Second Language Metacognition

Today, I tried to read a BBC news article in Spanish.  I took Spanish classes way back in junior high, and I feel I remember a decent amount.  After skimming through the article, it seems I remember less than I’d like to think.  Some of the words were easy to recognize, since they were so similar to English words.  The article was about the high cost of college loans, and their affect on new graduates in Chile (I think that’s what it was about anyway).  This article is similar to something I would read in English from the Denver Post on a Sunday morning.  Also, since it’s a topic that I’m well aware of, I was able to use some of my background knowledge to understand parts of it.  However, given that I couldn’t figure out what over half the words meant, I had a rather hard time understanding it fully.  There weren’t many helpful photographs in the article to help me along either.

In scaling back the difficulty, I chose a children’s picture book – La Primera Luna Llena de Gatita.  This, I thought, would be much easier to read and understand.  Again, I didn’t know all the words, but this time there were great pictures to help me figure out the meaning.  After reading it, I’m not able to tell you about the book verbatim, but I got the general idea.  A poor kitten thought the moon was a bowl of milk, and he kept trying to catch it so he could drink it.  Using the pictures, and what I know about fictional story writing (there’s always a problem and solution), I was able to figure out the story.

 

Next, I scaled it back a bit further to a book that I am very familiar with in English – Green Eggs and Ham.  Or in this case, Huevos Verdes con Jamon.  In this tale, our hero, Juan Ramon, was trying to get a cranky fellow to eat green eggs and ham.  Again, I did not know all the words in Spanish, but having read the book in my native language, along with all the illustrations, made it possible for me to understand the plot. 

In summary, this was a challenging activity to complete.  However, I was able to use several strategies in each scenario to help me make meaning of each text.  I used my schema about college loans, nonfiction stories, and Green Eggs and Ham to help me understand what was happening in each different piece.  For the last two texts, I was able to use illustrations to clarify my understanding of what I read.  Finally, I used my minimal knowledge of Spanish, and Spanish-English cognates to interpret certain words as I read.  This activity has helped me realize that, when I teach, I should introduce these different strategies to my English language learners.  By highlighting cognates and text features, students will be able to gather more meaning from text.  Also, if I take time to help students recall and build background knowledge, they will get more out of a lesson.