The language I chose to read was Dutch. My roommate is from Holland so she had some Dutch books lying around. Now the only Dutch word I know is my last name (Kuipers) which means "barrel maker" so you can imagine how I felt when I attempted to read an adult-level book. I read the first page of a novel and I honestly could not recognize anything except for names like Katie. I did see some words that were pretty frequent and I just assumed that they were our sight words such as the, of, to, and, etc. However, I wanted to throw the book after I tried to read the first few sentences.
Luckily, my roommate had a children's book that I could look at. The book actually had songs in it and it was about Santa Clause. The pictures were helpful to get a gist of what the songs were about. In Dutch, Santa Clause was spelled Sinterklaas which almost sounds like and looks like Santa Clause.
Teachers need to use lots of repetition to increase fluency but we need more visuals, more role-playing, more activities to increase a student's comprehension.
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Emily,
ReplyDeleteI was also so frustrated. Powerful isn't it. I agree that repetition , visuals and role-playing are essential.
Suzanne
Emily,
ReplyDeleteThis activity was eye-opening to me too! How frustrating it must be! Picture clues are such an important strategy and that was probably a good assumption on your part about the words that you saw frequently. They probably word sight words.