Blog Post 4 - Deciphering text in another language

Blog Entry #4

Context: This activity will encourage you to take a metacognitive look at how you decode unfamiliar text. It is important for you to understand your own strategies as you attempt to help your learners build their own decoding skills.

Task Description: Choose a text in a language that you are not familiar with, at a level at which you should be proficient (an adult publication). Read it. Find a way to make meaning. Do whatever you have to do to make this text comprehensible. Now scale back the difficulty of the text. How far back to you have to go until you understand what you are reading? What did you do to make meaning? What are the implications to teacher? Make a list of the strategies that you used and post findings/thoughts on your blog.

Delivery: Post blog entry by Wednesday.

Assessment: See Blog Rubric.

Adult Text - People Magazine online in Spanish

http://www.peopleenespanol.com/

When working with the text, I relied a lot on pictures and on the spanish words I knew. I looked at a picture of Michele Obama riding a bike and I knew the word anos, and the number 50.  I was able to deduce that the article was about Michele turning 50. I also was able to read that she is the president's wife.  I could, based on my knowledge of grammar, figure out which words (mostly) were verbs, nouns and adjectives. I could eke out the very very basics of articles, but not more than that.  I could extract very little meaning from text.




Children's Text:

I borrowed this children's book in Spanish on my iPad with my Kindle app. http://www.amazon.com/Childrens-books-spanish-grillo-Libros-ebook/dp/B00H2DZHTW/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1389850456&sr=1-1&keywords=children%27s+book+in+spanish

This book I showed my students and my students who speak Spanish were laughing with me at my silly questions.about the meaning. Here too I worked with the pictures.

The first book I was going to work with was Green Eggs and Ham in French and then I would have worked with people magazine in French. However, Green Eggs and Ham in French isn't available on a kindle version.

I realized, that even in a children's book I had trouble getting meaning from text.

I was frustrated as usually I read with ease and I understand some spoken Spanish, but not much.  I have very  basic Spanish words, counting, a few colors, and a dozen or so nouns.  This does not reading fluency make.

If someone had "tested" me on my knowledge of the text I'd have failed for sure.

Strategies I'll use in my classroom from what I learned:

1. Use of pictures.
2. Use of other students who have more fluency with the language. My students were having fun having me sound out words and giggling at my ineptness (in fun).  Pairing a fluent reader with a non-fluent reader makes it more fun.
3. I realized how very very basic is the information gleaned with very minimal language skills and a couple of pictures, even with people/places I recognized.