Strategies for Reading in an Unfamiliar Language

     In order to gain some understanding of what it must be like to be a second language learner in my classroom, I made an attempt to read an article in Italian.  I thought, initially, that it might not be that difficult and that I might be able to use my knowledge of Spanish, another Romance Language, to figure out what I was reading.  I quickly discovered that despite some similarities between Spanish and Italian the knowledge I had was not going to help me read or understand the article in Italian.  Immediately, I began to understand what my English language learning students must feel like when presented with text that is beyond their stage of second language acquisition.  "One of the most important things you should know about each of your English language learners (ELLs) is which stage of acquisition they are in.  Knowing and understanding the stage and its characteristics are critical for effectively differentiating instruction for these students" (Hill & Flynn, 2006, p.14).

     Initially, I tried to tackle the entire article but found myself scanning the text because I was unable to make any meaning.  So, I decided to scale back and take it sentence by sentence starting with the title.  I was still unable to gain much meaning so I decided to take it word by word with a focus on the letter/sound relationship in attempt to make any connections between what was familiar to me and the Italian words on the page.  As Gibbons (2002) states about reading in another language, "you will find that your reading relies much more on graphophonic cues that does your reading in English, and so you read much more slowly-the resources that are available to a fluent speaker of the language are not available to you" (p. 78). 

     I found myself using other strategies to attempt to gain some understanding of the article.  I first drew upon the knowledge that I had about the article and where it came from.  I found the article on an Italian cooking website so I used that information to activate my background knowledge about Italian cooking.  I have eaten at many Italian restaurants and have even traveled to Italy and explored the country for a couple of weeks.  I also enjoy cooking and have made several Italian dishes at home.  This knowledge helped me to understand a couple of the words in the title of the article, tagliatelle and bolognese and italiana.  I knew that tagliatelle was a type of pasta, that bolognese referred to meat sauce and italiana probably referred to the fact that this article discussed Italian food or cooking methods.  Even though I could now understand a portion of the title I was not able to fully grasp what the article was about.  Next, I moved on to observe the picture that was included in the article.  The picture helped to confirm that I was on the right track.  I could see that there was pasta with a meat sauce that looked like an Italian dish I'd seen before.  Now that I had spent 20 minutes "reading" the article and could understand 3 words from the title, I was really on to something!  When I looked ahead to the rest of the article I found myself feeling overwhelmed and frustrated.  I scanned ahead to see if I could make a connection with any more words in the text.  I did find a few that I connected with, Spaghetti alla Carbonara, Risotto, cucine, olio, formaggio and mozzarella di bufala.  However, my simple understanding of these words were not enough to help me gain any real understanding of what the article said.

     "Goodman (1967) refers to three kinds of knowledge on which readers draw to gain meaning from text: semantic knowledge (knowledge of the world); syntactic knowledge (knowledge of the structure of the language); and graphophonic knowledge (knowledge of sound-letter relationships)" (Gibbons, 2002, p. 78).  I certainly attempted to use all three of these types of knowledge to gain meaning from what I was reading.  My semantic meaning was the most helpful as my life experiences gave me access to some of the vocabulary and overlying concepts presented in the article.  However, my lack of syntactic and graphophonic knowledge of the Italian language prevented me from being able to read and understand the article as a whole. 

     The experience of reading this article gave me insight as to what is appropriate for English language learners in the classroom.  Presenting them with text that is far too challenging for their stage of language acquisition would be totally ineffective while causing feelings of frustration for the student.  Gibbons (2002) suggests choosing texts that offer repetitive language and/or events, universal themes, clear illustrations that coincide with the text, models of language and content that can be bridged and used to extend reading knowledge (p. 99).  Even more importantly, when working with ELLs we need to choose texts "that encourage children to read-and to want to go on reading" (Gibbons, 2002, p. 100).