在对付难文的阅读时,一定要善于在理解已知信息的基础上对随之可能出现的信息进行积极预测。预测时,应学会借助主题句、关联词语等篇章信息来提高预测的准确性。如,有一篇短文以这样一句开头:
Many people believe the glare from snow causes snowblindness. Yet…这里根据表示转折的关联词Yet,预测到下面可能出现的是主题句,又必然要否定本句中许多人的观点,即snowblindness(雪盲)可能由glare from snow以外的其它原因引起。原文紧接着的是:Yet,dark glasses or not,they find themselves suffering from headaches and watering eyes,and even snowblindness,when exposed to several hours of “snow light”.
据此主题,我们可以比较有把握地预测到下文将着墨于引起“雪盲”的真正原因,原文如下:
The United States Army has now determined that glare from snow does not cause snowblindness in troops in a snow-covered country. Rather,a man's eyes frequently find nothing to focus on in a broad expanse of barren snow-covered terrain. So his gaze continually shifts and jumps back and forth over the entire landscape in search of something to look at. Finding nothing hour after hour,the eyes never stop searching and the eyeballs become sore and the eye muscles ache. Nature offsets this irritation by producing more and more fluid which covers the eyeball. The fluid covers the eyeball in increasing quantity until vision blurs,then is obscured,and the result is total,even though temporary,snowblindness.
但预测不一定总是正确,它需要在继续阅读中予以肯定、否定或修正。上例中下文的内容与预测相近,表示理解过程正确。如预测与下文不一致,则可能:①对前面内容的理解有偏差;②据以预测的那部分语言信息可能有多种不同理解,因而可据以作出多种不同的预测。
预测有顺向预测和逆向预测两种,上面提到的为顺向预测。所谓逆向预测,实为预测的一种特殊形式,应用于已知下文要推知上文的场合。阅读中积极运用顺向和逆向预测,除了上面谈到的能提高对文章的理解深度外,还可帮助我们读懂本来难以读懂的章节。