Entry #4

At first, I was attempting to make meaning of an adult novel written in French, but could not understand the book.  I used text features/structures to figure out the book was probably a play because it was written like a script.  There were only a couple of pictures of people in old-fashioned clothing so I knew the story must have taken place in the past.

Next, I tried reading a Russian magazine.  It had many pictures that I looked at in an attempt to make meaning. The magazine seemed to be geared towards children because the pictures were of children and animals. The magazine seemed like an anthology of different types of genres.  One article looked like a poem because the organization of writing was in four stanzas, just like many of the English language poems.  Another article had a labeled map.  I used my background knowledge to recognize the map as Europe so I then knew the Russian writing of EBPOп meant Europe.  Another page looked like a bible story because it had an illustration of a page that closely looked like a page from an English language bible.  


It was very difficult to make meaning of the text because my background knowledge of text features could only help me a little bit. In addition, the Cyrillic script kept me from finding any cognates to help make meaning.  Even though I was giving the assignment my full effort, I could not understand any of the articles.  Sometimes I hear teachers saying their ESL kids just need to put in more effort, but this activity reflects how "giving it your all" can still result in limited or no understanding.