BLog Week 2 - Entry 4

Blog Entry #4

This week, for Blog Entry 4, I had to read a text at my reading level, which is written in a language I am not familiar with and attempt to make meaning of what I was reading. The text I chose is a book called Par de Detectives and it is written by J.A. Jance. I chose this book because the title caught my eye. I love mystery/detective books, and even though the title was in Spanish, it seemed as if the genre fit my interests. First I read the back cover to see if I could get an idea of what the book was about. I took Spanish in high school, (so like15 years ago) and thought my limited memory would help me…boy was I wrong. Being that some Spanish words, as many people know, are similar to English words, I was able to get a small amount of information as to what the book was about, but not much. According to the first sentence on the back cover, a famous artist from Seattle is dead in a morgue in Arizona. After reading this, I began thinking to myself, how awesome, I may actually be able to understand what I am reading. Then I read the second sentence, and then I read the second sentence again, and then I read it two more times. Beyond a couple familiar words, I had NO IDEA what was going on. After attempting to understand rest of the back cover, I decided to open the book, and I began on the first page of the Prologue. Oh my was this overwhelming. I recognized a few words, but other than that, I could not make any sense of what I was reading. Being that I did take Spanish in high school, I began to get frustrated that I could not remember what certain words were and also that I did not recall the rules of syntax in Spanish. Ultimately, after a half hour of really trying to find out what this book was about, I gave up. Some of the strategies I used to attempt to read this book were trying to connect the Spanish words to familiar looking words in English, trying to use my previous knowledge about the Spanish language, connecting any meaning I got from one sentence to the sentences before and after it, and rereading the sentences to see if I could make sense of them. This was a LOT of work, and I cannot even imagine having to do this for 6 hours a day.

Now, more than ever, I truly feel such compassion for ELL students. We teach without stopping, and they just have to sit there and do the best they can to follow along, when they probably get almost next to nothing accomplished compared to if it was in their first language. In the future, I will make sure that I am aware of what stage of second language acquisition each of my ELL students are in, and I will attempt to include adaptations in all of my lessons so that their individual needs are met!