Entry #4

  Reading foreign language text was definitely an eye opening experience.  I have had experience with this when I studied Spanish, but what was most suprising was how it felt to read a language that does not use the same alphabetic system as we do.  I started off reading a text at the adult level.  This particular text was in German.  Although I could not get any meaning out of the text, I was able to identify words like "and", "the", and "of".  Not getting any meaning at all quickly lost my interest, which I know is what our ELA students do as well.  There needs to be a way to find meaning in order to keep someone engaged in their task.
  From there I moved to two texts in Russian that actually had pictures.  Luckily, the pictures aided in helping me make meaning because Russian does not have the same alphabet as we do.  I was not able to make any meaning from the text itself. In the first book I picked up, it looked like a story that had some similar elements to Hansel and Gretel.  It seemed to have a brother and sister, a wicked old woman, and the wicked old woman wanting to cook the children.  On the other hand there were some differences.  The boy was quite a bit younger than the girl and there was a stork in the story at the beginning.  Even with the pictures, I was still unable to get the full meaning of the text.  This again shows how much work it is for ELA students to be able to make any meaning from text.  It is also easy to see how there can be some definite confusion when the pictures are not clear and you do not know the story.
   The other Russian text I knew the story well.  It was Cinderella.  Being able to decipher the story from the pictures was such a relief because there was no way for me to make any meaning out of the text.  Clearly my main strategy for reading text from another language is using pictures to help make meaning.  Without pictures this task would have been impossible.  This really had me thinking about times when we give our students text without pictures.  How frustrating that must be for those students!
  Last I went to what I thought was probably the simplest text to read. It was in Korean. Each page seemed to have one word on it with a picture of a bird.  I know the book had to have been about birds.  But then I realized that in a language like Korean one symbol could stand for a whole word, it is not necessarily one sound as in English.  Even with the most "simple" looking text I was not 100 percent sure I completely understood.
   This activity reiterated the importance that as teachers we need to be aware of the learning tasks we give our students of English as a second language.  We need to scaffold for them in whatever way we can to ensure they are able to make meaning.  Providing them with pictures, vocabulary scaffolding, realia, and opportunities to add their learning experiences to their schema is extremely important in the process of building their language skills and their comprehension.