Week 2 Blog Topics

Entry #4: 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.


I love this blog assignment, because I have SO many personal experiences where this has happened and yet somehow I've made it through five years of teaching and never once thought to connect my experiences with foreign language to the difficulties some of my students have. DUH!
I remember in college passing out of nearly all my foreign language requirements--in order to get 11 credits, I had to take one semester of French. I signed up for the class that was recommended to me: French 400 something or other. Yeah.....The first day, a Senegalese woman started talking about the first 100 pages of Madame Bovary so quickly and with vocabulary I had never heard before that I nearly started crying in the back of the room. I was the only freshman, and I got schooled. After that first day, I signed up for a lower level class that turned out to still be difficult for me. It wasn't that my high school French teacher didn't prepare me--I even lived in a France as an au pair for one summer. It was that the grammar, the writing, and the reading (all non-fiction newspaper and magazine articles about health issues) was not part of my background knowledge. I am conversational in French, but apparently not literate. What is my level of textual understanding? Comic books--the French comic book Asteriks. And it has pictures.
So what strategies did I use/could I use to construct meaning from texts that were, and even more so now, are too difficult for me? I Googled... a lot. I used Babblefish. I looked at Greek and Latin roots that I knew to try and derive some sort meaning. I highlighted and flaged and sounded out words. I read and re-read passages, stories, articles, whole papers. And I barely made it through with a B-.
These strategies are the same things I tell my kids to do; we study roots, prefixes and suffixes to decode new vocabulary; we look at the context of a sentence to comprehend the word; we ask kids to visualize or make use of non-verbal representations; and we try to scaffold support systems like peer tutors, literature/reading circles, progress monitoring, and teacher mentoring to help students develop those essential literacy skills.
There is always a learning curve, it seems, and surprising at how easily we may forget just how our students feel as they struggle to learn a new language.



Entry #5: Review 2 children’s books and determine what components in the book might affect comprehension because of cultural aspects. List 4 per book and tell how this schema could be taught or introduced to an ELL learner.

I reviewed two books in my children's library section: Dinner at Auntie Rose's by Janet Munsil, illustrated by Scot Ritchie, and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! By A. Wolf as told to Jon Scieszka, illustrated by Lane Smith.
Both of these books were chosen because 1) they are currently in my classroom and used for different classes/curriculums, 2) they are well loved by myself and students, and 3) when reading through my various children's books, these two stood out to me as being culturally biased more than some of the others.
Dinner at Auntie Rose's is a young girl's story of her dreadful family dinners and all that is expected of her. From social expectations to what food is discussed, this story potentially neglects non-Western cultures and/or cultures that simply do not share these views: "stand up strait; don't shuffle your feet' don't go into rooms with closed doors; don't talk with your mouth full; say please and thank you; don't pick your nose," etc. These are behaviors  that are "no way for a lady to behave" and yet, even as this (presumably) American girl struggles to comply with them, they assume that the social customs of the reader are the same. Similarly, the food that is discussed (brussel sprouts) and the idea that one must eat everything on their plate "because people are starving in Africa" could be exclusive. The language and vocabulary within the book are not particularly challenging, but such phrases as "My cousin Jeremy is a turkey" could easily prove difficult for second language learners who are still trying to understand the grammatical structures, nonetheless the hyperbolic idioms and insults of a six year old narrator. Some of the phrases Lucy, the young girl, uses could also prove challenging for ELLs: "I wish I had a rock to crawl under"; "jump in a lake"; and even "get that look off your face". Lastly, I started to think about the idea of family dinners as a whole--is this something that is culturally specific? Are they expected in some and dreaded in others? What about cultures where even extended family may share the same roof? For these reasons, Dinner at Auntie Rose's could be as unpleasant for ELL students as it was for Lucy.

The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs had even more examples of cultural/language bias. The folk tale of the three little pigs is well known in America, but not necessarily in other counties or cultures. Furthermore, the fact that this novel is a parody, a satirical point of view change from the original, would be lost on foreign language students who are not familiar with the original tale. The entire premise of this new, true story, is that the wolf was framed--all he really wanted was a cup of sugar, and the pigs, who were already dead, would have spoiled if he hadn't eaten them. When first introducing his side of the story, the wolf tries to defend his reputation saying, "Maybe it's our diet. Hey, it's not my fault wolves eat cute little animals likes bunnies and sheep and pigs. That's just the way we are. If cheeseburgers were cute, folks would porbably think you were Big and Bad too." Point to consider: what about cultures that don't eat cheeseburgers, but do consider bunnies as food instead of pets? The wolf goes on to also critize the houses and materials used by the pigs in construction: straw, sticks, and also bricks. When first learning that his neighbor the pig used straw for his home, the wolf says "can you believe it? I mean, who in his right mind would build a house of straw?" The rhetorical question is not only problematic for ELL students who may feel the need to know the answer, but also to anyone from an outside culture that may use thatch, sticks, mud, or other "non-conventional" building materials. Lastly, like the previously discussed book, this children's book contains so much slang, idioms, and culturally biased phrases that ELL students could really struggle to understand it: "dead as a doornail", "making a scene", "jazz it up".

With both of these books, ELL students would require prior knowledge/instruction to understand the idioms.  A lesson on figurative language using non-verbal representations to help students understand would provide students the knowledge to understand these books as well as spoken and written language later. One of the benefits of these particular children's books is the presence of illustrations on every page. These pictures could be used for any ELL student (even preproduction kiddos) to help them identify events, attitudes, main ideas, themes, etc. Strategically pairing unknown vocabulary with the visual representations would allow students to build vocabulary and extend upon whatever language they are able to produce at their level.