Chapter 7, page 168
arrived at this definition. In addition, suppose that there are 14 students in the room who do not know how
to infer the meaning of this word. They might have learned the meaning of cargo, but they have not learned
anything about how to derive the meaning of a word from context.
In contrast, consider this exchange:
Teacher: What do you think cargo means?
Rafael: I think it means something like products.
Teacher: How did you come up with that answer?
Rafael: Well, I looked at those two sentences. One sentence says that only tea was destroyed. The next
sentence says that no other cargo was touched. So I was thinking that cargo is something on
the ship that could have been have been destroyed. Cargo could be things carried on the ship,
like products being taken from one place to another.
This time the teacher followed up on Rafael’s answer by asking him to explain his thinking. From Rafael’s
answer, the teacher knows that Rafael did know how to infer the meaning of this word from its context.
Because Rafael explained his thought process, those 14 students who did not know how to infer the
meaning of the word cargo have a chance to learn something about how to do it from Rafael’s explanation.
By listening to Rafael explain his thinking (i.e., from Rafael making his thinking public), these students
might learn that they should consider adjacent sentences, and that words like other can be a good clue.
Figure 7.10:
Showing cognitive work
[This is a two panel drawing.
The panel on the left shows a girl about 11 years old saying “I think the paragraph summary is that Hawaii
has people from many different backgrounds.”
The label under this drawing says “Doesn’t show cognitive work.”
The panel on the right shows the same girl saying, “I think the paragraph summary is that Hawaii has
people from many different backgrounds. I got this idea because each of the sentences in this paragraph
talks about people from different backgrounds, like Japanese, Chinese, Polynesian, and European. Even
though there isn’t any topic sentence, I can figure the topic out because all the sentences are about this one
idea.”
The label under this drawing says “Shows cognitive work.”]
Making thinking public is analogous to “showing your work” on a math problem. Most of you
probably had a math teacher who would not accept homework or tests that only showed the answers to a
problem, you had to show all the steps you followed to answer the question. Making your thinking public is
a verbal form of showing your work, as illustrated in Figure 7.10. The girl on the left of Figure 7.10 simply