My Own ELL Experience

I attempted to read a French newspaper article, a reading level of at which I should be proficient in a language that I have little experience with.  The article was from a leading French daily newspaper, Le Monde, and the title of the article was “Des attentats à la marche républicaine, cinq jours en France” (Des attentats, 2015). As I attempted to comprehend this publication, I used several strategies that ELL students may also use to derive meaning as they are learning a language.

·         I looked at the picture for context clues. There was a picture accompanying the article of a crowd with a sign that read, “We are not afraid.” From this I infered that this article was about the recent acts of terror in France. I then knew what sort of vocabulary may be in the article and could approach reading it with a frame of reference.

·         I looked for words that were similar to other words I know in English and in Spanish. Taking Spanish in high school left me with knowledge of basic vocabulary. As in Spanish, I noticed that French used the pronouns, la, de and les. When I saw these words, I knew that a noun likely followed. Words like terroristes, victims and chronologie are similar to the English words terrorists, victims, and chronology. However, this strategy also backfired with words like attentats, which to me looked like the English word attendants and actually means “attacks.”

·         I used background knowledge on the current events in France that I have heard in English on the news. I had heard of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, so I was able to use my prior knowledge as a starting point when beginning to interpret the text.

Despite my efforts to make meaning of the article, I found that I was only able to understand the generic topic featured in this article. I found myself feeling excited even when I found one word that I knew (or thought that I knew), however I knew that I was not understanding this French text at a proficient level. As an ELL student in this situation, I would have appreciated words of encouragement and guidance/scaffolding from someone fluent in French. From this I learned to celebrate the little victories with ELL students, because many little victories will eventually lead to fluency in English!

http://www.thefrenchexperiment.com/stories/goldilocks/

After struggling to comprehend an adult publication, I ended up looking up words and phrases on Google Translator to better understand what I was reading. Then, I scaled back the level of reading to a familiar Fairy Tale, “Boucles d’or et les Trois Ours” (Goldilocks and the Three Bears). I had a similar experience as the news article, where I recognized words here and there, but this time the familiar story pattern helped me to infer additional words. I scaled back the level even further to very basic words with pictures...I am not even ready for sentences in French. This met my needs as a beginning French reader/speaker. The pictures helped me to match meaning with new vocabulary words, and there were audio clips that featured a fluent French speaker pronouncing the words. This modeling was completely helpful as some of the words were pronounced differently than I had expected. 

As an ELL instructor, I must keep in mind that third grade ELL students may not be reading anywhere near a third grade level. I as an adult may read at a kindergarten or first grade level in French! Yikes!  It is also important for ELL instructors to also challenge students with developmentally appropriate and challenging thinking while providing basic, fundamental reading/speaking instruction. This may be a challenging task to do both, but it must be done to meet the needs of ELL students.

 

Resources:

“Des attentats à la marche républicaine, cinq jours en France.” LeMonde.FR. Retrieved on 01/13/2015 from http://www.lemonde.fr/