For instance, the timeline of the narration is often treated flexibly, moving from the narrator’s perspective to different points within his memory of the events.” Good to see it’s not just me then… The entry for ‘Cat and Mouse’ in the English version of Wikipedia includes the following passage: “The narrative in the story is often fairly incoherent. The difficulty with vocabulary was not helped by the vagueness I found in the storyline, but at least I wasn’t the only one who struggled to follow the plot. I haven’t really checked, but I think I could probably count on one hand the number of pages where there were fewer than five words whose meaning was completely unknown (although a lot of those were descriptions of plants, trees, types of ships or religious terminology – none of which I’m particularly up-to-speed on in my native language either). The connection, of course, to today’s post is that I was thinking about this description of free reading as I was struggling through Nobel Prize Winner Günter Grass’ novella, ‘Katz und Maus’ (‘Cat and Mouse’). It was an interesting little talk however, seeing as the topic of the workshop was ‘Paraphrasing: The How To Guide’, most of the audience was, understandably, fairly annoyed with the presenter for completely ignoring the supposed topic.

One of the points the speaker stressed was that the students should read voluntarily, should choose something they want to read and should attempt a book which is pitched just above their level (no more than 4-5 unknown lexical items per page). Last week, I attended the 22nd English Australia Conference, the annual meeting for the Australian ESL industry, in Melbourne (which meant that instead of a flight interstate and a stay at a nice hotel, I got to wake up earlier than usual and spend the best part of an hour each way on the train every day), and one of the presentations I attended spent some time outlining the virtues of free reading for language learners.

Cat and mouse by gunter grass summary