I was browsing a news website looking for suitable articles to use as source texts in our mediations when I came across this article: «Los terraplanistas del Covid llegan al TS: No hay pruebas de que exista el Coronavirus».
Surprised as I was, I kept reading. It had really caught my attention.
And there was my eldest daughter reading over my shoulder. The topic of COVID-19 has her really engaged. Plus she had recently heard a song by some YouTuber talking about the flat-Earth theory.
So she asked what it was about. She didn’t understand how the two things were related. And there it was! A real intralinguistic mediation right in front of me.
So I had to process the text to understand the information and arguments included in it. Then, I had to transfer those ideas in the form of a new text created by myself. In this case, it was an oral text.
This new mediated text usually has the following characteristics:
Processing a text, as I did for my daughter, implies reading for detail.
And it may also imply transferring the ideas to the new text arranged in a totally different order, in response to the goal as stated in the context of the situation. And with this new organization of the information, mediators will carry out one or more of the following actions:
In short, here are some key words we need to bear in mind when we are teaching our students how to process a text in the context of a mediation, or when, as evaluators, we are assessing this type of mediation:
Summarising, clarifying, condensing information, reformulating, emphasizing main ideas, collating arguments, identifying purpose and viewpoint.
To fully grasp the potential of summaries, check out this post: What summaries can do for your students.
Below you can find two examples of Mediation Tasks to Process Texts: «Confusing News» is based on the article I was telling you about at the beginning of this post, which we turned into a cross-linguistic task (Spanish-English), and «The Future of Robots & AI» is an intralinguistic mediation task (English-English).
