#4 Metacognitave look at decoding

The assignment to read a foreign language with no background instruction was intriguing to me.  As an ELL teacher, I have "Newcomer" students who are in this situation in English-speaking classrooms.  Some of these students can call words (i.e., imitate the correct sounds when reading and speaking), and we the teachers sometimes wonder how much of the read-aloud they actually understand.

I chose to read a Czech article on a "Learn Czech" website; and then read some simpler phrases on the same site.  As I attempted to decipher the passages, I found myself using the following strategies:

1.   Look for cognates:   The Czech letter combinations, accents, and syntax are totally unfamiliar to me, and my eye automatically jumped to a word in the middle of the page "Technicke".   I thought "Wow,  I know this one!" (I didn't, it was actually a near-cognate: "technical").  I found myself scanning the remainder of the passage for words that could be the same or similar as the English word, and therefore more decodable.

2. Look for word patterns, or words that repeat often:  Words like "ma" and "je" were recurring, so I inferred that they are probably pronouns.   This helped me to start to recognize some form of structure within the sentences in the passage.

3. Try to find familiar word families:  This exercise was futile; I quickly realized that even if there are word families, they are very different from those that we have in English, or in the Spanish/French with which I am familiar.   I found some similarities, but they did not at all give clues to the meaning of the reading.

By the time I tried these 3 strategies, and looked through more simple Czech phrases, I understood how difficult it can be to glean meaning from text without supports.   Some supports that would have helped are:   Someone reading it aloud with expression and/or gestures; a background lesson in pronouns or basic vocabulary; some sort of introduction to the context of the text; or direct translation(!)

Puzzling over the passage also brought to mind Suzanne Irojo's assertion in the What Does Research Teach Us About Teaching Reading to English Language Learners? article that "ELLs can not develop phonological awareness in English until they are familiar with the sounds of English".   The sounds-letter correspondence of Czech is completely unfamiliar to me; it occurred to me that even if I know the meaning, I would not have enough phonemic awareness of Czech to read this passage aloud.

In order for me to be able to read this passage, I would have first needed sound-letter correspondence instruction to develop phonemic awareness of the letters and letter combinations.  It is likely that I may not be able to reproduce some of the sounds that we do not have in English writing.  Next, I would need a lot of vocabulary instruction, starting with basic phrases and the main verbs (to be, to have, etc.) so that I could recognize them as part of the sentence structures.   This particular passage was about the right to universal education, so I would need to be taught a lot of academic vocabulary, and some background (shema) in the topic as well.   I could clearly see how each of the components of reading instruction  - PA, Phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension - are absolutely needed to be able to accurately decode, read aloud, and to gain meaning from an unfamiliar text.

Overall, I found this to be a task that was intriguing and even fun at first, though it became clear early on that I could not decode the meaning of the language without instruction.   It also showed me how a student could easily become frustrated or overwhelmed by texts that are not at or near their language level if they are not given sufficient instruction for decoding and reading them.  It was a great insight to the value of explicit and scaffolded reading instruction for non-English speakers!