Blog #4

Blog #4

 This was a very interesting activity.  I have always found myself trying to make sense of conversations I hear in restaurants or malls when others are speaking a language other than English.  I started off trying to make sense of an adult-fiction novel.  The novel was titled “La Luna Roja”.  I have a very limited knowledge of Spanish, but did recognize the title as “The Red Moon”.  Unfortunately, that was about all I was able to make sense of the book.  I started by trying to read the back of the book so that I would have an idea of what the story might be about.  I was unable to make any meaning from the back of the book.  As I started to read the first chapter, I was able to pick out a few words but that did not give me enough clues to make sense of the story.  I spent over 20 minutes on the first page alone, trying to recognize any of the words.  I was able to figure out the story took place 11 years ago during the spring, but that was all I could recognize.  While reading this piece of material, I tried several different strategies such as recognizing Spanish words that resembled English words.  For example, words like pijama and imaginar were found on the first page.  I was able to match these words with English words, pajama and imagine.  Unfortunately, identifying these two words did not give me enough information to make meaning.  I was also able to pick out characters names and names of places with the clue of punctuation.  I found reading the first page very frustrating.  I was sounding out the words (with English rules for pronunciation), moving fairly quickly through the text, but making no sense of the words. 

I then moved to an adult-nonfiction text entitled “Historias de Mexico”.  I found this text much less frustrating to read.  I used the same strategy as I had used in the first story I read, such as finding Spanish words that look like English words and using punctuation.  Because this text was nonfiction, the information included a lot of dates and places where events took place.  I was also able to make sense of some of this book because there were pictures and diagrams to go along with the text.  With the combination of a few words I recognized and the diagrams/pictures, I was able to get a general gist of the information.  I could not read the information word for word, but could give general details from the information.  I could move through the information in this story much more quickly.

I also tried to make sense of a children’s novel.  I even chose a book I was familiar with, but was written in Spanish, “El Leon, la Bruja y el Ropero” or “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe”.  It amazed me how much I rely on the words for meaning.  I have probably read this book at least 8 times, but when I was faced with trying to make meaning of the story when it was written in Spanish, I had a really hard time.  I could recognize the characters and pick out a few words, but the details were lost as I was trying to translate the story back into English.  Trying to make sense of a story I was supposed to know was very frustrating, probably the most frustrating of all the books I looked at.  I used the strategies listed above but couldn’t make sense of much.  The story has very few pictures, so the pictures could not give me a lot of information.  I tried to fill in the holes of the story that I could remember with the words I could pick out, but I knew I was missing a lot of the story.  I can only imagine how much information our ELL learners are missing when they are reading text completely in English!

The last book I looked at was a popular picture book “Owen”.  I have never read the story before, but found it easy to make meaning of the story.  I used the pictures predominantly, but once I was able to put the story in order, I went back and tried to make meaning of the words.  The pictures played a huge part in my ability to understand what the story was about.  I would be able to retell the story in my own words if needed.  I think that pictures are a valuable tool for children learning another language, but I would not want the child to depend solely on the pictures.  I do believe it is important to work with the text as well so that a true meaning is obtained and a connection and meaning of the words can be gathered. 

The strategies I used included:

·         Matching Spanish words to English words (look-a-likes)
·         Using diagrams and pictures for nonfiction text
·         Reading stories that are familiar
·         Using pictures in picture books
·         Taking the stories one page, or even one sentence at a time
·         I had to take several breaks to avoid becoming completely frustrated
·         I found myself reading aloud much of the time