy it, photocopy or

cut). Paste it on your notebook and identify the parts of the text.

Answer the following questions:

1. What were your misconceptions about the topic prior to
taking up this lesson?
2. What new or additional learning have you had after taking
up this lesson in terms of skills, content and attitude?
 Thank
You!!!!!!!