Saturday, May 21, 2011

Decoding Unfamiliar Text

This assignment was interesting to say the least. I found two short stories online written in Spanish at two different difficultly levels (I included the link below). I would like to say that neither one of them were difficult, but I would be lying. The truth is, the easy beginner text was just as much of a challenge to understand as the more advanced text. As I was trying to decipher them, I found myself becoming overwhelmed and frustrated. Even with my year of high school Spanish, I could only pick out a few words here and there. The texts did include a few pictures, which helped some, but I was unable to figure out how they fit within the context of the story, as they were non-fiction texts.

To help me gain some understanding, I did turn to an online translator. To me that was just as frustrating, because I honestly did not have the time to sit there and look up every single word. And then there were times when the translation would come back and not make any sense at all. It was at this moment, that I gave up, went to my sister-in-law, who is fluent in Spanish, and had her do the work for me. What took me hours, only took her a few minutes.

This activity was very enlightening. I was not a kid who ever struggled with reading and for the first time I was completely lost, overwhelmed, and frustrated. It’s easy to take that for granted and lose sight of how struggling students must feel when reading. 

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