4.2.3.1. Stringing sentences together

Both instructions and statements can be strung together in chains. A language may have more than one way of doing this. For instance, in English, it would be natural to say “This man left his house, hitched up his oxen, went to the field, and began ploughing.” (Remember, we have among our hundred pictures one picture of a man ploughing a field with oxen.) However, we could also say “Leaving his house, hitching up his oxen, and going to the field, this man began ploughing”. At this point you want to concern yourself with learning to comprehend sentence chains of the type that are most common in the language you are using. The language may be very different from English in this area as in any.

There may be an important distinction between chains in which all of the sentences have the same subject and chains in which the subject of each sentence is different. The sentence chain “This man left his house, hitched up his oxen, went to the field, and began ploughing” has the same subject for all the sentences in the chain. It is “this man” who left the house, it is the same man who harnessed his ox, it is the same man who went to the field, and the same man who began ploughing. Contrast the sentence “My mother works at the bank, my father works at the factory, and my older brother attends university.” Here there are three chained sentences, and three subjects: my mother, my father, and my older brother. In your language sessions you will want to be sure that you get exposure to both of these kinds of sentence chains, in case there is an important difference.

Techniques: The example of the man ploughing was chosen to suggest ways the LRP might string sentences together in describing pictures. Your goal could be to attempt to identify the picture at the earliest possible moment in the chain. It is also a simple matter for the LRP to give you strings of commands. During your first week this would not be a good idea. Once you are a few weeks down the road, single commands may not be very challenging, and you'll appreciate the challenge of having a long string of commands to remember and carry out: “Go into the yard, get a brick, bring it back and put it on the table.”