8:1 - Salient

When & Where: I heard this while sitting in LTED626 the other night. The professors were instructing us to work in pairs to come up with the most salient questions on the passages we were reading to use as part of reciprocal teaching.

Definition: According to dictionary.com, salient means, "prominent or conspicuous."

Level of Familiarity: Because of how they were using the word in context, I knew that they meant they wanted us to come to a consensus on what were the most important questions to address from the passages. I assumed salient meant "important."

Reflective Commentary: This is a good word to know, especially if you are modeling reciprocal teaching strategies or other strategies that ask readers to come up with questions related to the text they are working with. picking out salient information from a text is an important part of many different comprehension strategies, and it is a great word to use to describe the type of questions or features of a text that are the most important.