Constructing Meaning in a Foreign Language Text

            Before beginning this activity, I knew how challenging it would be.  Even after years of studying German and feeling fairly proficient in the language, I found reading adult texts incredibly time consuming and, at times, frustrating.  For one college German course, I had to read a few of Kafka’s short stories.  It was agony.  I remember feeling great relief when I would finally reach a period.  After rereading the sentence several times, I would still forget the meaning of the beginning of the sentence by the time I reached the end. I had such difficulty constructing meaning even though I had significant background knowledge in the language and in the basic plot of the story. I felt such frustration with the process of trying to read, that, even now, I strongly dislike Kafka’s writing.  This memory helps me realize the truth in Gibbon’s (2002) emphasis on the difference between conversational and academic language.

            Strategies to construct meaning become more important as students have less knowledge of the language.  Here are some that may help:

• Look for recognizable forms of text, such as a letter, headings, titles, charts
• Rely on pictures
• Sometimes captions can help unlock the meaning of a few words
• Try to determine the meaning of words often repeated (usually not the small ones because they can be articles or other grammatical words that don’t help unlock meaning)
• Look for words that may be cognates to a known language
• Reread
• Use knowledge of sentence structure in a known language to help construct meaning
• Use an English/First Language dictionary (although this can lead to greater frustration)
• Ask for help—someone to explain the text with actions, pictures, first language etc.

           

Implications for teaching

• Compassion
• Students cannot complete assignments if they cannot unlock meaning
• ELL students at all levels of proficiency often need more scaffolding for comprehension than native speakers.
• Actions, pictures, demonstrations are essential to help convey meaning
• Support students’ acquisition of their first languages as much as possible.  With more knowledge of their first language, they have more strategies they can try to use
• Explicitly teach specific strategies for ELL learners