Week 2, Entry 4: Foreign Language Reading Attempts

For this exercise I chose a Polish book published in 1994. While I never figured out the title; exploring inside the book I was able to correctly identify some words even though I do not have knowledge of the Polish language. I used the following strategies:

• Picture labels: A picture of men with instruments with the word muzykanci in the label, I correctly guessed musicians.
• Cognates: I found the word Biblii within text and discovered it was the word Bible.
• Text features: On the title page I found the phrase tytul oryginalu (original title). In the back of the book I found Bibliografia (bibliography) and Autorzy (Authors).
• Context clues: A sentence under an old picture ended with roku 1896, I learned the word roku meant year.
• Visual cues: A map labeled with Polska ( Poland) and Swjedzen (Sweden)
• Google Translate: I confirmed all these discovered word meanings.

I could not determine what kind of text I was looking at. This exercise caused me to recognize how much meaning is lost when only a few words can be decoded for an English language learner or even a non-reading learner with little decoding ability.  It was a humbling experience to consider their attempts to make sense of a undecodable text. It becomes obvious that the student would need to begin at ground zero- knowledge of the alphabet, letter sounds, word structure, semantics and syntax to build meaning and reach understanding.