“Take a metacognitive look at how you decode unfamiliar text,” this was really hard, much harder then I thought it would be. I went into the task thinking; okay I have a good grasp on language as a whole I bet I can decode a different language pretty well. Boy was I wrong! I began with a Spanish newspaper. I am an avid newsreader and figured this would be a good place to start. I understood next to nothing. I understood obvious things like political names, locations, and words that were similar to English, but that was really it. I was able to use the pictures to help with some of the content, I think. I read the front page many times and became increasingly frustrated with each attempt. How powerful. This is so basic yet extremely important as a teacher.
I then scaled down until I got to a level that I could understand. This level was that of a toddler. I understood repetitive picture books in which the pictures directly correlated to the text. For example, everything on the page was blue, so I figures the word “azul” meant blue. The strategies I used were pictures, trying to find a connection to a word in English (or any other language I may have recognized), repetition.
The implications as a teacher to me would be the need for repetition. As I read on I picked up on words as they were repeated to me. I found it helpful to have pictures, much like a toddler would with a picture book. This also served as further proof to me that the more you read, the more you understand. ELL students need to be given more opportunities, possibly a longer block.
I also went back to a toddler's book. The pictures did help me too but it was also a different culture. It was about Santa Clause but the Santa Clause looked like the pope. The only reason why I knew it wasn't the pope was because Santa Clause in Dutch looks similar to how we spell it.
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