The text I chose was Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I chose this book because I've read in English and thought this might help as I read. While I already had a summary in my head in English, it only helped me to understand the text a little. I was able to recognize cognates (words that look and mean the same in Spanish and English). I struggled through the text, I decided to try my hand at a newspaper or magazine in Spanish. This reading was easier for me to comprehend and the visual made the text more comprehensible.
Here is a list of strategies I would use to make content comprehensible:
*provide a summary of the reading in the student's native language (if possible)
*use visual cues or realia
*teach students to recognize cognates (this works for romance languages, ie; Spanish, French, Italian-it becomes a challenge for students of non-Roman languages)
*Adapt the text by simplifying the language
As an ESL teacher it would be more challenging to help a student make meaning from a text and not know anything about their language. For example, last year I had a 17-year old girl come from China. Chinese and English are very different languages, not only in origin but one is alphabetic and one is not. While she had a lot of background knowledge, I needed to use a lot visuals and realia to support her comprehension. It helped that she had some knowledge of English but not enough that she didn't need support.
No comments:
Post a Comment