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Remember that the purpose of this section is to develop stages and strategies for reading narratives for comprehension. This is a process that builds on itself. It is therefore important that you spend the necessary time on each stage; with practice you will be able to combine stages and strategies to maximize your comprehension of the text you are reading.
As you learned in the Introducción: Getting Started, the first step is to construct a cultural/historical framework, beginning here with the narratives you will read in this course. Building this structure for the first time will require intensive thought, planning, and work. As you continue your study of literature, however, you will update and expand, not re-create, the cultural/historical framework. For this reason, it is critical that the structure you create be flexible enough to accommodate new information. The more time you spend on this phase the first time, the less you will spend later.
A graphic organizer is any visual aid, such as the venn diagrams and charts you created earlier in this chapter, that helps you organize and document ideas and information so that you can make intelligent guesses and/or predictions about a text. It can take many forms, but above all it must be meaningful to you, and it must be open and flexible enough that you can add new information as you discover it.
The content of the graphic organizer will depend on what you are studying. In this case, you need a way to organize the cultural and historical information that is most relevant to the writers you will study in this course. For example, following page 427 of the main text, the authors have included a chronological index of historical events and the specific texts written in each genre around the time of those events. This graphic organizer provides an excellent model to follow (see Appendix for a blank chart), or you can create a different type. The structure can change and evolve as the course progresses and as you begin to study other genres.
Task 1. Create Graphic Organizer.
Think back on other classes you have taken that provided a historical or cultural perspective of Spain, Europe, or Latin America. You can expand your background knowledge by researching the music and art, or any other area of interest, of the epochs of the texts you are studying.
Task 1. Key Word Search.
Task 2. Personal Research. Find a personal source of information (a professor, instructor, local teacher, friend, graduate student, librarian) who is interested in Hispanic history and culture, the narrative genre, the writer you are studying, or a related topic. Try to expand your knowledge base by talking to that person about the topic(s) of your research. Document your discoveries here.
Task 1. Transfer Information.
Task 2. Scan for Key Words. Scan Vida y obra from the introduction to La camisa de Margarita on page 45 of the text, using the reading strategies you have been practicing. Note the key words and phrases. What additional information about Palma’s life can you add to your cultural/historical framework that could explain why he writes what he writes and the way he writes it?
Task 3. Scan for Key Words.